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Odafe Atogun’s The Cabal begins with the popular opening glee known for novels ready to plunge their protagonist into hell—“Bako woke one morning to find his neighbour lying next to him.” Two of Kafka’s popular stories come to mind; “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial. And soon enough, we find out, in the second chapter of Atogun’s short novel, that Bako, a cheating boyfriend and the protagonist, is framed for the murder of his girlfriend, whom he finds days later dead in his house. He does the unexpected when the police almost nabs him; imagine it like this: Man, 27, jumps from a storey building to escape arrest by police.
Atogun’s The Cabal is so short and so fast-paced that if you’re looking for that immersive read a novel gives, you might miss exactly what its point is. Much so if you’re not familiar with the Theatre of the Absurd. First of all is Bako’s tenement compound. A storey of four apartments, two on each floor, the tenants of three men, and a lady (the neighbour Bako wakes up to in the beginning of the novel), and a gateman; all introduced indirectly, through Bako’s flippant observations of them, as if Atogun doesn’t necessarily wants us to know enough about them. Then the pervasive air of lethargy and weariness about Bako.
Fuel scarcity locks down main roads with long queues. There’s the heatwave in Abuja where Bako lives. He goes out day in day out, twice or thrice each day, with his jerry cans, returns with no fuel and puts the jerry cans back into his car’s boot; the image of him returning to put the jerry cans back to the boot comes alive with visceral monotony. His girlfriend Avé has caught him cheating with his neighbour. He’s trying to work that out. He’s out of a job. Then fuel crisis. Then listlessness. He has finally won back his girlfriend. He returns from an endless fuel search and finds her asleep on the couch since she’s refused to share his bed yet. He thinks all is well. When he finds out all isn’t well, and tries to wake her up, discovering the blood from a gash on her head, his hands now bloodied, heavy knocks sound on his door, then police pour into his apartment . . .
Bako’s father, whom he’s sworn to have no business with or to become like, a senator of godfather status known as Cafftan, is the only person who can help him, Bako’s friend AY tells him. On the run and in hiding a few days, Bako gives in and calls his father. But his calls go unanswered. Till eventually, a Lobito, Cafftan’s P.A. and right hand, answers. Bako is taken to a guesthouse with 24hrs electricity, running on “soundless Caterpillar generators” (the kind of extremely large compounds in lush locations in Abuja, expensive parked cars within, usually wasting away without occupants). He finds out his father has been comatose from the effects of poison. He finds out that his father is a member of the cabal. He finds out his father is, in fact, The Cabal, as its leader. A few days back, he thought to himself how the cabal normally caused things like a fuel crisis to create scarcity to increase the price. How ironic his own father is the head of such orchestration that frustrated him a few days ago.
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Rather than be worried about the death of his girlfriend, Lobito demands he forgets about it, and “The man,” a curious figure in this novel, demands that he takes over his father’s political dynasty. From here, the novel begins to descend into the monotony that usually characterises Absurdist literature. The insistence of describing, in clinical fashion, what the reader has already read or seen through the eyes of the characters, severally. Like the hospital Bako is taken to, to see his father who he is not allowed to see just yet. A hospital that houses magnificent structures underground it, with corridors that look like mazes, one door opening to another, and yet another, the cold monotony of opening such doors just to get to the right place.
Bako waits in the lobby of this hospital, waiting on the receptionists, a man and a girl who, one time, appear to be human, but then again appear to be wraiths of themselves. When he is finally attended to, days later, he is rather taken into a curious room in the hospital by “The man.” A room “with a spotless white door . . . vast . . . a place of exceedingly bright lights, like many suns revolving in one place. Everything . . . made of white light . . . The man walked deeper into the room that seemed to be without end. Bako followed mesmerised.”
This room further described, ironically, as the “light room” is where the cabal meets. In it the lives of everyone can be watched, The man tells Bako. The man bamboozles and mesmerises Bako; all he says and wishes for Bako is for the latter to inherit his father’s position. He does so with indirect persuasion, Bako feigning interest. The conversations become quite meaningless sometimes that Bako asks The man one time if he’s (Bako) going to get addicted on the weed The man gave him. Every other thing happens as an aside. So that when Atogun’s novel gets back to its main plot to address what is seemingly important, it descends into meaningless once more.
For Bako’s father to get well, a strange wrestle has to take place. This fight is between a cabal member and a madman. “According to the marabouts, if your father’s associate succeeds in throwing the madman, your father will regain his health, but if the madman wins, your father will never recover from his illness.” As suspected, the contender loses to the madman on the day of the fight. Needless to say that the spectacle pulls a crowd which gathered for a political event, but in which a wrestle was staged; no one conscientious enough to spot the aberration. Lobito explains to Bako:
It is a party affair. The information was passed through the party’s secret channels to its supporters at the grassroots, although the reason for asking them to converge was not made known to them. Because the outcome of the bout would affect them one way or the other, it is only fair that they are invited to witness it. You see, as a party, we pride ourselves on strong democratic values, values which dictate that all party members are included as much as possible.
Lies, doublespeak, newspeak, the language of propaganda; all tools of The Cabal, recalling Achebe’s warning: “It has long been known that language, like any other human invention, can be abused, can be turned from its original purpose into something useless or even deadly.” So deadly, as we find Bako gradually segueing into comfort only a few days of been brainwashed by the cabal, so that even at this gathering, sinking into this stupidity of the occasion, he is
…riveted, waiting for the combatants to emerge. Would Dr Taju come out in a disguise, making it difficult for him to be identified? Where would they bring the madman from? Would he be paid, and as such be motivated for the fight? Would he be informed of the significance of the fight?
This recalls, so much, political debates and analysis, fights even, by us, spectators of our politics, never knowing what is underground, having no real knowledge about what really goes on in the room where it happens. Yet our excitement. How titillated we get. How susceptible our minds are exploited for abuse, and finally destroyed.
Soon, the engineering of Bako’s mind takes a natural cause after the madman defeats the contender. Bent on revenge, to punish the politician responsible for poisoning his father and killing his girlfriend, he agrees to take his father’s place. What was the trajectory anyway? We are conscripted into suspecting only one, this. Not that it would have been a fault in the design of the novel had this not happened. The Cabal is the Cabal. Its mystic is its currency with the power to confound. Bako himself, in registering this, when he finally sees his father—more like, finally shown his sick father—admits this. It is a stark picture:
At first, Bako could not see anything because of the brightness of the room . . . he saw a white bed at the far end, on which a dark tiny creature was lying; an oddity in that dazzlingly white room . . . several tubes connecting ‘it’ to a machine . . . From afar he could not make out the face clearly. As he got closer, he saw that it had the semblance of his father’s face. But the body now shrivelled and scrawny . . . His complexion too had changed; his blackness as of death frozen in time.
Yet this was the creature, the thing—“it” as Bako saw—that wielded so much power. “How could a man in this state command the loyalty and fear of some of the most powerful people in this country?” Bako asks himself. We can imagine that it is at this point that Bako himself—the ritual atmosphere of meeting his father in such a state, coming face-to-face with a close picture of The Cabal—that he was initiated into it by the admittance of its power.
But when Bako finally decides to take his father’s place, seeking revenge on the politician who killed his father, he sees it as killing two birds with one stone; he thinks it is an opportunity to make a difference. But this is only moments after he has murdered a man and takes a new title, calling himself “Calibah,” instead of inheriting his father’s “Cafftan.” What kind of man is Calibah? Is he the kind of man “The man”—so ever trying to woo Bako from the start—says to, that, “I will guide you and in no time, you will catch up. You are an intelligent young man. This would provide you the opportunity to build the country of your dreams”? One lie enters another, and then another; it is a swastika wheel.
We invoke The Cabal for many wrongs in the country. Many say there isn’t a cabal. But even in our small circles, we know there’s always a unit, elite group at the apex or within the macrocosm. Imagine, then, a whole country. But whether it exists or not, it is not intent in showing its face. It is like Big Brother and it is not like Big Brother. We do not know it. But we feel it and imagine it to exist to frustrate us. Or it weaves itself into the goddamn habitus, bending us, manipulating or absorbing us, like it does Bako who finally surrenders to it, its sole purpose that we don’t understand it so that it can perpetuate itself and possibly descend a country in its power into dystopia.
How did this wily thing triumph in the novel and within the context of the country which it is aimed at? It is about politics. It is about power. It is about deceit and propaganda. We observe The man giddily telling Bako who has been defeated: “A young man like you becoming the president is rare, this country has been ruled by old men since independence. [sic]” and blah blah blah, and “Of change. Of repositioning us in the comity of nations.” But we know the baton has only changed hands. We know how it goes. A certain passage in the novel comes to mind again, if the reader remembers. In it, Bako recalls his father once telling him, that one day, “he would come to see that politics is the true essence of life.”♦
Carl Terver has a BA in English from Benue State University, Makurdi, and writes about film, literature, and music. He is the founding editor of Afapinen.
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