Violence

This is a very moving story about love and courage in the face of extreme poverty. It starts with an argument between Idemudia and Adisa, a very poor couple, about the man’s poverty and the lack of food to eat. In their argument Adisa threatens to be seeing other men and he in turn threatens to kill her if he finds out. It is raining but he is driven out in search of work. He and his friends get a job offloading cement for a wealthy woman (Queen). At the end of the day of working in the rain he gets home and collapses. Adisa had gone to see her aunt about their quarrel but when she returns and finds her husband sick it becomes obvious that she didn’t mean what she’d threatened him with and couldn’t bear to leave her husband. Idemudia has to be taken to a hospital but there is no money to pay the bills.

The rest of the story is then about Adisa’s ordeals in getting money. Queen’s husband promises to help her but then forces her to have sex with him first. When Idemudia is discharged Queen offers him work at her construction site. When the workers want to go on strike Queen attempts to divide them by first appointing Idemudia foreman for the first time, then tried to seduce him. Idemudia refuses to be tempted by money or sex so Queen throws her secret knowledge at him—that his own wife had slept with her husband. Idemudia rushes home in anger with the thought of killing Adisa. He starts to strangle her but finally realizes that she’d done it as a sacrifice for him, just as he himself sometimes sold his blood for money.

Built around this plot is a critical look at the injustices of the Nigerian society, a society in which the majority of its citizens are jobless, poor and uneducated, a society of abject poverty alongside stinking ill-gotten wealth. When people are driven to a corner by poverty they may have no other recourse than violence in order to stay alive, and should then not be blamed.

February 18, 2015. Review initially written in 1994. Novel first published in 1979, this Longman edition being published in 1989, ISBN 0-582-00240-0.