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