Book Review-Umwem Akpan’s ‘Say you are one of them’

LUXURIOUS HEARSES

This post is a month late, seeing it is part two review of Umwem Akpan’s book. See part one here

Jubril had been born in the South just like his mother Aisha, a Muslim girl who fell in love with a Christian man. The relationship between Barthromew, a Christian and Aisha had quickly become a community concern and besides the gossip that went by, pressure came from all sides. They proceeded to marry and Jubril was the second child of their marriage.

They were a model family, a point of reference for intertribal and mixed marriage. In fact, in his homily at the wedding, Father McBride had reminded the congregation that the couple was a symbol of unity in a country where ethnic and religious hate had simmered beneath every national issue…………..perhaps the myriad tribes and religions in the country would be welded together by the love within such marriages………., and the respect accorded in-laws would at least instill tolerance.pg. 174

And one day Aisha, without warning escaped with the children to Khamfi, her father’s original home. The boys grew up in a Muslim-only neighborhood and while Yusuf was interested in knowing his roots, indulging in the snippets of his family history, Jubril became distant. Yusuf became a victim of apostasy, mobbed by the neighbors and stoned to death. Whilst Jubril did not participate in his brother’s death, he had been close enough to hear him pray in tounges as the stones rained on him.

His former friends had held Jubril as a true Muslim for not allowing his family loyalties to come between him and his religion when Yusuf was given his just deserts, and Meta Nadum had rallied around him when he had readily submitted his hand to be chopped off as a punishment for stealing someone’s goat.

It was his friends Luka and Musa, among a chanting mob who stopped him dead in his tracks by declaring him no good Muslim because he could not join the street protest until he took the cows home first.

His defenses by producing the picture of his hero-governor never could hold, they accused him of being an enemy within. If he produced the chopped wrist, they would accuse him of stealing another man’s goat, even if he spoke Hausa with the proper accent, it still didn’t defend him. They insisted he was a southerner, they knew his baptism story as a small baby and before he began explaining the money his friends owed him, they wrestled him to the ground.

Jubril remembered running very fast and being surprised that he could move at all, given his wounds. When he looked back, the ranks of his pursuers had swelled; even those who had left the task of burning him to Lukman and Musa had joined in. They pelted him with rocks, but he did not stop or fall. He heard some gunshots, but he kept going. He went past the pools and up the hill into the savannah. The mob spread out and thrashed the cabbage farms. Jubril ran like a dog; he ran until his vision darkened. He remembered failing; he remembered dizziness beclouding him……..pg. 183

“It was late afternoon. It was before the new democratic government placed a ban on mass transportation of corpses from one end of the country to the other. Jubril had worked so hard to forget the previous two days that his mind was in turmoil as he waited to travel south with the crowd at the motor park on the outskirts of Lupa. He knew that even if people were stacked up like yam or cassava tubers in a basket, most would still be left behind. Fortunately, he had paid for a seat on the only bus left.”

Jubril a fair skinned teenager finds himself caught up in a religious conflict. A Muslim, he had done a good job disguising himself as a Christian fleeing south. Besides, in that time of religious conflict in the country no one would expect a Muslim or northerner to risk travelling with Christians to the south or in the delta.

With Nigeria on a war path, he abandons all the myths he had heard regarding the luxurious buses and all that had mattered is for him to escape to safety. He was from a village that practiced a conservative brand of Islam that made it impossible for him to watch TV or read newspapers.

As they wait at the motor park for the driver who has disappeared to scout for black market fuel, which had become scarce since the war, the languages spoken only emphasized his estrangement from the group. Ibo was mainly spoken and those that spoke English did so with accent peculiar to their tribes – all of them unlike Jubril’s accent. He resolved to speak little as the best way to disguise himself.

A good Samaritan, who had helped him to escape, had written the village in the delta where his father was born. He wished he had made this trip before, during the peaceful times. The mother, years before had insisted against Jubril’s protestations that his father came from an oil producing village in the delta region and that his father’s relatives would always protect him.

The story exposes the folly of what separates, only to be bearable in times of need. Jubril finds himself, for the first time in his life, not infuriated that there were so many women all over the place. And he did not react to them in any particular way, something that would have been impossible only three days before. He would have preferred to trek a thousand miles on foot rather than sit in the same vehicle as a woman.

The angst that had hitherto fretted his soul seems to lift and was replaced by some lightheartedness caused by secretly poking fun at some of his inconveniences. For example some of the women looked funny in their makeup and tight-fitting trousers. He constrained his urge to laugh out loud at these hell destined women, something that would do him in after successfully disguising himself thus far. He would see the lifestyles that challenged him as laughable rather than as sources of irritation and temptation.

His right hand had been amputated at his wrist for stealing. Nobody on the bus knew this, and it was important that Jubril kept this fact hidden. If they found out, they would know he was Muslim, for they had seen people like him before. His plan to run south would unravel. So now, though his elbow kept bumping into other refugees boarding the bus, making him whine with pain, he did not change his posture. He held a black plastic bag containing his few belongings in his left hand.

His seat in the bus had been taken up by Chief Ukongo, who would not badger off after Jubril’s polite request. The young man was to hitherto brace the long journey sitting on the aisle, something that would not long for the position that he stood at belonged to another pregnant woman with a child. In times of crises like this, even the aisle had been portioned and paid for.

Great perseverance, when such a sacrilegious word like Muslim or Islam in mentioned in the bus, and people would begin to search their neighbor’s faces, and Jubril feared that from their dangerous stares they could tell he was a fraud. He kept waiting for someone to pull his arm out of his pockets and the blows to start raining on him.

Unfortunately his mind revolted at his attempts to suppress his thoughts, and when not dwelling on his present circumstances, his mind travelled back to a past event that was tangled up in his flight from Khamfi.

Like his multi-religious, multi-ethnic country, Jubril’s life story was more complicated than what one tribe or religion could claim. He had lived all his life in Khamfi and was at home with his mother’s people, the Hausa-Fulani’s. He had always seen himself as a Muslim and a northerner. Looking at his skin color, he had no problem believing he would fit in where he was going. There were many on the bus, who were fairer than he was. He could have been from any ethnic group in the country. What worried him was that he did not know enough about Christianity to survive in this crowd. It seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. So many times, he cleared his throat and grabbed his Marian medal with his fingers and stroked it, his whole attention focused on it, as if the Muslim in him now shared the same catholic adoration he had considered idolatrous in Khamfi. Though Mary was accorded a lot of respect in his religion, he had always thought the Catholics went too far by making thousands of sacramental about her and setting up shrines. The advice of Mallam Abdullahi, the man who gave Jubril the medal, flashed across his mind: don’t feel too bad wearing the medal, as Maryam in the Koran was the mother of prophet Isa, Jesus. Though Jubril would rather not have been wearing the medal, this theology was good enough for him—and, besides, his rescuer had assured him that all Christians who saw him wearing it would think he was a catholic and let him be. Page 172

You will also find the pidgin spoken evoking some laughter, for example, the following lines:

When Emeka is smarting from the eviction of the sick man, and coaxes Jubril to tell the old man off for occupying his seat, Ijeoma, she of fighting with Tega over the luggage space earlier in the story says,

Abeg, no halass de boy,” “cally your anger go meet de porice. No be dis boy lemove de sick man from dis bus”

The tension in the bus was evoking sporadic arguments within the bus.

So the Chief who stole Jubril’s seat, wants to guard his honour even in crisis, so when he invites Jubril to sit on the floor near him, someone challenges the old man for asking the boy to sit at his buttocks. He revolts and refuses to be addressed improperly.

“I sure you want all of us to call you shief,” Tega said. “shief dis, shief dat…Too many shiefs for dis country. I go buy my Resource Control hat too!”

The humour and bile seems served in same portions:

“Look am not even supposed to be in this bus with you,” the chief said

Look, l’m not one of you!”

“Den leave de Luxurious Bus,” Tega said from her seat, “who you be? Abasha man? Babangida boy?”

“As our people say, before the discovery of peanuts, people were not eating pebbles….keep your Christianity to yourself!”

“No confuse us wid proverb,” Tega continued. “Maybe you be pagan…..wizard!” a few people laughed at her comments.

“Pagan, eh?” the chief said. ”how dare you call my traditional religion paganism!”

“But Chief, you dey play poritics wid dis ting.” Ijeoma said. “Just reave de seat.”

“if you be no Christian, wetin else remain?”Tega said.

“He is suffering from political correctness,”Emeka said, speaking for the first time since the police changed the TV channel.

“Let me tell you, “the chief said, “before the harvest of alligator pepper, the medicine man was already carrying his bag, not the other way round…..The religion of my ancestors is far older than yours in this country. This land belongs to us.”

….This was not the time to think about lslam and Christianity or God too much, he thought. It was a time just to be a human being and to celebrate that. What mattered now was how to get people to lay down their weapons and biases, how to live together.

…”As our people say,”he continued, “the world is full of gods, but the most important ones are called by their names. And also, do not forget: no matter how small an idol is, it is good to carry it with two hands” I chuckled at this, because it felt that he was mocking Jubril’s juju which he had accused him of hiding in the pocket.

And this Chief Ukongo, not wasted any moment to parade his royaleship, by hailing the people to unite around royal chiefs like the northerners are united around their emirs, goes on to narrate his boast of the military government under general babangida, only to be interjected by Monica.

“Na lie o…l understand dis one, “she insisted.”Dat general like power too much o. if no change handover date many times, if he no cancel our 1993 elections, Abacha no for become our leader…Na de same people. Locust years. De man dey use you. He no share power wid you, abeg.”

“OK, woman, it is not exactly like l was saying. All l was trying to say was that the military respected us. May l talk now, Madame Lawyer?”

“Just make you no lie for dis young man, Chief.”

“Gabriel, the point is, we taught those Sierra Leonean and Liberian rebels a lesson. We lost a lot of soldiers…for a good cause!’

“Chief, how many die for combat?”

“That’s codified information, not for everybody, you know. A lizard may listen to a conversation, but he may not say something.. I mean who are you to want to know how many soldiers died in combat?…”

This chief gives the impression of a typical royalty who can do anything to intimidate his subjects into submission. He is also a good liar…reminds an earlier statement that a chief who can laugh with the others in the bus that hard, could lie too.

“You and l”, he said as he hugged Jubril, ”must show this to the world. Remember, nobody has a monopoly on violence. So don’t go around trying to terrorize the Christians.”

“As our elders say, the ant’s hope of reaching the sacrificial food lies in the folds of the wrapping leaf”…chief’s response to Jubril when he asked him whether he would help him after they reached home.

The ECOMOG soldier, whom the refugees referred to as a madman, refusing to recognize his efforts in fighting in Liberia and Sierra Leone, they also referred to as Chief Ukongo’s fellow idol worshipper, for he has a bigger and more intimidating assorted wreath of talismans than Chief had. When Jubril is at some point lost in flashbacks of when his hand was amputated, they attribute his strange behavior to being hyponotized by the soldier’s charms.

It’s interesting to a reader to see the various shifting of opinions of people when acting in different situations. For example, Jubril is in awe of the soldier remembering what Chief had told him about the sacrifices of ECOMOG soldiers who served the country gallantly, but when one of the soldiers is actually standing in front of them, the Chief takes to indifference feigning insult to his chieftancy. Even the refugees laugh that to his claims of retiring to a good conscience and dignigty. This is laughable, reasoned against a belief that all soliders are thieves. In fact one of the refugeesguffaws and wonders why all soldiers from her place are stupid—not using their chance well.

“Soldierman, you go eat conscience and drink dignity, abi? Your wife and children go dey happy well well to receive you from Sierra Leone empty-handed.”

“No problem,” the soldier said.

“No wahala, huh?” she taunted him. “ We no tell you before? You be madman…Na only crazeman who go reach colonel for army and no steal money for dis country.”

The soldier on the other hand finds the refugees to be the mad people. Other than obsess with oil, he is going home to farm as his ancestors did before oil was discovered in his village. Except that Monica one of the refugees reminds him that the oil companies have polluted every grain of sand, to which he says he will do fishing. This too is vain, as as the rivers have been destroyed.

The dialogue evokes a conversation amongst refugees who start talking about the pollution of the delta, and about how they must make sure all the oil companies moved away from the area.

The earlier bitterness of the refugees seem to stop as some laugh their way into sleep. They find it ridiculous that even if the soliderman would not have stolen the oil money, he could have at least bid for an explotation licesnse, after all, expertise is not as much needed as money. He reminds them that coming from a minority tribe stacked his odds of becoming a general despite serving his country for 32 years. The refugees wonder whether his not being a general meant that he had not received the billons of dollars pumped into ECOMOG to which chief barks that the generals should be left out that matter, and instead, a probe should be done on madmen like the soldierman.

In an interesting way, Chief escapes flogging by the soldierman who resorts to an erratic behavior of shoving the refugees on the isle, and jumped over the heads.

“Dis no be de savannah of Sierra Leonne o!” a refugee said.

“You think we dey urban warfare for Liberia?”

It’s ridiculous that the Chief seems silent until the chieftancy or the national governemt is mentioned adversely.

For example, when the soldier compains of his arrears not paid by the government, after 6 years fighting for his fatherland…the fury of chief only seems to be provoked by the fact that the solider says no stupid chief fights for people in a true democracy.

He of the earlier talismans and claims that he ascribes to the ATR, also announces to the refugees that the solider’s worship is not the true religion of their ancestors—whatever the juju he had brought back from his travels.

It’s unbelievable to the soldier, and even to the reader, that after suffering too much for the freedom of his country, that the refugees would want to eject him from the bus on the account of religion.

“Let me tell all of jou in this bus, none of these white countries, which brought us christinaity and democracy, came to die for the Liberians. Did any of these Arab countries peddling militant Islam in Africa send troops to Sierra Leone? I say jou all are mad, to kill each other for two foreign reliyions. We wretched ECOMOG soldiers went out there to die for democracy while the lttle democracy in this country is being scuttled by yenerals and politicians and chiefs…rogues.

Whilst the soldierman’s address brings up important things to reflect, the chief’s thinking seems way set. Perhaps because there is a challenge to his way of thinking. He tells the soldier that making sense doesn’t depend on how many places he has visited. “ As our people say, if winning a race depended on one’s number of legs, the millipede would beat the dog hands down…” Whilst the refugees see this as wisdom, and in deed proverbial or idiomatic wisdom, the chief seems to use this to feign some mystique around him, perhaps to win the loyalty of his unwilling subjects-the refugees. Is it not what African leaders are wont to do. Chuckling away and fanning imaginary sweat in gatherings when they perceive to have said something important to the adoration of their people. A people tied to misfortunes that the only way to feel secure is to rally around these feel important people, who in turn skirt their eyes around their kingdom like some sort of parlour?

This same chief who ascribes to the traditional religion later is awed when the madness of the solider is calmed by the sprinkling of holy water by Madam Aniema. I guess it’s this quick shifting of attitudes that made Africans so gullible.

“Your holy water is as powerful as what those bearded Irishmen sprinkled on our ancestors to make them instant catholics. Then the church didn’t waste time dipping you inti a river before you got the Sprit…

“Just three drops of water and you knew Latin like the Pope,” the chief said

Even the chief offers to speak to Rome to make the madam a priest, to which he is reminded the catholic church doesn’t ordain women. When the outsiders interject with an opinion that there should be an execption to Aniema, they are quickly reminded to mind their own business.

Well, the madness returned quickly after,and more strongly at that despite the attempts to tame it earlier. Ridiculous that the chief insitist in voting to eject soldierman out, as opposed to showing tickets since he had Jubril’s ticket. The refugees, just like Chief were switching sides and it was proving difficult for Jubril to be comfortable.

Jubril is converted to Christianity, after Emeka possessed by some inhausted powers, descend on him claiming that he was an enemy. His marian medal is thrown away to the detriment of the catholics. Emeka takes off into the savannah, haunted by the inexhaustible spirit powers. When he sobers later to the realization that he has to board the second bus with the other refugees, he is shocked that the bus is full of dead bodies. Women, children and men, with blood everywhere as if someone had gassed the bus. Even the refugees after what they had seen seem to forsake the aura and mystery of the world of the spirit, and are not in the mood to listen to his spirit story to be allowed to board the first bus again.

The gullibility of people when faced with misfortune is evident. Chief opines that his country needs the hottest kind of the spirit to be cleansed, for when a ghost cat is stealing from your house you also buy a ghost cat not an ordinary cat..

The sad situation is that Jubril is not spared by the refugees. When the news stream on the TV, the madness of retaliatory attacks in the South, the mass number of corpses from the south etc, the refugees lose their mind. For people like him who could not belong in Khamfi and was haunted by how quickly Luka and the mob had flushed him, his future was still uncertain as the same madness had spread to the south. He had never thought that people in the south were capable of such violence and no one had told him that there were northerners in the south whose lives could be in danger.When he saw images of a mosque razed down he wept, in convulsions even though he himself had set churches on fire before. He took out his right hand to wipe a tear, and it was too late trying to put it back in the pocket. All Christianity, all form of reason desert the refugees as they impound on the boy, his pleas that “I come prom soud, but I be prom nord,” not saving him. He attempts to convey the mangled story of his religious identity, which is useless in the ovious murderous looks of the refugees.

“These were not the stares of catholics, or born-agains or ancestral worshippers. His conversion meant nothing to them. Their stares reminded them of his fundamentalist muslim friends, Musa and Lukman.

It’s breaking that Jubril dies being jeered at his Christo-muslim identity, which could not be embraced by either the northerners or southerners. He dies embracing his god of Islam who had at least been with him until that point of his flight.whilst chief washes his hands off the boy, he doesn’t use his supposed royal authority to save a citizen. Expected, since as an ancestral worshipper, he is an outside to the two foreign religions. It is the soldierman who tears at the kangaroo court, to no avail, attempting to save a citizen, before the refugees dragged him and Jubril and slit their throats.

Bookreview; Umwem Akpan “Say you are one of them”

Stories are meant to break hearts. The collection of stories in Umwem Akpan’s ‘Say you are one of them’ validates this opinion. Besides the pain and horror witnessed by the African Children, it is harrowing that these stories are narrated through the voices of children. As a reader, the book evokes empathy, and you might find yourself stopping so many times to ponder, sob or in frustration. The important thing about the narrations is that they come so close to the truth as the reality of everyday occurrences in different parts of the continent.

From the family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya, whose 12 year old daughter, Zawadi is pushed to childhood prostitution, to the siblings in Benin trying to cope with the Uncle’s attempt to sell them into slavery in Gabon; the book is full of riveting stories that exposes the survival struggles amongst African children, and the creative ways to get out of their predicament.

For the purposes of this review, as the stories are deep rich for a single review, I have singled out two short stories, and here’s to hoping that you will get a copy of the book and enjoy the read, as much as I did.

P.s. the review is quite long (with a couple of excerpts that I found captivating in every way). I have broken it down into two parts (or rather reviewed the selected short stories separately). The next review will be up in a week’s time.

Fattening for Gabon

‘I mean, look at my face.”

He touched at his scar and pulled at his lip and people began to laugh.

“Scarecrow!” One woman shouted, her mouth full of rice.

“No worry, when l get money well well, l go do surgery…my face no go smile like dis all de time again. N’do na dio face se, military face. Den una no go know again wheder l dey vex o, wheder l dey sad o, wheder l dey lie o…l mean , even now, who tell una say l dey happy wid una?” pg. 52

“kai, you better start looking for anoder monkey man o harvest your coconuts…”

Kotchikpa is a 10 year old boy, who has moved alongside his younger sister Yewa, 5 to live with their Fofo, an agbero. It had been agreed, in a meeting of relatives that the two, the youngest in a family of 3 others, needed to live with their uncle at the border town, who from then would take care of them. Although no one has volunteered information about the parents’ sickness and relatives talk about it in hushed voices, Kotchikpa later eavesdrops that they have AIDS though he doesn’t know what it means then.

The children’s uncle, Fofo Kpee(also Smiley Kpee :), is described as a smallish, hardworking man. He also has an incredulous sense of humour. And perhaps, as Kotchipika thinks, it is this sense of humour and smuggler’s instinct that he had developed as an agbero, that the secret to sell them off was kept from the world for three months.

Before the Gabon deal which as you will learn later, went awry, as a simple agbero, he made a living getting people across the border without papers or just roughing them up for money. He also hired himself out in the harmattan season to harvest coconuts in the many plantations along the coast. He had his fair share of misfortune over the years, falling from trees and getting into scuffles at the border. Yet the man was upbeat about life. He seemed to smile at everything :), partly because of a facial wound sustained in a fight when he was learning to be an agbero. Ridged and glossy, the scar ran down his left cheek and stopped at his upper lip, which was constricted; his mouth never fully closed. Though he tried to cover the scar with a big moustache, it shone like a bulb on a Christmas tree. His left eye looked bigger than the right because the lower eyelid came up short, pinched by the scar. Because of all this, sometimes people called him Smiley Kpee. Pg. 33

The book exposes different levels of comprehension and innocence of children at different stages of life. Whilst the children seem trusting, Kotchikpa is inquisitive, while the younger Yewa does not seem to be bothered by the family’s unexplained fortunes. Partly why, they may have been chosen for this illegal business of children slavery. Having been used to poverty lifestyle, they behold the machine as if it were some sort of magic that had descended upon them, something too much for them—with Yewa circling around it like a Voodoo priest, her legs stepping lightly, and her feet in socks of dust. The brother, whose palms had been dirtied from stocking the cooking fire with wood, even begins to sweat. Both are in disbelief, and Smiley Kpee seems to relish their innocent bewilderment of this fortune before he produced an invoice and proclaimed,..”God done reward our faitfulness………….Nous irons to be rich,-ha-ha!” This opens the reader to the ignorance and attribution of all mysteries to religion and its influence. And perhaps also why Fofo Kpee does not seem to see it wrong in going to offer a thanksgiving ceremony for the Nanfang, presided over by an non-suspecting and non-discerning pastor, the object of the thanksgiving being the price to sell of innocent blood to the unknown future of a distant land.

An element to Akpan’s writing is that it is so rich of humour that you will gawk and find yourself with an imprinted smiley on your face, or a silly grin as you devour the pages. Maybe close to that of Smiley Kpee. For example, on the night that the Nanfang arrives, the voice of the story tells that Fofo didn’t tell them stories about which he laughed more than they did. Also, after one sip, he decides it is better to save his fruit juice for until dinner, and owing to the excitement of the night, when they finally descend on the Abakaliki rice and stew of onions, Kpomo, and palm oil, they don’t mind to find the little pebbles in the rice. Even Fofo doesn’t scold Kotchikpa for not picking the rice well.

“When l got down to the last gulp, l stopped and saved it. l had water instead and ate and drank until my stomach filled up, the palm oil in the stew yellowing my lips. Then l drowned the rest of the juice so the taste would remain in my moth until l went to bed.” Pg. 39

After the thanksgiving, Kpee throws a party to celebrate the Nanfang. The explanation of the mysterious change of fortunes is that his brother and wife who live abroad had sent him the zokeke does not register any special meaning to the children, neither when he said that they would come with the older children to visit and they would get even better things. The plot thickenes on the day Fofo Kpee comes home in a Nanfang (a motor-bike) that he planned to use to ferry people between Benin and Nigeria to boost the family’s income.   Even the exclamation of disappointment by a man, Big Guy, whose words “Smiley Kpee, Only two?” “No way, iro o! Where oders?” don’t seem to bother the already excited children. After all, having an agbero for an uncle, they had been used to people coming to harass him for different things.

And on one evening Fofo Kpee comes home nervous and informs the children of the adoption plan by some NGO people whom he describes as a a group of caring, smiling people who go around the world helping children.

“It was the first time I saw him show frustration or doubt about our new life. Seeing how tense he was and hearing his continual sighs, l kept quiet. He was so distraught by whatever was worrying him that we abandoned the outside walls. After a while he got so angry that in one final rush of work, he closed up everything. And darkness descended on the room. Pg. 82

The guiless nature of the children, would not give any specific reason to doubt their uncle and his humour carried them through the difficult situations, like sleeping in a sealed room with no ventilation, in the guise to keep off the thieves. But it is when he unclad before them, exposing his nakedness before the children that it became unbearable. Fofo Kpee has a dream in which he talks in his brief nap, and while the kids watched him, he was twisted as though fighting a lion, and in a fiery voice saying that his children would not go to Gabon. The nightmare of that night would have served as a warning to Kotchikpa that the dream would unravel, but he had instead chosen to remain strong so as not to frighten his sister. Probably wrestling the strangling demns of child trafficking, or the nasty thought of selling off his brother’s children for a morsel.

The surreal and solemn silence around them is broken when the uncle suddenly takes off his loin cloth leaving the children confused and concerned. You almost turn morbid in fear when the writer introduces the issue of child sexual slavery.

“The dread that had hung around him since he awoke from his nightmare went away now. Apart from his nakedness, he looked very normal. His whole body glowed with the sweat except his bushy pubic hair, out of which hung a limp penis, its head smooth like mango skin, its body wearing a tube of tiny rings of flesh, like the neck of an oba in an odigba.”

“you want to touch my ting?Come on, do it, allez, touchez moi.”

He was now coming towards us.

“No,no I said, and we backed away.

My sister was silent. She never spoke again that night but shielded her privates with her hands and moved behind me.

“Oh, you want touch your ting, mes enfants?”

“No, l said.”

I felt numbness around my groin, and my heart began to pound. l didn’t feel the heat anymore, though l noticed more sweat was pouring from my body. My penis seemed to have shrunk completely, and my balls became one hard nut. l knew immediately this was different from my fofo’s ordinary clowning. l was afraid.”

Fofo Kpee teases Yewa (a 5 year old!) on whether she probably would like to touch a white man, and to this Kotchikpa counteres the wisdom of whether they need to actually go to Gabon. That night he sleeps dressed up with his back towards fofo, and his hands shielding his privates, while trying hard to convince himself that the performance of that night did not actually happen. He detests the shorts he is wearing but can not bring himself to sleep naked that night. He hates Gabon. He hates the Nanfang and vowed never to ride in it again.He sympathizes with Paul-the boy who was so withdrawn on the night that the godparents visited. Although Fofo Kpee apologizes to them that he overdid things in case things became difficult abroad, Kotchikpa starts thinking of how to escape and run back to Braffe with the sister.

Things took an ugly turn when Fofo Kpee detested Big Guy’s Gabon deal causing hatred to ensue between them but also moves quickly, from the decision that the children could not go to school again to the suspension of their collective dream of going to Gabon, such that no one mentioned it again to an extent that it filled their silence. Dissipation of pride in the nanfang etc.The pieces of the puzzle come together slowly, and Fofo intimates to Kotchikpa that they need to escape. Unfortunately the night of the planned escape bring with itself miserly and disappointing darkness. As the cartel of children slavery seemed to be watching over them, they are impounded as they tried to escape that night, one week to the impeding Gabon trip. Their games teacher Monsieur Abraham is part of the cartel, explaining the kindness he  accorded them in school including giving them glucose on the first days of their lessons when they couldn’t sleep. Kotchikpa feels so disappointed for having been duped into such a well-orchestrated plot but nothing had prepared them for worst days ahead.

Though their situation had gone from bad to worse in a single night, Kotchikpa had behaved to make the guard believe that he liked him, in the hope that they may be allowed into the parlor to see their fofo. Yewa shaken to the core, had been hiding in the water vat, which she had covered…she turned her anger towards the brother whose kindly gestures to fool the guard, the sister mistook as his collaboration with fofo and the guard to sell her off.

The horrors of child trafficking. Sea orientation incase the water in the vessel finished out, or were tossed overboard during the search by government people of which they would be required to hold to a huge prank of wood attached to the ship or given life jackets.

……The plan had been to build a bigger depot for the children awaiting dispatch. What an evil plot. Sadder because immigration officials, people in police uniform and teachers like the games master were part of this unnerving syndicate.The children from northern Nigeria had been brought in a huge fish truck, to disguise the cargo.

The horror before the other children are brought in to share the room with the two ison the night that Big Guy come in with other guys and under the cover of darkness dig the grave to bury Fofo Kpee. Kotchikpa is not asleep at the time, and has eavesdropped by the window until he hears that the pit being dug is to be deep enough to bury Smiley Kpee completely. The gravediggers get the Nanfang as their payment. With Fofo Kpee dead, Kotchikpa feels emboldened to be an even worse human being than Big Guy and he starts plotting their escape.

Exploiting the guard’s friendliness the morning after their fofo was buried in the night, he manages to convince him to let them into the parlor, hoping that he can get access to the green corduroy jacket that had spare keys.You almost coil with fright when Kotchikpa tries to pretend that he knew nothing about Fofo Kpee’s death and burial in the night, and his ruse to fake sighting a rat to distract the guard while he tries reaching for the spare keys, makes the heart of the reader skip a beat.

“Now my insides were rising and falling with joy. I began to fantasize about our escape. Our best bet was to run in the middle of the night, while he was asleep. I hadn’t thought about where we would run, but it didn’t bother me. My joy now was that freedom was within our reach. I just needed to manage my excitement until then. Again, like on the day Fofo tried to run away with us, l thought it was important for me not to tell Yewa anything until we were ready to leave. I didn’t want to risk it. Pg. 137

Desperately the boy manages to escape, but the sister is left behind as she was slow to jump through the window when they were caught up by the guard. His desperate pleas to have the sister jump through the window didn’t yield in time, and he only saved himself.

“I ran into the bush, blades of elephant grass slashing my body, thorns and rough earth piercing my feet. I took the key and padlock from my pocket and flung them into the bush. I ran ad l ran, though l knew l would never outrun my sister’s wailing. Pg. 139

I bought this book at Nakumatt Nyali sometime back while scavenging for African literature but it could be on the shelves of several other book stores.

 

 

Book review – Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks

Part of a trilogy of Novels set in France, Sebastian Faulks proves himself as a master of imagination, or something beyond it. This is a Novel that shreds your heart, tears your human sense, and in an intricate way, reveals the complexities of human reason, and so many conflicting things that are capable of existing or co-existing in a single human being and also the complexities of societies, at a particular time of history.

The voice of the story is a Scottish girl who leaves her job as a receptionist and general helper at a doctor’s practice to do something that would contribute to the war. A fluent French speaker who would pass for closely a native, her father who fought in France in the last war, used to take them, where he had been, to visit the war graves. She also went on exchanges to a French family during the summer holidays, and read French and Italian at the university.

Through a contact that she got on the train on her way from Edinburgh to London, Dick Cannerly, she was able to secure something to do in G section.

’and you presumably know what our aim is in France?

‘Well, you’ve told me, haven’t you?

‘Yes. But in practical terms what this means is that we are encouraging the French to disobey their government-though l use the word’ government’ reluctantly, since one must doubt its real legitimacy. The means at our disposal are what you might call ‘anti-democratic”. We aren’t going round organizing meetings at which we air the anti-Vichy point of view; we’re using guns and explosives. Even the organizational side of our work is only a prelude to violence. The trouble is, Ms. Gray, that this message is still falling on a fairly stony ground. A large number of people welcome the Vichy government and deeply respect the Marshal, but an even greater number are motivated by a fear of something worse-of civil disorder. They fear that the resistance, such as it is, would be the prelude to a full-scale Communist revolution. So they cling to the idea of stability, of law and order and turn their face away from the actual shape it takes.”

The task was very simple: first to accompany Yves-some calm taciturn little man, acting as his chaperone, until they are safely arrived at the house near Uzerche, where he would join forces with a very busy little network and she would then wish him bon voyage. But aside to this she had her own personal ambitions.

While in France, she was to be called Dominique Guilbert, born in 1917 and was married to a clerk in Angouleme who was now a prisoner of war in Germany, and was traveling to visit her sick father who lived in Limoges. In addition to her cover name Dominique; her field name was to be Daniele. Additionally her hair was cropped and colored although G-section had not anticipated the possibility for a public bath house due to fuel shortage that she was to encounter later in Lauverate exposing a certain inconsistency in coloring.

During a train journey, she kept herself distracted with newspapers, to conceal what she thought was her obvious identity as English.

 The news in the paper was gloomy. The Russians were in retreat, as the Germans drove them back from town to town, the Japanese were threatening Singapore; the Americans had in theory joined the war, but for all popular belief that this meant the allies must win, it seemed to Charlotte they had as yet made little difference.

She resented the anguish that reading the newspaper brought and felt he news of the deaths keenly; the war had aroused in her a feeling that surprised her. When she was a girl her father had taken the family to France and pointed at the million acre graveyards of the British dead; Charlotte did not take in all he said about the war, but even at the age of seven understood that such a thing could never be endured again. An unthinking allegiance to a national cause seemed to have been the motive that led million men to die, and the danger of such thinking had been alive in the calculations of all the people she had known.

Yet something had changed. She had come to see the enemy as not one competing cause whose selfish aims were defensible as any other’s, but as a plain manifestation of evil. When she told Cannerly on the train that she was patriotic, she was not saying quite what his easy smile suggested he thought; she was saying that, despite the implicit danger, and against her former judgment, she had come to feel this way. What she meant was that she had unwittingly developed an almost motherly identification with the men being killed. She despised their killers. There was no doubt in her mind; and although she was not particularly pleased to have been driven up to this conviction, she saw no possibility of its changing.pg. 37

After Dominique had delivered Yves to his final destination, where he was in deep cover, and according to Mr. Jackson no longer needed her guiding hand, any further communication between them would be through wireless and would come through Octave. She however could not take her plane back. She would stay in France until she felt she had done something worthwhile. More urgent even than this was her need to find Gregory. To fly home now would be to admit that he was dead, and this was something that she could to do. She had no idea how she would set about finding him, but merely by being in France she had a better chance. If she gave up on Gregory then she was giving up faith in her own life.

She needed to get herself as soon as possible to Clermont-Ferrand; to track down Monsieur Chollet in his garage and see if Gregory had called; and, if not, to use whatever method her cunning and determination could devise to go out in the dark and find him.

He had told her that he would be flying a Halifax, but it’s when she received a message of his disappearance from Borowski, that she discovered he had been on a mission using a Lysander, a tiny monoplane.

When she moved to London, she shared a tiny icy flat with Daisy and Sally, whose ghastly boyfriend Terence had got them all invited to a literary party on the same evening she arrived. While she felt she did earn her right to the party, and in fact did not want to go to this party or any party at all, she would do it for Daisy. If she seemed aloof, Daisy might complain to her mother in Gloucestershire, who in turn might tell her mother in Edinburgh. It was through this ancient friendship of the two women, though they never saw each other anymore, that her place in the flat had been arranged; and even if it was not much of a flat, she owed daisy something. Pg. 23.

It was at this party that she met Peter Gregory and their affair developed quickly but never seems to have the affinity or commitment to last. He is a pilot in a field of war, and while he has survived when his friends perished, this luck to cheat death is not all promissory, for the war could last forever. He is later to regret leaving for that fateful mission without letting Charlotte know.

He had contemplated a switch to night flying, something that required a different kind of skill from the day time flying he had been taught. It required trust, and he believed he was good at trust, at least where his own safety was concerned. He had come to think he was inviolable though his friends were all dead.

“Flying by night was a violation of instinct; there were no steeples or bridges from which to take a bearing, no flash of wingtip or underbelly to show the vital presence of other aircraft……….Even when you swore you could feel the brush of rooftops on the undercarriage, you must believe the altimeter’s finger pointing at 10,000 feet.”

While he was lucky to survive a crash with the Lysander, he had a fractured tibia, suspected but undiagnosed by the vet who had been contacted by a stallholder who knew that his sympathies were reliable. Unfortunately, as an Englishman he could not be taken in for a surgery. Gregory the unsinkable, the unkillable: lucky to have survived the crash, lucky it was so near the landing zone, lucky that he was picked by sympathetic people.

He had told Charlotte that he seemed completely incapable of crashing, having been straight through a squadron of messerschmitts after his ammunition had run out and wasn’t even scratched. He had flown upside down a hundred feet from the ground to give the impression of being out of control and somehow managed not to touch a tree. Even when his plane’s been damaged, it’s seemed to fly normally. He would come back. He was indestructible. But what are war-time promises?

And for the belief in this particular man, a remarkable man and the purity of the feelings she felt for him and believed he had for her, a force superior than any other guiding force; Charlotte believed that she could not organize her life until she knew if he was alive or dead. Unfortunately, the garage man at Clermont-ford did not seem to have an idea about the disappearance of Gregory, much as he had indicated that she could contact him if anything went wrong.

Octave found her a job as a servant girl at his father Levade’s domaine. A weird man who was a painter, a Jew, thought by some of his village mates to be a Satanist as well. This is despite his conversion to Christianity 10 years before.

Peter had not understood her romantic feeling for France such that had got it into her head that she ought to be dropped into France. She felt that being in France gave increased the chances of finding him. It was during this prolonged stay that she got to learn of the Duguay boys and later form such an attachment to them, so that she often visited them while not working at the Domaine:

Andre was almost seven, Jacob only four. Perhaps the complexities of the politics being discussed in Madame Galliot’s ironmongery would not have made sense to him given his tender age. The anti-Semitic remarks at the shop closely touched his family.

‘For years they’ve been undermining us, keeping all the best jobs to themselves, swindling proper French people. The day they say no Jew should be a school teacher anymore, that was the best day we’ve seen round here for a long, long time.

‘I didn’t know Duguay was one of them,’……’he seemed like nice enough type. He was no trouble to anyone and I don’t think his business was dishonest’

‘Oh, but the mother, though. A typical Israelite,’ said Madame Galliot. ‘They changed their name to Duguay to take us all in.’

Hearing his family name, Andre found the courage to speak and asked for candles. While this seemed to give him a surge of courage, and nothing more to the effect of those hate spinning words of five adults, it’s clear that when his voice brought him into view, it disparaged and scattered their thinking, splitting their guilty at the sight of the toddler.

Unfortunately those words would soon after his sprint uphill, make out a new meaning that would halt the family’s existence forever. It was not clear why their house was locked, something unusual. Neither was the Star of David planted on the door of the house. The mother had tried to explain the shortage of food, that they lived in difficult times, something Andre found difficult to understand.

Benard, a gendarme had put their parents on the train, a special train, upon visit from the Vichy police. He would pass as a sadistic who had seen an opportunity to have his sadistic impulses made legal, the same as locals such as Benech whose guiless beliefs regarding the occupation are amusing. Benech feared a communist revolution more than the German occupation for he felt that the occupation provided the communists a chance for a revolution against traditional France.

When Andre’s mother became hysterical, weeping the father had started weeping too. And if they could not save themselves they could perhaps save their little one, Jacob. She took him to the door of the cellar, and despite his spirited screams, they locked him there. Interesting that the change of names, and even religion to devout Catholics to have a sense of belonging could not change their identity as foreigners and prevent them from being rounded off to the refugee camps. While wicked Benard, in his sense of being a law abiding citizen, becomes part of this plot, he at least allows for the ‘missing statuses of the boys. This would not be sustained forever, because the Duguay boys are used as collateral when he came with the Nazis alongside Benech to take Levade.

It’s an apparent difficulty to implore a 7 and 4 year old to be brave and try not to worry over the absence of their parents, even when there had been such an intimate physical closeness with the mother, that instantly turns their world in hopelessness and despair.

The boys had been hidden at Sylvie Carriteu’s, in the rafters and could not be allowed downstairs. Her mother who kept watch over them enjoyed looking after the children and saw it as a natural act of female kindness. Although she accepted that Jewish people were dishonest and anti-French, and that the Vichy legislation to restrain their activities and confiscate their businesses was overdue, she didn’t see how the little ones were to blame: after all, it was not Andre or Jacob’s fault that they were born Jewish. Her daughters view was more developed, which was shy it was she who had been approached by Julien to look after the children in the first place.

Andre—because he had no power to change his circumstances, his will to survive and his legacy of natural content deceived him into experiencing them as bearable. To this, Sylvie told her mother that she thought him adaptable.

Yet something was checked in him. Without his mother’s constant touch, he shrank a little; his movements became less fluid ; he walked more often than he skipped; he remembered himself more, never any longer forgetting to say please or thank you. Slowly too, he began to register his father’s absence; he missed his physical bulk and the stability it represented; he missed the feeling of bodily release that followed their wrestling matches. And for all the way the observable changes were so small, he still had fits of misery.p.169-70.

And while his mind was preoccupied with what to do with André and Jacob, in the face of imminent prosecution of Jews, although from the newspapers it was not so difficult to make out what was happening, from what he had seen or heard, there would be no let-up in the persecution of Jews. He did not pause to consider his own position. His father Levade was three-quarter Jewish, and Julien three-eighths Jewish but since this ridiculous fraction had never mattered to him before, he thought it would not matter to anyone else in France.

Then as the war escalated the free zone became occupied, things were getting dangerous. Levade was taken by the Nazis who had been brought by Benech, and try as they may, no papers could be located to prove his identity as French and to save the Duguay boys, Julien confessed that his father was a Jew. They took him on that fateful cold night, and left a Nazi in charge of the domaine.

Sheer ingenuity or probably luck had them convince the German soldier that they needed to sleep together as a couple for the last time. To arouse his anger giving charlotte a chance to escape and ensure that the boys were moved to safety and for Julien to move somewhere safe, they resorted to making love noisily to agitate the German. The trick worked and when he came over to push Charlotte away, this gave Julien a chance to wrestle him and take possession of his gun. The plan was to kill Benech, to which he succeeds. The kids were not to survive later after being moved to Anne-Marie’s and something tells me that Pauline Benoit, a Gaullist told on them.

Partly the redemptive bit is having Benech exterminated, and the determination of Julien in doing this would provide safety to the boys and possibly give him a chance to escape, or so he thought. Later before Charlotte left for London, she made a trip to Paris to see Levade for she had heard the trains were destined there. Of course nothing had prepared her for the shock of the concentration camps, and much as she managed to get a message to him, explaining that Julien was trying to save the boys, Monsieur Levade died that evening. And as she waited some more, when children were dropped, she thought she has seen the Duruguay boys:

In the camps they had to wear a yellow cloth with a star, and anyone seen without it in the camp would automatically be included in the next transport and so was any internee seen on the women’s staircases.

It’s painful to see Sylvie and Anne-Marie lose the boys to the German soldiers even when Sylive was willing to compromise herself to the soldiers to save the boys; an act Anne-Marie’s mother could not fathom and told on the boys. The horrible sound of childish screams upstairs as they were roughed away is extremely devastating.

The rumours was that there was no work at the other end of the trains and that the Jews were being exterminated by the thousand. People would throw themselves from storied floors once they learnt that their names were on the list and in the camps there seemed to be no sympathy for the dead for someone else would go in the trains on their behalf.

“Outside again, he went over to where the bus was now leaving the compound. There  mire buses had been and gone in the meantime, and Andre found a number of children of his age wandering among the hundreds of forgotten bundles and bags, looking for some identifying mark. One boy sat cross-legged on the cinders, his head between his knees. Andre noticed the scabs and sores on the back of his hands, which were clamped round his neck. The boy appeared to be immobilized; it was as though he had found the point beyond which he could not go. Andre saw the fair hairs on his neck, matted together with filth…pg. 442

Back inside:

“there was a solid wailing in the room as though the children’s nerve had given way in a collective wave of despair. The older ones could no longer comfort the younger, and even the women who tried to help them were in tears”

The gossip of gas and crematoria would seem far-fetched but the reality of the destination was sealed when they got to the bus. There was no sense of time passing in the train and the stretched hours would not amount to days, though they were in the second night. A man had died in their wagon and everyone was edging away from the body. And finally the train came to a halt. It was deep night.]

There was elation: at last they had arrived. Then some smoke came through the slit, a pungent smoke.

..”Now they were in a line of children and old people. They were climbing into Lorries.

Andre was at the back. They went past a long ditch in which ragged flames were rising. From a tipped lorry, what looked to André like giant dolls with broken limbs were being poured into the trench.

They stopped at tow whitewashed farmhouses with thatched roofs. The lorry’s headlights showed up pretty fruit trees.

Now they were naked. It was very cold in this room. Jacob took André’s hand and found that there was already something in it-a tin soldier.

Andre kissed Jacob’s shorn head, the stubble tender on his lips.

There was another room, another door, with bolts and rubber seals, over whose threshold the two boys, among many others, went through icy air, and disappeared. Pg 460.

Gregory found his way back to London through Italy, and into North Africa. Sounds major luck for someone with a fractured leg and terrible French in an occupied country. Charlotte went back to London, helpless that there’s nothing more she could have done to save the boys. Through her reconciliation with the father, we are let to know more horrors of the previous war, that left him, and many others devastated. Octave wrote to Daniele to let her know that the boys were taken, he had not heard from the father though he hoped the worst rumours about the camps and so on were not true (poor soul) and that he had hid in some hills for safety. Despite the squalor and the shame and bloodshed that would come, he still felt great hope about freedom to come.

The winner is the resolution of redemptive love that withstands the war-time promises….

..as Charlotte reunites with her lover Gregory…..As they came near to it, Charlotte slipped her hand into Gregory’s and found that it had already contained something – the handle of his stick.

She held on tight to his arm, nevertheless, as they walked through the porch, stepped over the stone threshold, worn smooth and low by many centuries of people passing through. They crossed into the cold interior of the church, heavy with the scent of cut flowers and the murmuring of the organ, into the soft air, and disappeared.pg. 496

Whilst it’s a fictional book, the Author indicates that it heavily relies on actual or tries to represent the historical background as it actually was. If you are a lover of history, you will like the powerful representation of the harrowing incidents surrounding WW2, and if you are not into history, you can never escape the reality that our present lives have been shaped by past events, and how we respond to it, may determine how we handle or prevent future recurrences. There is a stark contrast, for example, with the dissemination of information today for it can be argued that the social media, and even traditional media, would not allow the world to be dark to events such as the horrible holocaust of the Jews. There is consolation in the fact that the world has a medium to know, and possibly nudge an action. This is in contrast to times discussed in the novel (clearly not an information age, like today) when all they relied on was the wireless to send coded messages. I got thinking, ‘but how miserable!’, and perhaps this explains why by the time the world realized, the lives of 6 Million Jews & other minorities were no more. Gassed poisonously and cremated.

British people laughed at Hitler and his preposterous acolytes, but, as German philosopher long before the Nazis might have argued, abstract evil did not choose the form in which it emerged in the particular. Pg. 122

Whilst the statement is debatable in many ways, I find many of the atrocities that were done in history utterly disgusting. Despairing. Squalid. Mean. Horrid. Undignified deaths. The disturbing bit is while many know of the holocaust of the Jews, and there was the international backing, there is little known of our own histories. For example the Namibian Holocaust, or the holocaust in Congo, or the slave trade in East Africa to Persia or did the world just choose to forget that the trail of blood existed or treated them as fables? Or are terrible times best forgotten?

Despite being awful base creatures, man still has ability to be good. Sometimes evil and good would exist together, or sometimes next to each other. You will find this in beautiful souls like Julien (Octave). His words to Charlotte:

If you don’t base your actions on what is right then you have nothing left to fall back on incase the practicalities fail. I would rather die myself. I am not going to be responsible for the death of the children.

 

Book Review: Shreds of Tenderness by John Ruganda

DISCOVERING THE MIND

A riveting drama, you will find the themes in this book interweaving your thoughts on the realities of present day African countries. You will also cackle at the humour of the daily lives of the characters, despite their otherwise difficult situations. Grab your copy, and enjoy the intricacies therein but until then, see my review:

Oh, no Wak. I know you probably mean well. In fact, I know you mean well. But, no. Let me do my penance, if need be. If the forces that be are rounding up all SRB spies, so be it. Let them. I’m not scared of the law. I’ll serve my term and keep my dignity. Pg. 134

The first book that I read written by J. Ruganda was “The Burdens”, and whether from the dramatic presentation of this work by my high school teacher or the sheer love of words, I simply loved this drama. Published in 2001 by Oxford University Press, Shreds of Tenderness is set in a greedy society, which is characteristic of political dictatorship, greed for power, betrayal that is edged in family and political relations, individualism and use of excessive power to harness into submission the disloyal errants. It is also about survival in times of political tyranny. It also sheds light to the survival and plight of refugees, the lack of belonging “while on the run” and the lack of acceptance, “when they come back home”

Set in the present and in home of a fallen affluent minister (Odie and Wak’s late father), the flash backs and “play-within-a play” helps the reader see through the atrocities committed by the fallen tyrannical regime. Odie plays the “King of Termites” who lives in a glass jar, excerpt:

Your Highness…

Your Highness. Having a royal nap, your Highness, are you? A royal nap inspite of the shooting and the shelling and the killing outside? (A bit impatient). YOUR HIGHNESS. Are you deaf, Your Mighty Highness? Or is it that you have no ear for the onslaughts of man by man? No ear for human cries of woe? I’m amazed! No Shred of tenderness left in you? The liberation war is upon our backs and you take time off to have a royal nap. Cosy, very cosy indeed. Cosy and careless, I might add. Pg. 2

Notes: This depicts the obliviousness of those in power, and their indifference to people’s suffering caused by the war of liberation.

Since Wak returned from exile, Odie is never the same. His abnormial behavior is edged in a deep hatred for Wak, whom he views as a bloody deserter. A bloody unforgivable traitor, to be exact. Pg. 8 & 9. But Odie’s hatred is also laced with fear. Possibly fear that Wak’s presence will unearth sudden truths regarding his exile and his supposed death. It could also stretch to the motives behind Odie’s informing on his brother Wak, the issue of inheritance. Even Stella seems to notice the strange behavior:

You have been behaving strangely since he returned three weeks ago. Haven’t you? (pg.11).

To his defense against sister’s accusation, Odie points out that Stella must be a crack pot to think that Wak should scare him. Why, he has survived 10 years of dire violence, where every second was a nightmare and life unpredictable hence got not time for a sausage-and-bacon returnee who did not have as much guts as a cowardly chimpanzee when the bullets started ricocheting. (pg.12)

Odie would like the reader to believe that his hatred for Wak is justified, that he shouldn’t have cowed and ran away at the height of political unrest. The sister, Stella feels something more sinister is at play. Something unsettling. Some kind of guilt that Odie seems to harbour within. She doesn’t seem to see the how to the realization of the horrors of genocide 10 years on (pg. 9). Odie must be hiding something from her. Some projected inner guilt, calling for a purging.

While the people who stayed on suffered unmentionable atrocities, even the people who fled as refugees suffered a great deal.

“..You stayed and lived through the quagmire, as best as you could. I can imagine that and I appreciate it intensely. But fleeing from your own country…that’s another matter, man. A different kettle of fish, as they say. There is nothing as abominable as being a refugee, let me tell you. Shouted at. Your dignity is lowered. Hell, man. It is a blight….self-exile is another matter of course………….From the sweeper to the highest official they subtly remind you that you don’t belong. You are an alien. Pg. 80

At first you live under false illusions……But then, all of a sudden, you get the first rude shock from both local and foreign press. Headlines alone are enough to tell you their thinking processes: ‘MARXIST TYRANT BOOTED OUT BY A POPULAR ILLITERATE SERGEANT MAJOR’…’COUP IS A VICTORY FOR DEMOCRACY…’WE RECOGNIZE STATES NOT INDIVIDUALS’ ……I had believed the regime would be in a shambles in a matter of months. I was wrong and naïve, to be frank. The regime had minerals that the West and the East wanted and were willing to cast a blind eye on one buffoon of a nigger trashing other niggers…………..We never realized that our endowments would be our undoing! Pg. 82 & 83

Whilst the country of setting would pass for Kenya (mention of Odeon Cinema-pg. 76), it could also pass for any other East African country but more particularly so, a country anywhere in Africa. The leaders using their political powers to influence extra-judicial killings, sharing of power etc…Rings a bell? I laughed out loud when there is a tug between Wak and his brother Odie (step-brothers) about sharing of power after they could not agree to the Primer rules, and this made me flash back to 2008 Kenya “power sharing” deal. It’s interesting this book was written in 2001, almost fore-shadowing the events of 2008, and any other political duels where power sharing ratios have become part of the solution to political stalemates.

Odie: I didn’t realize that our self-appointed Returning Officer was going to be biased and bribable. Besides my call for an independent observer team to monitor the elections was deliberately ignored.

Wak: And yet you objected because you were sure of winning, right? But now you have lost, it’s another matter. Is defeat such an unacceptable burden? Christ! We can’t all be winners, you know. Pg. 60 & 61

As the primer game goes on, and with Wak’s 2/3^rd majority win, giving him the clear mandate to change laws, rules and regulations as fit, the disagreements dwell on matters principle and the mundane too. Wak is considered common place thinker, as Odie thinks something more authentic to fit in what the publishers want is more appropriate. You would think authentic would also do with telling a truth. But not so, in the hard times, pleasing the judges would mean the prize of $5000 is such a welcome token, in the tough times they live in. Whilst one accuses the other of a country betrayal, there is also a sense of conformity, even if it means re-writing their story to fit the judge’s profile, for survival sake. “Competition for the New Alphabet Book for the Revolutionary Third World” Not Africa, Third World. So A-as a primer would not work for Africa but for Autocracy—argues Odie. “ A may be for your mother Africa, but remember in ten or twenty years’ time there will be children who will learn with bitterness that your Africa, and Brazil and Cuba, ‘Mr. Chair’, are not their motherlands but graveyards for their parents and relatives. We are busy rewriting our histories with the blood of millions of political martyrs, and our children will have the misfortune of learning that with spouts of tears and self-hatred. (pg. 62)

….And the drama ensues, with Stella suggesting B–for the Bible,earlier on she had suggested A-for Amen to which Odie refutes, and implores her to be imaginative for a change. Well, B-Bible doesn’t work either, not at least as far as Odie’s maxims theorizes.

Look at it this way, Stella. I’m not saying that BIBLE is a wrong entry. No. (Patronisingly) In fact, it’s very good; it would win the soft sentiments of our Christian mothers and fathers and all that. But who knows? One of these fine mornings, when cocks are crowing and the likes of Wak are snoring off their whisky fumes, some influential maniac might decide to proclaim this our ‘Pearl of Africa” and Islāmic state. What then?….What will happen then? We do not want to endanger our Christian brothers and sisters, do we? That aside, the Bible has bullied us into subjugation for over a century. ….. No, Stella, we need a new primer altogether, with entries from the Koran or some other holy books-if you are religiously inclined that is. pg.67-8

The drama also focuses on a domestic setting; shedding light to acts of three siblings, Wak, Odie and Stella. In Part one, the reader is led to believe that Odie is a patriot, who stayed behind amidst political turmoil, while Wak his brother is depicted as a betrayer of his country and family. The reader is set to believe that Wak, who ran away to political exile after emptying the family’s coffers and leaving behind an ailing mother in hospital deserves no place in the reconstruction of the country. Stella feels strongly for Wak, something Odie detests and is quick to warn her “And you little sister, be careful; this kith-and-kin-nonsense doesn’t wash with me”

Odie’s hypocrisy is deep hidden in the resentment for his brother and the unraveling of his return. He seems too preoccupied by his guilt. He had plotted his brother’s downfall–and after 10 years in exile, ran an advert to the belief that his brother was dead. This was to make him an accepted heir of his father’s property, to which Wak was the rightful heir.

Conversely Wak passes as a callous fellow, who would rather Wak be punished for “abdicating his patriotic duties”, it turns out that Wak is willing to extend a reconciliatory gesture to his brother Odie. Stella is really afraid of Wak’s supposed callousness, but he corrects her that Odie is brother…no tears need be shed. There is a re-conciliatory embrace…perhaps depicting a healing to/reconciliation of the nation too. Turns out the cold-hearted, bitter Odie is the callous one. He didn’t mind their grandma’s death, terming it Good Riddance,..”she always ate her biscuits alone.” “Never shed a tear nor even apologized when their father died”. Pg.76

To Odie’s utter incredulousness, he is forgiven, even after he insists that he wants to do his penance…, something that takes Wak and Stella in shock. Are you out of your mind? Pg. 134

On the contrary, I have discovered my mind.