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With his eightieth birthday looming, it crossed Michael Palin’s mind that now might be the time to hang up his boots, to lounge about at home, to take things easy. Then the opportunity to visit Africa’s most populous nation arose. A few weeks later, he was at Lagos airport, camera crew in town.
In the journal he kept during his trip he gives a vivid account of the towns and cities he visited, the landscapes he travelled through, and the people he met: from vibrant but chaotic Lagos, to seemingly deserted streets of Nigeria’s hyper-modern capital, Abuja, to the polluted oil fields of the Niger Delta. Michael Palin is welcomed as an honoured guest by a powerful emir and harangued by a passerby in Benin City. He hears the testimony of a kidnap victim of the terrorist group Boko Haram and experiences the collective spiritual ecstasy of one of Nigeria’s mega churches. And throughout his trip, he experiences at first hand the contradictions of a country that has so much natural wealth and human talent and yet simultaneously grapples with corruption, religious strife and deep inequality.
Praise for Michael Palin:
‘I cannot remember the last time I read a book so immediately absorbing and affecting.’ Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything
‘Stirring’ Daily Telegraph
‘Everybody’s talking about it . . . A brilliant book.’ Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2
