By Segun Ayobolu
Those who have read Olukorede Yishau’s first novel, ‘In the Name of Our Father’, will not be surprised at the linguistic felicity, stylistic dexterity and imaginative fecundity exhibited in the ten short stories that comprise his new collection titled ‘Vault of Secrets’. Yishau is a breathtaking storyteller of outstanding craftsmanship. His weaves his plots effortlessly with twists and turns that keeps the reader wondering till the last sentence. And many of his characters make his writing a unique brand of ‘faction’; they are identifiable people or types in society acting out their lives in his spellbinding narratives. Let us take, for instance, Nonso Ejiofor, the key character in the story, ‘This Special Gift’. He is a wealthy and influential publisher who, because of the power conferred by his newspaper, is courted by the high and mighty – governors, businessmen, bankers – more out fear than respect.
Nonso lives in the exotic Banana Island, where the lives of the opulent contrast sharply with the hardship of the wretched of the earth in the two contrasting cities of class division that define Lagos. But he spends the most part of his time as a denizen of some of the city’s most luxurious hotels. He utilizes the enormous wealth he has amassed exclusively to satisfy his hedonistic adventures rather than pursuing worthwhile ventures that edify and ennoble society. Not under aged girls young enough to be his daughters, married women or even the wives of his employees are immune from the publisher’s amorous escapades. How does Nonso die of a heart attack in a hotel room in the company of a young, single girl and a married woman whose husband believes is out of town on an official conference? You will have to read Yishau’s story to find out?
What about Williams who discovers that the tale that he is the product of an unknown rapist who had forced carnal knowledge of his mother in her youth is not the true story of his origins? Rather, his grandfather had impregnated his own daughter, William’s mother, and he was the resultant offspring. Williams accidentally discovers this truth, which had been a secret known only to his grandfather, grandmother and mother. How this dark secret shapes his life is the story titled ‘My Mother’s Father is my Father’. In this review, I intend to focus on one of Yishau’s stories in which, beyond in depth psycho-analytic portrait of characters, the author’s fiction paints a vivid picture of the socio-economic contexts within which the lives of the characters are narrated.
The setting for the first story in the collection, ‘Till we meet to part no more’, is a prison in Nigeria and the tale revolves around a female inmate, Oluwakemi, who has died of tuberculosis but whose heart-rending and tragic experiences is told by her cell-mate, Elizabeth. Oluwakemi has been found guilty of first-degree murder of her husband, Jide, and sentenced to death when the court ruled that the murder was premeditated and not in self-defense as her counsel had pleaded. That the convict had been awaiting the execution of the sentence for 15 years and had no idea when this would be portrays the experience of thousands of condemned inmates in our prisons that have to endure an agonizing and interminable living death after conviction.
Oluwakemi had married Jide in Queens, New York, at a home for the elderly where they both worked. It was a passionate love at first sight and the couple’s early romance evinced a promise of what would be a life-long, till- death- do- us- part relationship. Unfortunately, this was not to be. On their return to Nigeria, Jide became a changed man. He routinely maltreated and inflicted violence on Oluwakemi on whom he heaped all the blame for the failure of the business he had started with their joint savings from America. As Oluwakemi narrates the story, “One unfortunate day, he came home very drunk and beat me…That day, I did something I rarely did – I fought back. I hit him with the first thing I could grip. He fell, and I stood over him, waiting for him to stand so I could hit him again. When minutes later he had not stirred, I bent down to shake him. That was when I saw the blood flowing from the back of his head”. The man died.
But then, how did Oluwakemi get to America in the first place? It is not an unfamiliar story in Nigeria’s political economy of poverty, exploitation and underdevelopment. At 14, Oluwakemi had been sold into slavery by her own parents to a certain Madam Koikoi who processed the necessary papers and took her to America. The excited young girl was promised a bright, promising and successful future in God’s own country; a life which contrasted sharply with the poor, bleak and gloomy existence she led back home. Does a sex slave market not thrive in Nigeria where parents prompted by poverty or greed or both sell off their children to predatory sex slave entrepreneurs who make a fortune from this satanic trade?
Alas in Maryland, America, Oluwakemi was turned into a sex slave by Madam Koikoi when she turned 18. “Different men would come and have sex with me, unprotected and Madam Koikoi was being paid for the service I was providing”. When Madam Koikoi died in a fight with her husband, a fight instigated by his raping Oluwakemi, the police took custody of the girl, put her on a welfare programme that enabled her to get an education and eventually a job in the home for elders where she had met her husband.
Back home in Nigeria, Oluwakemi’s father had become rich and famous, not through productive efforts but through fraud and roguery. His daughter naturally kept a distance from him. With the acquisition of his wealth, Oluwakemi’s father promptly abandoned her mother and lavished money and attention on a variety of younger girls. Oluwakemi had no sympathy for a mother who had acquiesced in her being sold into slavery. One of his criminal enterprises soon caught with him, however, and Oluwakemi’s father ends up in Ikoyi prison, Lagos, for duping an American businessman of about $10 million.
Elizabeth, the cell mate who narrates Oluwakemi’s story, got into prison for poisoning and killing her husband, Jacob, “who had four other women on whom he was lavishing my money”. She contracts cancer while in the cell and knows that the terminal ailment would soon rescue her from the endless wait for the hangman. In her soliloquy, Elizabeth gives a vivid depiction of the deplorable socio-economic conditions of Nigerian prisons. In her words, “Oluwakemi, like you well know, this prison is a house of horror…Many things were going on that we did not know. We did not know that the male warders were raping female inmates. We did not know that sex was used as barter for food, to access the medication your family brought you; to get better living conditions. We did not know that they were selling them in the open market. I did not know until recently when an inquiry revealed it, and most of the officials in our prison were changed and the people from the Ministry came to visit”.
Praying that her cancer kills her quickly, Elizabeth quips “I know I deserve to die, but not for killing Jacob. I deserve to die for causing many deaths with the counterfeit drugs I was manufacturing. When my fate comes, I will embrace it”. This, like many other stories in this fascinating book, is a graphic fictional narrative of the political economy of greed and criminal pursuit of wealth acquisition at practically all spheres of life in contemporary Nigeria.
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