Phyl Amadi looks back at life growing up in Nigeria in this collection of essays that celebrates a time of simplicity when tribes lived in harmony.

But that idyllic life did not last: He also lived through the dark days of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war that broke out in 1967 and lasted until 1970. Even when it ended, life was never the same.

The fighting triggered a progression of seemingly never-ending decay in Nigerian society, which today is manifested in fraudulent and violent electoral processes, bloody religious conflicts, a corrupt public service, deteriorating infrastructure,...