adminChristopher Farai Charamba Literature Today
I am a huge fan of short stories. Often they have a single exquisitely described setting, a limited number of characters who you immediately get to know, like or loathe and on occasion a brilliantly crafted unexpected ending. “Say you’re One of Them” by the Nigerian author Uwem Akpan lived up to this very expectation. This may be bias but Africans write the best short stories. Perhaps I think this way because they are arguably familiar and relatable.
I am instantly reminded of the stories my grandmother would tell as we sat in her kitchen waiting for our dinner to be served. Or the exaggerated tales my cousins and I would tell each other during the school holidays about our randomly imagined adventures.
Africans are certainly panache about their storytelling. Oral tradition has long been part of our culture both as a means of preserving history and conveying important cultural messages from one generation to the next.
Short stories thus resemble the conventional way in which many cultures in sub-Saharan Africa have preserved and conveyed their history, tradition, customs and practices to their people.
This collection by the Nigerian author has three short stories and two novellas which tell tales of children in different parts of Africa; a slum in Kenya, a border town in Benin, a middle class neighbourhood in Ethiopia, a bus terminus in Northern Nigeria and a home in Rwanda.
The book deals with plight millions of children on the continent face, from being forced into sex work to support a family, being sold into slavery, as well religious and cultural persecution.
Each story paints a different reality and gives a voice to children who in the conventional African narrative are neglected and forgotten. The style in telling the stories through the eyes of the children is reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ approach in novels such as “Oliver Twist” and “Great Expectations”.
It challenges one to consider a difficult and harrowing reality that African children find themselves in every day. These stories are tales of suffering and sorrow, though some are interlaced with hope and humour. You get the sense from the start of each that the protagonists are doomed but find yourself crossing fingers, anticipating a fairytale outcome for them.
The author of “Say you’re One of Them” said that he was “inspired to write by the people who sit around my village church to share palm wine after Sunday Mass, by the Bible, and by the humour and endurance of the poor.”
The first story is titled “An Ex-mas Feast”, it is told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy, who lives in a shack with his parents and five sibling; three-month-year-old Baby, two-year-old twins Atieno and Otieno, 10-year-old Naema and 12-year-old Maisha.
Maisha has taken up sex work on the streets of Nairobi in order to support her family as her parents do not work and her eight-year-old brother often accompanies her as he goes to beg for money on the streets.
The story is set around Christmas time and the boy is hoping that he will be able to attend school in the coming year.
His unemployed mother is a religious woman who openly scorns his eldest sister calling her a prostitute but sends Naema to beg on the streets with the three-month-old baby while giving the twins glue to cure their hunger.
Akpan presents a family dealing with poverty where the children are forced to be the breadwinners of the family.
Aside from the home being dysfunctional, the story looks at some of the challenges the children face; hunger, drug addiction and a lack of education.
“Fattening for Gabon” is one of the two novellas in the collection, it tells the story of two children, a 10-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, who unbeknown to them, are being prepared to be sold off to slavery by their uncle in a border town of Benin.
The children are kept inside their uncle’s home and introduced to their new “Mama” and “Papa” by their uncle’s friend who gives their uncle a motorbike.
They are told that they will be adopted by new parents and are given a variety to food to eat to fatten them up and make them feel comfortable in their new environment.
While the boy through whom the story is told eagerly anticipates moving into a new home with his new Mama and Papa, he is has an inclination that something sinister is about happen based on the manner in which his uncle goes from excitement to depression when dealing with the traffickers.
The short story “What language is that” focuses on two six-year-old girls who live across the street from each other in Ethiopia. One is Christian and the other Muslim. The two have always grown up playing together until one day their parents forbid them from doing so and they are forced to communicate via the windows of their homes.
This looks at how religion is used as means of dividing people, how the innocence of children does not see one based on their religious beliefs or culture but just as they are, yet through one’s beliefs they can be forced to turn against he or she who was once their friend.
The other novella “Luxurious hearses” has within it a line from which the book takes its title. It deals with a Muslim boy who is trying to travel to Northern Nigeria on a bus full of Christians at the height of the civil war between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The boy has an amputated arm which would easily give him away as a Christian and must deal with a number of people and difficult circumstances that could easily reveal his identity.
He has already escaped death once through the mercy of a Good Samaritan who hid him and provided him with transport money to escape the Christian-dominated territory. On the bus, the boy must deal with the hateful things that the Christians say about Muslims as well as navigate a multitude of cultural and religious differences on the bus without revealing himself to be Muslim.
Akpan shows the difference of people and beliefs within Africa but also how spiteful and hateful people can be based on often incorrect perceptions.
My favourite of the lot is the final one, “My Parent’s Bedroom” which was shortlisted for a Caine Prize in 2007.
Written in the first person it is the account of a Rwandan girl, born to Hutu father and a Tutsi mother, who is trying to understand the changes taking place in their household as a vicious mob of Hutu relatives, neighbours and friends descend upon her home looking for her parents.
A harrowing tale of the 1994 genocide told by a nine years and seven months old girl, who is instructed by her mother to look after her infant brother and wait for her father while her mama uncharacteristically goes out at night.
A religious undertone resonates throughout the book and this is no surprise as Akpan is a Jesuit priest.
This, however, does not weigh it down and the author does not focus on Catholicism but also explores Islam, other denominations of Christianity and even traditional African faiths.
Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in southern Nigeria.
After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa.
He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006.
In 2007, he taught at the Jesuit college, Arupe College in Harare, Zimbabwe.
“Say you’re One of Them” won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) 2009 and PEN/Beyond Margins Award 2009, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
The book made it on to Oprah’s Book Club in 2009.
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