Chigozie Obioma: how Nigeria can succeed

The Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma was as surprised as anyone when his first novel, The Fishermen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year. “Nothing could have prepared me for that kind of attention,” he said, speaking down the phone from America, where he now lives. “It was a bit of a shock to me.” The 28-year-old was born in Akure, Nigeria and later spent time in Cyprus, where he began writing The Fishermen. The novel follows the fate of four brothers—the youngest nine, the eldest 15—growing up in 1990s Nigeria. When they defy their father’s wishes and go fishing in a local river, they encounter a madman who prophesies that the eldest brother will be killed by one of the others. This prophecy, redolent of classical and African myths, haunts the rest of the novel.

As well as drawing on myth, the novel is also grounded in everyday reality. The brothers play computer games such as Mortal Kombat, for example. I asked Obioma if he was deliberately trying to meld the mythical and the realistic. “Absolutely, yes,” he replied. “I consumed a lot of mythical books as a child, especially the works of Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe. Their books are great tragic novels… In creating The Fishermen, I wanted to have these qualities shine through. I also wanted to portray as honestly as possible what life was like in the 1990s. Those things were part of life at the time: playing video games, watching Hollywood movies.”

The brothers’ father is keen for them to embrace western education. Yet his anxiety about them visiting the supposedly cursed river shows he is not as forward-thinking as he thinks. “There is what I think of as the African reluctance to completely abandon traditional culture,” says Obioma, “even though they have surrendered to the idea that western civilisation is superior. In Nigeria even very well-educated people believe in incarnation. There is an idea that cats at night are evil, they must contain some kind of evil spirit, some kind of harbinger of impeding doom. Things like this strike me as extremely interesting. You see this in the father. On the one hand he is very well educated, and he wants his children to be well educated: that is what helps you obtain good jobs, become lawyers and engineers. But although he tries to mask it, he too believes in the superstition around the river.”

The madman the boys meet at the river is called Abulu. A peculiar, anarchic personality, he eats from rubbish bins and exposes himself in public. Still, he exerts a powerful pull on the characters. Obioma said: “One thing I discovered when growing up that struck me was the notion of the intruder as madman, whether that be in the Igbo tradition or the Yoruban, which is my tribe. When anyone intrudes into a space the general recreation, the instinctive one, is to designate that person as a madman.”

Although the Abulu figure draws on African myth, the author sees him as metaphorically representative of the British incursion into the continent. “The reaction was—how can these guys come and say there is one God, for example, when we have gods for everything—we have gods for rain, we have gods for fertility. These guys have a woman as a king, these guys are crazy!” The irony was, he went on, was the “madman” was eventually imbued with so much power he took control of their lives.

Obioma has strong opinions on why Nigeria has not been able to succeed despite all its resources. “I came up with the conclusion that the foundation of the national self was wrong—the idea of Nigeria is a problem. The tribes were once thriving. They had their own civilisation, their own way of life, their own sophisticated form of government that was sufficient for their needs. One day these people [the British] came and said ‘be this way.’”

So is the problem the way African nations were designed in the first place? “The African has not come to that place in his political evolution, let me say, where he thinks in terms of nation states in the way the west does. The typical African thinks in terms of tribe. These nation states are still arbitrary in our minds. If Africans had chosen to be in a nation state, then that is one thing. When they are coerced into doing it, it only breeds disaster. My novel makes the argument that we need to look back to the foundation of these countries. Should we dismantle them or should we just continue on these arbitrary maps by the British?”

The Fisherman is, Obioma is keen to stress, not just a political novel—it is a family drama, with vivid characters. It is also filled with what the author described in a recent essay as “audacious prose.” He told me he revels in the risks of language. “One of the things I found most fascinating about writing fiction is the magic of language. I have a lifelong fascination with words, especially in the English language but not exclusively in that. One of my intentions in writing is to push the language, to enrich it. That is what I see as audacious prose. I get frustrated by what I find in creative writing workshops in America—this ‘less is more thing,’ which is seen as the true way of writing, the best way of writing. People frown at purple prose or flowery prose, but I hope I can be a little bit exuberant in my use of language.”

The Fishermen (One/Pushkin Press) is out in paperback