You won’t get the full message of this very interesting novel until the very end. The setting is Nigeria of the 70’s, the heroes and heroines each surviving the harsh life of poverty through unbelievable feats. But it is only at the end that we realize it is actually a fiction about a fiction. The Man in the title is Lakemf, a teenage boy in a boarding school who with a friend were in the habit of stealing things from their school either for resale or for consumption. Came In From the Back of Beyond refers to the dramatic change in Lakemf after a day spent with Maude, one of his teachers, listening to his tales of difficult childhood as well as reading a manuscript he was supposed to have written, which was supposed to have been a true life account.
The first story was about Maude himself supposedly; how his mother had been a prostitute on account of being young and in a city all by herself, after her relations abandoned her on account of her family being killed in a fire caused by enemy political thugs. Then the mother had died when he was a teenager, and he had to turn to criminal gangsterism to survive. Somewhere along the line a companion of his was caught and lynched by a mob, and he got injured in an auto accident. Then a good Samaritan came along, offered him a job and he had his break in life, furthering his education and so on.
The other story was in the manuscript, about Bozo, his ex-girlfriend’s first boyfriend. Bozo, who was rejected by the society in the form of his father and his Christian school, turned to drugs after a terrible incident that destroyed his father and his sister. Then he decided that the answer was social revolution, and started mobilizing people to turn against the government. But his life ended in the struggle.
Lakemf was so moved after listening to all this. The fact that Maude finally told him they were actually fictional didn’t matter as he decides to turn a new leaf, rather than contributing to the rot in the society.
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