West Africa Reivew (2002)

ISSN: 1525-4488

Chronicles of a Nation Betrayed

Titi Adepitan

Debo Kotun, Abiku, Nepotist Books, xvii; 417 pps, $14.95 pbk

Abiku is remarkable for the way it weaves a breathlessly paced narrative from strands of Nigerian sociopolitical life of the last two decades. In time, critics and scholars may yet afford readers a close analysis of this rich, multi-layered novel, but even now there is no denying that Debo Kotun’s first work will enjoy a visible place in the growth of Nigerian literature. Abiku is breathtakingly bold in utilizing material from the Nigerian national life where other Nigerian novels, even of the famed satirical tradition, have not dared to tread. The strength of the novel consists in this radically new deployment of the resources of what is popularly called faction to fresh and exciting ends.

Indeed, it must appear quite remarkable that Nigerian novels tend in the main to eschew direct references to place names, historical personages and actual events. The teaching of the works of major figures like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka at the University of Ibadan in the late seventies and early eighties (this reviewer has confirmed similar anecdotal relationships with former students of other Nigerian universities such as Nsukka and Ife) was aided in no small part by titbits and vignettes from professors who taught the authors’ novels from privileged positions as former classmates, boon companions, or students and acolytes. They would tell their students who the five interpreters in Soyinka’s novel, The Interpreters, were modeled after in actual life but would never mention the claim in a paper. They knew who the young writer in Achebe’s A Man of the People who declares, “I dress to please myself” is supposed to be lampooning, but such privileged information was only meant for students who were close enough to the professors themselves. S. H. Olu Tomori, the late Nigerian professor of English as a second language, would bellow right at one of his students, “Achebe sat r-i-g-h-t t-h-e-r-e in that same chair you’re sitting in!” However, the wealth of privileged information that coevals shared about the circumstances and raw materials that went into the fiction of Nigeria’s greatest writers never did become worked out into a distinctive area of study in the same way, say, that’s quite commonplace in the study of Western literature.

Abiku’s utilization of actual and quasi-historical materials from Nigerian life may begin to compel more attention in that direction. The story of two half-brothers and their childhood friend is built around the burgeoning tradition of political machinations and intrigues in the Nigerian military. Ola Ademola, the bright young village boy who later becomes a medical doctor doesn’t quite discover until the end of the novel that Segun Sakara, the Judas-figure whose lot is to eternally dwell under the shadow of the beatific, Christ-like Ademola, is his own half-brother, the product of an extra-marital liaison between Ademola’s mother and Sakara’s father. Ademola is bright at school; Sakara is not. Their mutual friend Ayo Crowder is given to put-downs, and for the poor Sakara there is little to choose between these two bêtes-noires. But he has to wait until he becomes a soldier first. The rest of the novel narrates how the three star-crossed childhood companions are sucked up into the vortex of Nigerian military politics of the eighties and nineties.

The novel’s title provides the magic wand that empowers the hero. Ademola is an abiku, a child caught up in the often interminable cycle of birth, death and return. The classic celebration of the phenomenon in Nigerian fiction is Ezinma, the child prodigy in Things Fall Apart; Ben Okri has also been fascinated by it, besides many lesser-known attempts in fiction, such as Goke Ajiboye’s Abiku. Soyinka and J. P. Clark-Bekederemo also have eponymous poems on the subject. Kotun’s novel attempts to convey the plausibility of the phenomenon of children who are born only to die and be re-born, with their previous consciousness (and even sometimes their corporeal identity) intact, by likening the whimsical suddenness of such deaths to the better-known Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in orthodox medicine. Of course, children die and children die, but it is not quite appropriate to equate the enigma of abiku with crib deaths or any other kinds of death that might be attributable to physiological disorders. It is not the suddenness of death that typifies the abiku phenomenon; it is the sheer willfulness of it: the power that such children wield in choosing, determining or predicting their own death to the minute and – depending on their own meanness or generosity, or the “crime” of the designated parents they wish to punish – how many times they choose to come and go. It is an improbable theory to sell to the Western imagination, but such skepticism is not likely to be shared by anyone who may have listened to a teenager narrate chilling accounts of a previous life in a household she/he has never visited in this present life, five or fifty blocks away from her/his present parents’ home!

The enigma of abiku is itself part of the huge backdrop of mythmaking which has informed mainstream Yoruba literature, stage and TV drama. The novel draws from this background when it suggests that the conception of the hero Ademola came with its fair share of the Yoruba romance (not as in love story) with the spirit world. His mother is returning from the stream one day when a phantom appears to her from an iroko tree; mesmerized, she complies with the phantom’s every bidding, including the sex (rape?) that follows (12-13). The encounter would have been vintage Yoruba folklore except for the sexual act, which would be extremely difficult to explain in terms of any positive agency in Yoruba belief. The closest example of such an encounter in Yoruba literature is from Ogundele Langbondoko’s Ibu Olokun, where the hero, Orogodoganyin, a spirit of the woods, appears to his prospective mother, who is already pregnant, and drives out the twin fetuses in her womb and then takes their place. It is not uncommon for some of the human figures in the fables of the Fagunwa tradition to play consort to non-human figures. In A Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Kako the Hercules-Samson figure is married to a spirit and Akaraogun, the narrator has a notorious witch who turns into an antelope for a mother. In the main, however, these are minor essences from whom the hero is meant to redeem himself in order to truly come into his own as in the case of Akaraogun, or be damned, as in Kako’s. In actual life the link between the world of humans and spirits ever remains a very delicate one. Sexual encounters with spirits, unlike in Greek myths, rarely bode well for humans in Yoruba thought; they can hardly explain the spawning of a breed of children notorious for being disdainful of both gods and humans. Douglas McCabe’s recent article in Research in African Literatures “Oral Yoruba Texts and Soyinka’s “Abiku” “, which lists Kotun’s novel in its bibliography, (33.1, Spring 2002) offers a rich background into the sociology of the abiku enigma.

The novelist has a tremendous gift for evoking atmosphere, especially of the rancid social decay that has overtaken Nigeria in the last two decades. This is all the more remarkable because Kotun has been out of the country since 1971 (and has not visited since a decade). His feats of evocation may remind a reader of the Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote his first two highly praised novels about a Japan that he had not visited since the age of five. Traveling through a similar time capsule in Kotun’s novel, the reader familiar with the turbulence of Nigerian life since independence is compelled, pleasurably at times, but painfully often, to relive some of the very livid memories of a country caught up in the arrested throes of birth, or death. The experience of boarding house education, so reviled in North America but memorable in Nigeria up to the seventies and eighties as the seed time for young and restless minds in high schools, is evoked in Ayo Crowder’s “assortment of canned food which filled his provision cupboard” (xv). Must have been ages since many dreamt of canned food in provision cupboards! Side by side with such fetching recall are the descriptions of the journalist Lade Ogawa’s death: “They have killed me!” (21) (Compare Dele Giwa’s actual statement in his last moments after a parcel bomb exploded in his study in 1986: “They have just killed a great mind, you know”; or Ikemefuna’s in Things Fall Apart: “My father, they have killed me!”) Betrayal is basic to all three instances, as it seems to be to the contemporary Nigerian psyche; Kotun’s novel dramatizes the wanton self-interest that often makes this so.

The novel is replete with such fictionalization of actual history. The role of the late Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, second-in-command to Lt.-Gen. Aguiyi Ironsi in the first military dispensation (c. 1966), is retold almost in entirety and invested in the character General Akin, who is himself not so fictional as such (122). The $2.8 billion scandal that ushered in the Shagari Second Republic (c. 1980) is pushed forward to the time of General Bukha (16), alongside similar accounts of sundry abuses of office by the republic’s party stalwarts. The champagne party commemorating a politician’s first billion (148); the pathetic story of the director of publicity of the ruling party who compelled the pilot of a flight from London to land in Lagos, even though a military coup against his party’s government had just taken place and the main airport in Lagos was closed to international traffic (149); or the misappropriation of the $12.4 billion revenue accruing from increased oil sales during the Gulf War (372): these events actually happened in Nigeria and are intended by the novelist to jolt the reader into a new awareness of the insidiousness of the national gut-rot. Such strategies of historical recall do not merely flesh out Kotun’s narrative; they also say something deeply moving for the conscience of a writer who can still keep track of unseemly developments in his homeland several decades after leaving its shores.

Abiku is a very rich, full-bodied story of how the most promising African nation of the twentieth-century seems to be hell-bent in bringing its own destruction to pass. A lot of the blame is heaped on the leadership, both civilian and military, but the novelist is candid enough to stricture “the mindlessness of a people who have condemned themselves to hell on earth” (214). Some of the most evocative passages carry Kotun’s authority of a middle-aged Nigerian who’s able to examine the problems and limitations intrinsic to the very idea of nationhood in a country like Nigeria from a vantage position afforded by his familiarity with how systems work in other lands. There is a poignant passage (40-1) about the history of Nigeria all the way back to the Nok civilization of pre-Christian times. The Y-shaped confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers, possibly the most enduring symbol of the country, is described in the passage as “dividing” the country into regions. More than two hundred pages later, another passage traces the origins of the suburb of Brooklyn in New York (284), and the reader comes away with the unmistakable truth that the history of nations carries a lot more authority when it is about integration, rather than ancient fissures across which no far-sighted bridges ever seem to stand.

Citation Format

Adepitan, Titi (2002). Chronicles of a Nation Betrayed. West Africa Reivew: 3, 2