Like many 21-year-olds, Chibundu Onuzo is nervous about her exam results. The Nigerian-born-and-bred Onuzo has just finished her final year of a history degree at King’s College, London. Her favorite place? The British Library in London.
The sense is, though, that she is not just killing time before fighting her way into the scrum of graduate jobs because Onuzo has already been recognized as one of the brightest literary talents to emerge from Africa in recent years. Her début novel, the Spider King’s Daughter, is a love story that sees the privileged, fenced-off world of Nigeria’s wealthy collide with poverty, as the teenage daughter of a rich family enters into a romance with a street hawker. In many ways it a well-worn love story, albeit one with a unique flavor.
“It’s the setting that gives every love story a context. I don’t think that can be taken away from the story. The background shapes their relationship,” says Onuzo.
That background is the teeming, sweaty, lunatic megalopolis of Lagos. Nigeria’s commercial capital, home to 20 million souls, who seem to live at a pace and density unlike anywhere else in the world. Every inch of the city, which sprawls across damp islands, heaves with life. It rises into skyscrapers and dives into battered, corrugated iron shacks. It is a place that has a unique intensity of detail, clogged with traffic and the fumes of thousands of diesel generators that take the place of a national grid.
“What I like about Lagos is the chaos,” Onuzo says. “[State Governor] Fashola would not be pleased. There’s a creativity. You just feel people are… I don’t know… You just feel people are expressing themselves.”
Onuzo has lived in Britain for the last seven years. The distance from the exhausting grind of Lagos has given Onuzo a sharper focus on her hometown.
“My Lagos is a very specific Lagos. I’m writing from memory. I went back while I was writing it but I wasn’t living there. The things I was looking for were very specific. I was writing about hawkers and that was where my eyes were trained on. It’s a specific Lagos, a slice of what I’ve seen,” she says.
The protagonist’s role, as one of the young men and women who dart between cars in the city’s gridlock to sell water, ice-creams, belts, ties and cheap plastic goods straight out of cargo containers from China, was cemented by an early experience.
As a child, Onuzo was encouraged to enter an essay competition by her mother and went to visit a young hawker.
“She was a child, 16 or 17. What struck me was that she didn’t seem to have any more prospects. She could look forward to the next five or 10 years of her life, that was what she could see herself doing. It just felt like a total waste, someone who is so young. It stayed somewhere in my mind,” says Onuzo.
Lagos’ socioeconomic inequalities form the backdrop to the romance, the great divisions between the rich and the poor—and the politics of inequity—are central to the narrative. Onuzo did not set out to write a political novel, but politics in Nigeria is unavoidable for those with education and a voice.
“Oh yeah, because politics is why you don’t have lights. It’s why you don’t have working water. I mean, here [in London] you have your basic commodities or whatever you need. When you wake up [in Nigeria] there is a constant reminder that the political system has failed you in everything you see. So that’s why it’s very close to the skin,” she says.
“I know there are a lot of other African writers who have reacted against the pressure to be the political voices of their time, like the greats—Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, they were involved in their writing. They were engaged every day in writing polemics about Nigeria. There is a new generation of African writers who say ‘look, we want to write about other things…’ For me, I think it’s hard to avoid writing about Nigeria without talking about politics.”
Achebe and Soyinka, both defining voices of their generation and great political authors, cast long shadows on Nigerian and African literature. The pair are the yardstick by which other writers are measured, even though the context that they worked in is no longer the Africa that the current generation recognizes. The tyrannies of colonial rule, then the civil strife and military coups of the post-colonial era have given way to new disappointments and new hopes. However, the overriding pessimism and despair, that is a feature of the Nobel laureates’ canon, is hard to escape.
“They had such dreams, such high hopes after independence. You had the civil war and everybody said ‘what is this?’ Coup after coup. And then, you can understand why they just kind of give up,” Onuzo says.
“I’m 21, I’ve only been politically conscious for what— four years? And some of my peers have already given up hope in Nigeria. I can understand Achebe. After 40 years you can kind of cut him some slack for going: ‘This country!’ But yes, they were all optimistic at [the dawn of] independence in 1960. Every generation starts off with hope.”
2010 saw Nigeria celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence with a fanfare and promises of its future greatness. The significance is muted for this young generation.
“I’ve not been alive for 50 years. “The Nigeria I know has been worse than it is now… People from my generation might be more hopeful. They are not seeing Nigeria from a 50-year period. They are seeing a 12-year period [since the transition to democratic rule in 1999]. There was a time in Lagos where there were strikes. I tell people I didn’t grow up in a war zone but I saw dead bodies on the side of the road when I was a child. Things have gotten better, slowly, and certainly not fast enough, but they have,” Onuzo says.
“There’s a different bad guy now,” she adds. “The military guys are gone, or at least they’re all wearing civilian clothes now. So you know, it’s a different fight.”
Politics, though, is her personal interest. Onuzo insists that she feels no pressure to write polemic, or to be worthy. She understands, she says, that being African, a woman and a writer means that she will become known as an ‘African female writer’—that typecasting is a necessary evil of getting published and shifting copies.
African contemporary literature does not, as a genre, have the same level of global recognition as, for example, writing from the Indian subcontinent, but that is changing as more stories from the continent become told, according to the Zimbabwean-born publisher and deputy editor of Granta Magazine, Ellah Allfrey. Much like Indian and Pakistani writing, which burst into bookshops in the West, becoming “less foreign” for consumers. The worthier, more literary authors blazed a trail for others, which allowed others to find markets for more commercial work or genre fiction.
“If you have more writers from Africa or the diaspora being published, you are going to get more stories,” Allfrey says. “You can’t solve the problem with any kind of prescriptive way. You can’t say you can’t write about child soldiers, because actually Africa has child soldiers. We have poverty. We also have these other stories. What I always say is that I’m waiting for the African sex and shopping novel because then I know that we’ve arrived. Because then we’ve moved away from that quite, highbrow literary style.”
“Publishers and editors have a large role to play,” she adds. “It means publishers being braver, and trusting the fact that the readers are smart and want more, and the readers wanting more of these stories, having access to more of these stories. But also the writers themselves saying ‘this is what I want to write, so here you are’.”
International agents are, she says, starting to recognize the potential market for African literature and are “hovering up” writers.
For the time being, the success of writers like Onuzo is an important marker.
“She was just spotted as this amazing talent and that was because nobody had read this love story set in Lagos before,” Allfrey says. “That’s the great advantage that African writers have, that there are a whole bunch of stories that readers in the English language haven’t read and so agents and publishers want to pick those up.”
Onuzo’s next book begins in the troubled Niger Delta, with its protagonists moving, of course, to Lagos—“just because Lagos is Lagos. There’s definitely enough to keep me in stories for at least five books,” she says.
For the time being, she is trying to avoid the sense of having made it as a writer.
“It sounds so terrible. I’ve made it at 21. What am I supposed to do next? I’ve written a book, and by no means a perfect book. A very first novel book. There are a lot of flaws in it. I’m just starting out.”
In the meantime, there are exam results to collect.