Reviewed by CP in 1987. This article may be downloaded, but may not be uploaded or printed elsewhere.

Many years ago I worked in an accountancy office with two young Nigerian articled clerks. They wore immaculate clothes, spoke educated English with an accent I found difficult to understand and had names I could not pronounce. They had scars on their cheeks. Allowing for the fact that I was junior to them both, I disliked working with them: one was imperious, bombastic and bad-tempered, the other was given to terrifying outbursts of sudden screeching laughter. They both had beautiful hands, which I would watch covertly. (I remarked on this to some of the others in the office, and was rewarded with sideways glances.) They made me curious but I learnt nothing at all about them: they never talked about themselves, never mixed socially with the others - i.e. they never joined in with the male bonding of after-office drinks sessions - and returned to Nigeria as soon as they gained the qualifications for which they had come to Britain.

Adawale Maja-Pearce's In My Father's Country raises familiar feelings from those days: curiosity quickened, curiosity unsatisfied. The problem here though is not shyness, arrogance, cultural alienation (or whatever it was that made those accountants so unapproachable), but a more common phenomenon, a banal one that hits the literary world from time to time. This is not a book about Nigeria at all: it's a book about the consequences of a publisher's lunch.

In an ingenuous passage the author describes the no doubt congenial occasion which led to the book being commissioned. The author rehearses for us the facts with which he regaled his editor: Nigeria is Africa's wealthiest state, Nigeria could easily feed the entire African continent single-handed, Nigeria contains nearly a quarter of the entire African population, and so on. You can't help visualizing author and editor parting merrily after this lunch, emerging into the late afternoon sunlight full of mineral water and expectations and mutual congratulations.

Nevertheless, with the contract signed (there would have been the traditional cooling-off period of several weeks), the book remained to be written, and so in due course the author had to pack his bags and set off on The Journey, notebook at the ready.

Of course, this book is no different from many others in this respect. Very few authors can afford to go gadding about the world without an advance in the bag, so to speak. But the point here is that the book that emerged is not even remotely about the subjects outlined in the author's pitching session, apart from rather large chunks of Nigerian history and quotes from indigenous hack novels that read as if they have been thrown in out of a sense of duty.

The bulk of the book is about the minutiae of travelling: airports and cars, checking into hotels, meeting prostitutes, trying to contact friends of friends in remote towns, hanging around in other people's houses. What you learn from this that you did not know before is the way middle-class people get around in Nigeria: this appears to be by taxi, driven recklessly and at high speeds.

The rest leaves you wanting to know more. Mr Maja-Pearce's writing is weak on description. A city is a city, a road is a road and a house is a house ... the Nigerian "experience" might as well have been in London or anywhere in Europe, for all the author imparts to the reader. There is no impression of colour, smell, space, landscape. Local detail is only that which might be expected: glimpses of begging, poverty, a feeling of political instability and corruption behind it all. The rest is tedious reporting of encounters with mostly unpleasant people, dutifully noted in the journal, before setting off in a high-speed taxi to the next undescribed town or house or hotel.

Then it ends and the author returns to London to write his book. I hope the editor feels the commission was worthwhile, but it seemed to me the book was neither well written, well told nor well observed, and stands as a grim reminder of the difference between travel and travelling. The former broadens the mind, the latter wears out the bum.