It is the first time I have started an interview while running for a bus with its subject but so much about Ben Okri – and the lunch we are about to share – is out of the ordinary. He is charming, clever, funny, occasionally bombastic and flamboyantly unpunctual – half an hour late for our rendezvous at the Elephant and Castle. A novelist and poet, he won the Booker in 1991 for The Famished Road. And famished is what we admit to being as we sit at the top of a bus going down the Old Kent Road. Suddenly, he spots Toys R Us, opposite our destination, and leaps to his feet, joking that the store fills him with Proustian delight because he associates it with 805 – the "best African restaurant in London".
He strides into the restaurant, with a proprietorial air, looking spruce and dashing in black beret, pale blue shirt and traditional tan brogues. The place is empty. "Nigerians are night people," he asserts in his wonderful, deep boom of a voice, gesturing at the space dismissively. We sit down in the executive suite, full of tall chairs upholstered in beige – a swanky setting. From the start, it is clear Ben is going to be boss of the banquet.
"You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup."
"How hot is it? Will it make me …"
"Kate, do you want to do this with me or not? If people knew I had brought you here and you did not have pepper soup, I would be in a lot of trouble." He goes on to explain in detail why pepper soup is not optional: "It enhances the appetite, expands the tastebuds, opens up the desire channels, cleanses the blood, inflames the eyes … The fish pepper soup is very delicate. The meat pepper soup unforgettable.' He drops into the conversation that Antonio Carluccio – a friend – has been inititated. "I was a bit tentative. I thought: is he ready for African food? But he went into ecstasies about the tastes. It was a revelation for him."
I need to move Ben on – I want to ask about the poem he has written for the National Portrait Gallery which I have just been to see and which puts words into the mouth of (and is exhibited alongside) William Hoare's superb 1733 portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. Ben explains: "It is the first ever painting of a freed slave in this country and has extraordinary historical significance."
Diallo came from a family of west African Muslim clerics and slave traders – which complicates his story. He was taken into slavery in 1731 and worked on a tobacco plantation in America. In 1733, through a mixture of piety, enterprise and good fortune, he got himself to London where he was "paraded round" and freed by public appeal. He met Queen Caroline, mixed with high society and had his portrait painted. The painting is on loan to the gallery from Qatar and has just toured the UK with Okri as its appointed chaperone and poetic scribe.
The pepper soup arrives with a tender slab of fish as its centrepiece. "Now Kate, you have to be very cautious about this. At no point should you be ambitious. It should be done with great tentativeness. After you have overcome the first shock, don't say: 'OK, I've got the hang of it' and slurp it." Could this, I ask, taking the tiniest of sips, be a metaphor for how you approach life? "Yes," he replies.
The soup is extraordinary: its pepperiness startling but giving way to what Okri describes as underflavours. He tells me that his poem, which is as dignified as its subject, was a nightmare to compose because, like the soup, Diallo's story had underflavours. Even his face was a puzzle: inscrutably contented. Around his neck hangs a natty case (disconcertingly like an iPhone cover) which turns out to be a pouch for his handwritten Qur'an. "There is tremendous tension between Diallo's story and his serenity," Okri observes. One line from his poem covers all bases: "Freedom is a difficult lesson to learn."
Our boyish waiter, who seems awed by Okri's authoritative manner (and, at 54, his seniority), approaches with a saucer of mints. "What is that?! That is what you give people when they have finished eating. Take that away! We are," he returns to the menu, "about to have a big discussion." The waiter abashedly retreats with the mints. Okri proceeds to structure our meal with a storyteller's instincts. "I want a range of flavours. I am recommending plantain and rice or yam pottage …" And that is just the start of it.
There were no restaurants like 805 when he was growing up in Peckham. There was Nigerian food at home and fish and chips "as the exotic alternative". His family moved back to Lagos when he was nine. Critics often struggle to describe the mix in his fiction of traditional African story-telling and contemporary savoir faire. Ali Smith called him a literary and social visionary – but he has also been set upon by critics, his mysticism not being for all palates.
He talks often about what a splendid storyteller his mother was. He relishes the indirect way Nigerian narratives and proverbs teach. "You are at a party where a man is talking loudly. You ask someone to tell the guy to quieten down. Someone else observes: 'We are not sure who is more mad, the madman in the marketplace or the person who tries to reason with him."' He laughs.
By this time, the table is groaning with food: goat, stockfish, plantain and rice – all delicious, although the colour scheme is unrelievedly orange, intensified by our Nigerian Fanta (Ben mixes his with Star beer, "a combination some Nigerians go for – it's great."). The respite from orange is swampy green edikang ikong "crawling with vegetables", given to "young ladies before they get married" to fill them "with the juice of sensuality and vigour of living". Of all the dishes, it is the strangest – with a chewy astringency.
Okri starts to talk about his father who came to London to study law – and who had a wonderful name: Silver (he invented it himself). What Okri loves is his parents' names together. He tries them out: "When Silver meets Grace …" They came from different tribes (Grace from a royal Igbo line, Silver, a democrat, from the Urhobo people). "Marrying outside your tribe was a bold thing to do." His father was a "brilliant" man who "followed his heart". But the family's return to Nigeria coincided with the civil war during which Grace frequently had to hide: "How she survived is extraordinary." Today, he sees his parents' marriage as crucial to his sense of the world. He asks: "What is it with all these boundaries? That got cracked before my birth by Mum and Dad."
His father had a tremendous library in Lagos: Dickens, Homer, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Greek philosophers galore. "Time to dust the books, Ben," he'd say, "But don't read them." This – presumably disingenuous – warning worked like a charm. Crouching in his dad's library and leafing through its forbidden pages started a feeling that has never left him: reading and writing are "primarily magical operations to do with secrets".
His eyes shine as he describes the phone call from Lagos to London that broke the news of his mother's death: "There is the way the world was – it hung together. Then something went – the balance of the universe." But he has family here: two brothers who meet him at this restaurant for pounded yam and Nigerian natter. One is in property, the other in telecoms. And at least his parents lived to see him win the Booker and, in 2001, accept an OBE.
Myths sustain Okri's writing and the novel he is working on – his 11th – will explore one of mythology's greatest themes: homecoming. He knows about home and what it means not to have one. He returned to England in the 1970s on a Nigerian government scholarship which dried up (because of corruption) and was unable to complete his degree in comparative literature at Essex University. For a spell, he had to sleep in the doorways of banks – the warmest places "because of their air shafts". Today, he lives in Little Venice, overlooking the canal.
"How does a man return? Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly. It could be a book or music [he is passionate about classical music]." He reveals he is planning to go to a literary festival in Gibraltar to talk about the conjunction of Africa and Europe in his writing – another way of situating himself. A big subject? He laughs disarmingly, admits he is not yet sure what to say: "It is very unwise of me" It is time for us to settle up. He roars : "My friend! Hello! Hello! Hello!"
The waiter returns: "Is everything all right?"
"We are very happy indeed." Ben turns to me: "Do we have any complaints?"
"No," I say.
Ben Okri on Ayuba Suleiman Diallo: A Dialogue Across Time runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 16 March
Ben Okri appears at the Gibraltar literary festival on 25 October
