The Madness of Didi

This is a very well-written book of social conflict. The young village orphan boy Francis Ndidi-Agu, adopted by a priest (who anglicized his surname to Didi) and sponsored to a British education, was able to see the world with a new eye. He realized that in telling themselves they were white when their skin color was actually pink, and in going about brutalizing other peoples in the name of civilization, European culture seemed to be founded on some sort of madness. He divorced himself from his adopted family and refused to become a priest, causing his sponsor priest to write his village that he was dead. He decides to illustrate this madness by announcing that he was GREEN and acting like he owned everybody, and to the extent of killing six white people in cold blood.

He wanted to deceive society by claiming to be mad, and see what would happen in court. But his real reason was found out by a student psychiatrist who was interviewing him, and unfortunately the secret service had used her without her consent, and Didi’s intent was out before the court hearing. He was afterwards jailed for several years, part of them spent in mental prisons. He was released from prison through pressure from friends and deported back to Nigeria, where he was immediately attracted to a father-less family of a mother, son (Obi) and an adopted daughter. He got a teaching job at a college and became a hero of student activism on the one hand, and an enemy of a wealthy politician that saw him as the cause of his daughter’s rebellion, and eventually arranged for his home to be set afire at night with Didi trapped inside.

Most of the book was about his arrival in his village and the villagers’ initial assumption that he was a ghost, his growing attraction to Obi and his family, his popularity in the village, schools and country, his confrontation with the Ndumezays, and his death, told in first person by Obi himself, probably after his own return from England under the sponsorship of one of Didi’s friends. The real meat of the story is in the form of a manuscript about Didi’s experience in England which was sent to him in the village by his friend, and which he let Obi read when he was about to die.

March 19, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1980. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).