Granta once laid down the rules for how not to write about Africa (Binyavanga Wainaina, issue 92), but it has been less explicit about how one ought to write about it. In this special issue, the magazine turns to the literary richness of one African country rather than the continent in the abstract: Nigeria. Granta 177 marks a return to the land that produced some of Granta's finest contributors - Adewale Maja-Pearce, Buchi Emecheta, Helon Habila - with fiction and poetry in translation, reportage from the Fulani heartlands of the north, dispatches from a Lagos newly reconfigured by entrepreneurial fervor, and reflections on the oil frontier whose corrosive effects on the body politic continue to shape the delta and the nation alike.