Buchi Emecheta : The bride price

Aku-nna (« my father’s wealth » in igbo language) is a young teenager living a peaceful life in Lagos, the Nigerian metropolis with her carefree brother Nna-Ndo, her mother Ma Blackie and her father. The latter who served as a soldier in the British colonial army and came back from faraway fronts with a recurrent handicap on his leg, is now working as the head of casting department in the Nigerian railways society. Aku-nna is a brilliant student whose hope is to make a good marriage to make her father proud. But soon that loving and caring father died from the deterioration of his old war wound.

“With our father gone, there will be no more school for me [school is over for me]” thought Aku-nna and she couldn’t be more right.

Buchi Emecheta introduces us step by step (progressively) to the remains of tradition in the igbo burial ceremony in Lagos, the solidarity that naturally takes place as well that the hypocrisy behind some behaviors. Then the author takes us to the countryside where the Odia family is forced to move, they settle in Ibuza at Okonkwo’s, the eldest brother of the late Ezechiel Odia.

In that context, with the man very attached to tradition that is her uncle, the frail and sickly Aku-nna discovers a very rigid and male chauvinist society. The reference to Okonkwo, the eccentric and also extremely attached to tradition character from Chinua Achebe’s novel may be intended. In this novel, Uncle Okonkwo is interested in his own social ascent within the clan and counts on Aku-nna’s dowry as soon as she’ll start growing up into a woman. Meanwhile the girl becomes attracted to a young teacher whose status as a slave descendant makes him a social outcast.

This novel brings back the questions Chinua Achebe already rose in “Things Fall apart”, i.e the possibility of questioning some flaws of the traditional igbo culture. The subject of caste, for instance. The main difference here lies in the fact that the outside look is not one of an occidental missionary but coming from a young African girl herself raised in an African city. Unlike Léonora Miano’s character, Aku-nna does not reject her entire culture. But she disapproves of forced marriage and the ostracism that leads to Chike’s family being banished from the society. Buchi Emecheta also analyzes the impact of both magical and religious beliefs on the subconscious and how they somehow freeze things up so much, even when there seems to be a tiny bit of freedom for the people

Buchi Emecheta takes us to a journey through this story of which tone and rhythm are perfectly under control.

A very beautiful novel indeed.

Article original traduit du français par  Titilayo Agbahey

Buchi Emecheta, The bride price 

Ed. George Braziller 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a yellow sun

Biafra is one name engraved in the subconscious of many nations. The Biafra War marks the first steps of humanitarian work with what has been called the French Doctors of the dawning Médecins Sans Frontières going to the rescue of Biafra people starving because of the blocus imposed by the Nigerian federal government. To Congolese people, “Biafra” refers to a bloody episode of the country’s story. The word does refers to insurrection. Memories of Biafra, a tiny ephemeral country which seceded from the giant republic of Nigeria and fought for its freedom during four years.

Tous droits réservés par simakorenivski

That bloody page of the Nigerian history is precisely the topic of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel. Her very controlled and compact style takes the characters to two different times: the beginning of the 60’s just after the African independences where the author progressively sets the characters of the novel and the social and political context. Then she takes the reader to the end of the 60’s with the roaring conflict and the evolution of the different characters.

I won’t introduce those characters, not because I don’t want to, but I’ve really being fascinated by the construction of each figure, the tragedy behind the trajectories, the encounters, the injuries, the splits, the disappearances, the hopes and madness…I wouldn’t be able to stop if I had to make a description. [You wonder what to say after finishing reading some novels but in this case everything was cristal clear] You got my enthusiasm about this book. It’s about two twin sisters from a wealthy igbo family during the first ten years of the independent Nigeria.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie first evokes the happy days following the independence. The story is subtly counted and illustrated with the ardor of the local intelligentsia who argues endlessly, theorizes that new Africa and denounces the first forms of corruption. But they underestimate the ramping evil left by the former British colonial power which opposed the ancient precolonial nations: the hausa people in the north, Muslim and undereducated on one side and the southeast igbo, Christianized and overflowing with senior executives, entrepreneurs, traders on the other side. After a coup d’état led by igbo militaries, the first massacres perpetrated in the north cast a shadow over the country. People wake up to the tough reality of a divided country where the biafran secession is a try to recapture a nation weakened by the colonial dividing as decided in Berlin in 1885. The biafran military bravery is confronted with the suffering of its people facing hunger, diseases and bombings. Chimamanda turns back the clock of history without ever letting the reader get lost within the story of the characters caught in torment.

This book is my heartthrob and a lucid reflection about the 60’s Nigeria.

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a yellow sun

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

Copyright © 2008 Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center

Chinua Achebe was undoubtedly one the greatest African writers. A precursor. His novel “Things fall apart” is the result of a feeling of revolt thus the need for an African to shed lights on the pre-colonial Africa and the shock that have been the first encounters with the West. It’s been fifty years in 2008 since the book has been published but it’s still the most-sold African novel.

The book is about a man named Okonkwo, a warrior and a talented farmer who’s willing to regain the prestige his family lost due to his lazy father. The story takes place among an Ibo tribe, one from southeast Nigeria, in the pre-colonial Africa. Chinua Achebe introduces us to a though, complex, ambitious man who is seeking personal achievement and the clan recognition. The author has that very sober way to tell the gradual rise, its peak and then the unexpected exclusion from the clan. The originality and thus strength of this novel lie in the thorough description it makes of the founding principles of that Ibo community. Beliefs, initiatory rites, funeral and wedding ceremonies all closely related to the agricultural production or justice, social values, the relations with other tribes, human sacrifices…everything in this book is recounted with lucidity. There’s no trace of prejudice, indulgence or self-whipping.

When Okonkwo is forced to exile with the whole family (including three wives) after he seriously trespassed one of the social codes, it brought him to put things into perspective, observe the hospitality of his mother’s tribe where he’s serving his sentence and perceive the first news of the arrival of the Europeans on the igbo land. That first contact between the two civilizations led to misunderstanding and violent frictions.

Things fall apart. The author then describes in the second part of the book, with great erudition, the civilization shock following the arrival of the first Christian missionaries. Chinua Achebe highlights the impact of their evangelistic message, the tension caused by the collusion between some missionaries, the colonial administration and the traditional organizations whose spiritual unity is jeopardized by the rising of the Christian community and the questioning of some practices like the infanticide of twin babies. There will be a failed attempt to initiate discussion. The rest is about pride, fear, hatred and ignorance.

I’ve rarely read a book whose author has such a good knowledge of the Christian doctrine and the African traditional beliefs. The author masters the implied philosophies beneath the frontal collision and the distance he keeps with the story make this novel remarkable. This is a very complete work which stays very accurate today. A classic.

[In 2007 Chinua Achebe received the Man Booker international Prize for his entire career, a prize which rewards the best English-writing authors. He was preceded by Ismaïl Kadare. Chinua Achebe died this year at age 83.]

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

Paperback: 209 pages

Publisher: Anchor (September 1, 1994) 

Language: English

Mariama Bâ : So long a letter

I’ve been wondering why some novels make more impact on us than others. The clues are: the author’s talent, the building of their work , the topic, the way we identity with the characters, the context of the reading, sincerity, rage, humor, the capability to look positively to the future…fill in the blanks.

The Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ’s So long a letter makes me identify with a character very close to one in my own life, though the Congolese context (mine) is different. What also strikes me about this novel is the quality of the writing, Mariama Bâ’s courage and lucidity when analyzing the urban society of her country. She has a very good understanding of the unheard pain of the many African women bending under the burden of patriarchal traditions. In 1979 she questions polygamy, caste systems. She calls for what can be qualified a reasoned emancipation of Senegalese women. Leaving aside an occidental-flavored feminism, she tells the story of two women through the letters Ramatoulaye and her childhood friend Aïssatou share. During the period of mourning following her husband Modou Fall’s death, Ramatoulaye recalls the beginning and evolution of their couples, the influence of the families, cast matters, betrayal or men’s cowardice, the choices when confronted with an imposed polygamy despite the original ideal they’ve imagined.

She also paints many other women from Aïssatou’s mother-in-law, keeper of the family’s noble lineage, to the mother of her own co-wife who brings her young daughter into marriage with the old Modou Fall.

This novel is all about women, sometimes persecutors, most of the time, victims of history and present. It’s a story of friendship, like the one bonding the two main characters of Toni Morrison’s Sula.

It’s way too hard for a woman to make a man understand the weight, the violence, the abandon that polygamy is in african big cities under the yoke of a rampant materialism and a triumphant masculine egoism.

So here is a woman speaking openly to another woman. A very beautiful african letter.

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Mariama Bâ, So long a letter

Edition Heinemann, Translator Modupe-Bode-Thomas, 96 pages

Richard Wright : Native son

Literature, novel most specifically, enables a difficult and rather unusual exercise: walk into the incredible, incomprehensible, fantastic, violent universe of someone else.

The reading of some novels gives that unique opportunity to pause and sometimes discover what’s unfathomable.

Richard Wright confronted me with rage. A guts-seizing rage. A muffled fury that’s been waiting for the moment to express itself. Richard Wright has chosen the mighty pen to put words on the tremendous rage his peers  were going through. And he did that with two fabulous and absolute must-read novels: Native Son and Black Boy.

Native Son takes the reader in the 50’s America. A highly anti-communist and racist America where minorities would play a second role. Wright takes us down the road to hell with Bigger Thomas, a young African-american from a slummy ghetto in Chicago, charged with a murder he committed “accidentally”. This disturbing, revolting novel though set in the 50’s still enlightens the realities of today’s America and in some point, in a lesser extent, France’s.

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Richard Wright, Native son 
Ed. Harper Collins, 1940, 504 p.