Four stops before the checkout

Ibadan, Nigeria

Stop one

Mapo Hall

Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Look, I have seen hilltop civic halls that would embarrass this one. But fine — Mapo Hall wins on nerve. The British colonial administration under Captain William Ross finished it in 1929, right on Mapo Hill in the heart of indigenous Ibadan, and the engineer Robert Jones — Taffy Jones, Welsh, no relation to good taste — had local labour raise that classical portico. Seven columns, which everyone ties to the seven hills Ibadan claims. Cheap trick. Worked. Colonial officers and then Nigerian leaders held forth from that balcony over the largest city in tropical Africa, and it is still the ceremonial centre. Restored this century, too. I resent how good it looks.

Stop two

Bower's Tower

Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Now this is where Ibadan gets smug, and I say that as someone who has climbed better towers in worse cities. Bower's Tower sits on Oke Are, one of the highest hills here, put up in 1936 by the Ibadan Native Authority for Captain Robert Lister Bower, the first British Resident of the 1890s and a famously stern imposer of colonial order. Taffy Jones designed it, same man as Mapo Hall, sixty-odd feet, forty-seven steps of spiral stair — they call it Layipo for the winding. And then you reach the balcony and the whole city opens up and, all right, I concede. Nobody does a view like this.

Stop three

Cocoa House

Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Twenty-six storeys. In 1965. Tallest building in tropical Africa, and I have to stand here and admit it, which is not how I planned my afternoon. Cocoa House in Dugbe was paid for with cocoa money from Nigeria's Western Region, conceived under Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his successors purely to prove what farmers' produce could build — hence its name, Ile Awon Agbe, the house of the farmers. It housed the regional development corporation, survived a serious fire in 1985, got rehabilitated, and now keeps a heritage museum in the penthouse. Other cities built towers with oil. Ibadan built one with chocolate. Annoying. Better.

Stop four

University of Ibadan

Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Every city thinks its university is the important one. Ibadan happens to be right, which is the sort of thing I dislike conceding before lunch. The University of Ibadan is Nigeria's oldest, founded 1948 as University College Ibadan under the University of London and fully independent by 1962. The campus is a landmark of tropical modernism, much of it by the British partnership of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, whose pierced screens and shaded courtyards actually answer the climate instead of ignoring it; Trenchard Hall and the clock tower hold it together. Wole Soyinka passed through. So did Chinua Achebe. Fine. You win this one.

The Ibadan, Nigeria track

Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel

Written for this world alone.

Okay okay okay so you want the usual? Because THIS is the usual, perfected — the Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Reel, the house blend of tennis strings, and I mean that as the highest compliment I am legally allowed to give!

Solid nylon core — that's your base shot, consistent every single pull — wear-resistant outer wraps like a double-walled cup, and the 17 gauge, 1.25mm, that's the lighter roast: brighter, livelier, more feel, more spin. And it's a REEL. 660 feet. That's the five-pound bag, my friend. You're not a casual anymore. You're a regular. I LOVE regulars.

So here's the thing about Ibadan, Nigeria, and I need you to hear this because it's basically my origin story: they built a skyscraper out of BEANS.

Okay, cocoa beans, okay, technically they built Cocoa House in 1965 with cocoa money — the first skyscraper of its kind in tropical Africa, twenty-six floors, funded by the region's cocoa boom — but the POINT is, a bean built a tower and I have never felt so seen.

Climb Bower's Tower on Oke Are hill and look at that ocean of brown roofs — venti view, no extra charge — then swing by the University of Ibadan, the nation's first, 1948. Play your set, restring off the big reel, and yes, obviously, celebrate with a hot chocolate. Bean loyalty. Next customer!

And look, one reel pours out everywhere from a scuffed municipal court down in Dugbe to the shaded campus courts under the trees at the University of Ibadan — same string, same pull, hundreds of cups of it. It's also perfect for the beaten-up spare frame your cousin keeps in the boot of the car, because solid nylon forgives absolutely everybody, which is more than I can say for my espresso machine.

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Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis String Reel

Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel