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.

When he came over, he was rarely in the same place for very long. He was always rushing around, hustling for business, cultivating his contacts, dropping in on old friends and looking up his girlfriends. You never knew when he would turn up. You would be lounging in the house watching television, enjoying your holiday, and he would suddenly burst through the door. Once you recovered from the shock, the games would begin. I would hide in my room, trying to figure out how long he was going to stay. I would listen for clues as he boomed down the telephone, barking orders to his offices in Nigeria. If he didn't reveal his travel plans, I would bide my time and wait until he had left the house before going downstairs to rummage through the papers scattered on the dining room table.

In my father's house, there was never any clear distinction between home and office - at least not at our London home. He treated the place like a warehouse. Cartons of unsold copies of his books were piled in the corridors and crammed on the bookshelves in his bedroom and in the garage. A big, red, ugly filing cabinet filled with letters and documents, all meticulously cataloged, sat in the middle of the house. He kept strict records on everything, including detailed accounts of how much he had spent on my education. There was nothing lavish about the house. It was an unremarkable, modest, four-bedroom home in a lower-middle-class suburb of London. If anything, it was a relatively small house for a family of seven, especially as half of it was comman- deered as a warehouse. Home comforts were not high on my father's list of priorities - especially in England. As far as he was concerned, his children were in England to get an education. His attitude to the house was probably meant to reinforce that message.

If I didn't find his plane ticket among his papers, I would search through his notebooks, where he scribbled his plans and thoughts. I often came across outlines for novels, screenplays and rough drafts of poems jostling with reminders to pay bills and obscure calculations and estimates of his fortune. If I didn't get an idea from the notebooks of when he was due to fly back, I would second-guess him anyway - he rarely spent more than a month away from Nigeria.

He always returned home, though I could not understand why. He was forever moaning about the situation in Nigeria, and I would wonder why, when he had the means, he didn't just walk away and leave it all behind. But all he ever did was complain and then go back. It was almost as if he actually relished the challenges of living there. Most reasonable men had long since given up or been forced to compromise their principles out of the sheer frustration of trying to survive in a society that "rewarded theft and penalized hard work," as he used to say with a perverse grin.

I would usually wait until the night before he was due to fly back to Nigeria, when he was too tired or too busy tying up the loose ends of his trip to pin me down, to raise the issue of my future. My timing always aggravated him. "Why do you always wait until I am just about to leave before you come and trouble me with your problems?" he would groan.

When we found a mutually inconvenient moment to talk, he would sit on the edge of the large sofa opposite the fireplace in the lounge, filling his pipe with tobacco. He would pack the tobacco tiglidy with his thumbs. It always took him two or three attempts to light it, but once he got it going, he would ease back into the sofa and puff away, popping his lips contentedly. He always had a puzzled frown on his face as the smoke curled out of his pipe, filling the room with a thick cloud of a rich, woody aroma. I usually sat in an armchair next to the fireplace, staring ahead in nervous silence, conscious of the intense expression on his face. Once he'd collected his thoughts, he would take three short puffs, yank the pipe out of his mouth, lick his lips, and swallow loudly.

"How are your studies going?" he would bark at me.

"Fine," I would reply tersely

He usually took the hint and switched to a less sensitive topic. I would still bat his questions back at him, responding with monosyllabic, guarded answers. Whenever we attempted to talk about anything other than politics or school, the conversation usually ended in an awkward, embarrassed silence, but once we gave up the pretence that we could manage anything as complicated as small talk, and reverted to the familiar parameters of our relationship, the conversation would flow. He usually opened the proceedings, droning on about his politics, trying to drill his values into me, sprinkling the lecture with his favourite phrases: "Hard work doesn't kill"; "To whom much is given, much is expected"; "In Nigeria, the only wrongdoers are those who do no wrong"; "To live a day in Nigeria is to die many times." He usually ended with the clincher that the ball was in my court, or with the reminder that he had given me the best opportunities in life.

Ken Wiwa's IN THE SHADOW OF A SAINT