Everywhere you drive in Nigeria, men and women are making things, in open-air workshops, on the red earth of the roadside. But "craft" was also artificially encouraged before independence, as part of the vision of a colonial administration that forced the glamour of backwardness on the colonized. There were, for example, Cardew's experiments with stoneware pottery, conceived as an evolutionary bridge between the indigenous and the industrial. Today, thankfully, the handwork is found where it is needed in a multitude of furniture and metal workshops, in every design vocabulary. The artist Olu Amoda has seized the moment. His large workshop in Lagos is filled with scrap metal that is recycled into sculpture and into doors and grilles. In some ways the functional side of his practice resembles that of the young Vulcans -Tom Dixon, Ron Arad and Andre Dubreuil -whose "salvage baroque" metal furniture took London by storm in the 1980s. But his grilles and doors are more than ordinarily functional in a country where the rule of law is fragile and armed robbers show little mercy.

Not that Nigeria's current social and political problems are the whole story.

As Nkiru Nzegwu points out, Amodu's work echoes an ancient West African concern with function -where "the superbly carved aafin (palace) caryatids were verandah posts, the beautifully designed bas-relief wooden panels were doors, and the stylised elegant iron birds on (Yoruba) staffs announced the orisa's ase (the divinity's life force)". The enchantment of technology has real meaning in Nigeria.

* This is an edited version of an essay that will appear in the catalogue to Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular craft, an exhibition mounted jointly by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Crafts Council, which opens at the

V&A on November 13.