This story is a bit about the colonial past and more about the bad
leadership of corruption and human rights abuses of Nigeria's recent
past. It is about Nigeria not in name but in context and peoples.
The
story starts at B. Beach in Laga, Federal Republic of Madia
(reminiscent of the Lagos Bar Beach in Nigeria) on New Year Day of 1988,
with the naked drowned body of a woman. In government a military
dictator is in power, Gen. Isa Palat Bello. A man at the scene (Bukuru),
someone presumed mad from his unkempt appearance and making a home at
the beach, tells the police that the woman had been raped by soldiers at
dawn. Because soldiers are in power, this gets him locked up on trumped
up charges of being the rapist and murderer. In court Bukuru repeats
that soldiers had raped the woman who then chose to run into the water
when he attempted to help her. And when he declares that Isa Palat Bello
once raped and murdered a woman named Iyese, hell is let loose. Having
been declared sane by a psychiatrist, another one is procured to examine
him, but with a forced order to return a verdict of madness. Bukuru in a
maximum security prison (reminiscent of the one at Kirikiri in Lagos)
decides to tell his story to one particular reporter. The majority of
the book is Bukuru’s tale, the account of how he fell in love with
Iyese, a woman forced into prostitution by society, then deserted her
when she needed him most, afraid that the violent Isa Bello whom she’d
been seeing would come after him with guns.
It is a tragedy, in which the narrator, a journalist, finds out that
the supposedly mad man arrested by the police was in fact his biological
father, from the man’s written account which he unwittingly chose the
journalist to be ‘the voice.’ It was in fact the birth of the journalist
(Ogugua but renamed Femi on adoption) that caused Ogugua to abandon his
life as a newspaper editor for that of a beach-dwelling unkempt Bukuru,
his mobid fear of Bello the soldier that murdered Ogugua’s mother after
she told him he was not the father of the boy, a fear made worse once
Bello was catapulted to the leadership position of the land after a
coup.
An interesting twist in the story is the use of Sheri as the
name of the narrator’s girlfriend, a lady he intended to marry until
she fell to the wishes of her parents not to marry someone who didn’t
know the ‘source of his genes.’ Sheri’s ‘lilting’ voice in the story
sounded like the real-life Sheri Fafunwa I used to know (now married to
the author). Another interesting aspect is the use of traditional
stories and sayings of old times, told now by grandmothers.
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