I just received my photos back from the printers and amongst some pictures of our day out last month in Abeokuta, the birthplace of Fela, I found this one.



Ibrahim was my MoPol, or Mobile Police, who I hired for a vast sum of money from the Anti-Robbery Squad, a place where my fixer Kole told me people arrested for robbery are taken, tortured, and rarely re-released. Ibrahim carried two pistols or an AK47 whenever he was with us, and mostly he drank Star Beer at the same time, though didn't get as drunk as the other MoPol, who was drunk all the time and complained to me as much as he could, in a language I could not understand, demanding money.

I disliked Baba, the second MoPol, so much that I could barely go near him, and sent Kole to deal with him whenever something was needed to be dealt with. The two bus drivers, who did not go home for a week while they drove us around, sat under the tree in the hotel car park and giggled as Baba teased me, demanding money, whining and whinnying in his squeaky voice, brandishing his pistols ill-concealed on his hips. The bus drivers did not like him either.

The day we went to Abeokuta I actually enjoyed myself because there were only a handful of us, the musicians left in the hotel to rehearse. When we stopped the bus in the intense afternoon heat to wait for Balinger, our guide for the afternoon, we climbed out of the bus and I took the opportunity to try on Ibrahim's bullet-proof hat. He posed for a photo, and though he looks serious, he was light-hearted on that day.

The evening that Kole and I went to pick up the police, the day my musicians arrived from London, we waited outside the police station as night fell. Policemen armed to the hilt were streaming out of the gates and climbing into vehicles or onto motorbikes.

"You see this?" said Kole, "You know where they are going? To raid people."

I had assumed, in the way that instinctively happens when you grow up with a police force who are mostly there to protect you, that they were all going out on jobs like ours, hired thugs to warn off bandits on the road, and trouble from other police. But infact they were out to create havoc on the roads themselves, these were the very police I was hiring Ibrahim and Baba to protect us from.