Kwame Mensah's Lagos

Kwame Mensah moved to Lagos in 2019 to write a novel about Accra. He is still there. The novel is about Lagos now.

'I thought I was going for six months,' he says. We are in a restaurant in Lekki, eating jollof rice that he insists is better than anything available in Accra, a claim he makes with the cheerful provocation of someone who has been having this argument for years. 'But Lagos got into me. It's the most alive city I've ever been in. Exhausting, impossible, completely overwhelming — and completely alive.'

His novel, 'The Mainland,' is a portrait of the city through the eyes of a Ghanaian outsider — a character who is close enough to understand what he sees but far enough away to see it clearly. It is a book about belonging and not-belonging, about the pan-African dream and its complicated reality, about what it means to be African in a city that is simultaneously the most African city in the world and a city that belongs to no single version of Africa.