I ran into him one afternoon two years after he was murdered. He was in his house in the village, sitting in a chair at the far end of a long rectangular room. He was smoking his pipe and listening to a group of elders who were animatedly discussing MOSOP business.

I was five thousand kilometres away, in London, trying to find a way into this story. As soon as that picture of him popped up in my head, I decided to retrace my steps to find out why that particular image, out of all the ones I have of him, had become my abiding memory of my father.

The story begins in March 1992, when he came over to London and gave me an ultimatum.

I had graduated from university two years earlier, and had been drifting in and out of temporary jobs in London. I was unsure of what I wanted to do with my life and was trying to break into journalism, though deep down all I really wanted to do was play professional sports. I was good at games - football, cricket, rugby - but I had never dedicated myself to any of them because I knew my father would never approve. Although he loved sports, he felt they were a part of the "entertainment industry," and as he later told me in one of his letters from detention, the best black minds had no business playing sports for a living.

Although I wanted to pursue my own ambitions, that was easier thought than done, especially as he had given me the kind of opportunities that few people, let alone Ogonis, even dream of. I could never shake the feeling that I owed him, that he had worked so hard to give me a head start in life and I had an obligation to repay the faith he had invested in me. Whenever I thought of going my own way, a littie voice would pull me back, reminding me that I'd been given, as he used to say, "the best education that money could buy...the best opportunities in life."

He wanted me to return to Nigeria. That was why he had sent five of his children to private schools in England. He hoped, he expected, that we would all return to Nigeria at the end of our studies and apply our expensively educated minds to the resolution of the problems facing our people.

But if there was one thing I was sure of in March 1992, it was that I didn't want to return to Nigeria. There were all kinds of complicated reasons for this but the only one I could articulate at the time was that it was what my father wanted me to do. I wanted to make my own choices, and I needed time to work things out for myself. But he was impatient. He couldn't see the point of me "loitering around the fringes of British society" when there was so much to do at home. He wanted me to help him run the business, or better still, to apply my skills to the cause that was just starting to fire our people's imagination.

But what, I argued, was the point of going back to a place that most people were desperate to leave? There was nothing to entice me back there. Nigeria was a frustrating place to live - the constant power shortages, the oppressive heat, the mosquitoes, the sandflies. The prospect of working for my father was hardly a selling point, and since I was firmly apolitical I didn't want to sign up for the struggle. (When you grow up in a political home you either toe the party line or you want to get as far away from politics as possible.)

If there was one thing my father hated it was procrastination. You had to have a positive reason for not wanting to do something. And since I couldn't find a decent excuse for remaining in England, I tended to avoid him whenever he came to London.

Facing my father was like taking a hard look at myself in an unforgiving mirror. Each time I stood before him, I saw the man I was meant to become. I saw the man I would always be compared to. He was ambitious and worked hard. He relished and sought out challenges. He was careful with his money. He was meticulous and religious in his attention to detail. He was confident in himself, and he was successful. He was, I was certain, everything I wasn't.

It was hard to avoid him, though, and even if I only saw him three times a year, he was never far from my mind. I could never completely relax and live my life on my own terms. Even if I managed to convince myself that most of my peers in Nigeria were looking to leave the country, or that the struggle to make the country a better place was a thankless task, I could never shake the thought that it was a thankless task to which my father had dedicated his life. I could argue the toss, convince myself that I would rather be a black man in a white man's country than endure the daily aggravations and frustrations of living in Nigeria. I could argue that I just wanted to live in a place where I could get a job that paid a decent wage, where I had a roof over my head, with running water and a constant supply of electricity But just as I was getting comfortable with my decision to give up on Nigeria, just when I had satisfied myself that the country could never offer me a reasonable life, and just when I had forgotten about Nigeria - that was when he usually came back to remind me of my obligations.