AS I move towards reviewing Dipo Faloyin’s exceptionally fine book, I want to indulge in a personal anecdote, one that reflects the book’s subtitle “Breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa.” When I was around nine or 10 years-old I got into the habit of helping an elderly female neighbour with tasks such as dusting her tiny house, weeding the garden, shopping, and so on.
This content is for subscribers only. To subscribe, Click Here. Or Sign In
As I grew older and our conversation became more adult, I withdrew, as I discovered she was a rabid anti-Semite and racist.
She was a gifted amateur painter and one day she showed me her most recent canvas, inspired by a recent visit of hers to Kew Gardens, London, where tropical plants are grown in a huge greenhouse. In her painting she had portrayed a black family—husband, wife and child—gazing nostalgically at a large group of tropical trees.
“They’re dreaming of home,” she said, and then, because of course she was anti-immigration: “They should go back to where they belong.”
The point is, she had portrayed “home” as the jungle. She would never have thought of showing Africans standing in front of a multi-storey office block, or an oil refinery, or the entrance to a university.
Racists depend on stereotypes, and stereotyping — whether by racists or by the ill-informed — is what Faloyin is arguing against.
This makes his book sound pretty severe. But while its purpose is deeply serious, it is also a book that will make you smile and giggle all the way through, even if the smile is superimposed on a grimace because of the deep seriousness of the issues the book addresses.
The Author’s Note states “I am not generically African. I am Nigerian. This book reflects my viewpoint as such.”
Then in place of the usual epigraph or seminal quotation comes this: “Insert generic African proverb here. Ideally an allegory about a wise monkey and his interaction with a tree . . . “
So we know we’re in for a funny and biting read.
The Preface is titled “Identities” and, following on from the author’s self-identification as Nigerian, he begins: “I delight in discussion because I am forged from my family’s most consistent ritual:
gathering too many people in a confined space and arguing about nothing—each person giving their opinion on each person’s opinion.”
And then, in a characteristic shift from the light-hearted (though never shallow) to the dead serious, comes this: “Throughout history, individuals and entire communities have been systematically stripped of their personhood and idiosyncrasies, often to make them easier to demand, denigrate and subjugate—and, in some cases, eradicate.”
A further dimension to the book—its critique of colonialism and discourses about colonialism—is signalled in the following alert: “Each chapter of this book will bring the context that is often missing in discussions about Africa to the fore. You will discover how each country was formed by people [primarily the colonialists] with poor maps and even poorer morals.”
The emphasis on discourse is especially pertinent for readers in the global north—certainly in the UK—where schools’ syllabi do everything they can to avoid mention of colonialism. (We don’t, after all, want to encourage a poor opinion of ourselves).
The first of the book’s eight parts is titled “Lagos” and although it is the shortest section, at just eight pages, I’ll spend some time on it since, as regular readers of this column know all too well, that city is very important to me.
Faloyin avoids delving deep into the “Lagos as hell-hole” mode of accounting for the place. But as an aside and doing just that I can’t resist quoting here what must be the ultimate Nigerian newspaper headline and one so redolent of Lagos, from The Punch of April 14th this year: “Vandalism worsens grid collapse as gas shortage slashes power supply.”
Focusing on Lagosians’ boisterous self-confidence, maintained against all odds, Faloyin quips: “the world’s most perfectly seasoned chaos . . . Lagos is the punch line to a joke that could start: ‘21 million people unburdened by self-doubt walk into a bar . . . ‘”
And a little later, in a passage that demonstrates how bright and beautiful Faloyin’s writing is, he comments: “The city’s unknown physics are not poetic, but a consequence of nobody taking the time to design it with intent . . . Lagos has everything it could ever need to be THE great city. Lagos has no idea what it wants to be when it grows up.”
The second, much weightier, part of the book is on colonial history and its fall-out, but for that, esteemed readers, you will have to remain on tenterhooks until next week.
To be continued
Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.
