A rainy Monday in Asaba. The roads are slick, pockmarked with brown, muddy water. The keke halts, and before its rider can collect his fare from the middle-aged woman who has just alighted, his vehicle is rammed from behind. The culprit—a younger keke rider—steps out.
The rider of the keke I’m in charges at him. “Idiot! Ezi! Nwa Abakaliki!” he hisses, his head which is a size too large, bobbing with venom, veins bulging as his hand grips the vehicle’s handle tightly. The passenger beside me in the backseat responds in sharp, crisp English: “Meaning what? Are you better than him?” The keke man reaches for conciliation with familiar humour: “Chairman, see as you dey attack me. Lee wetin the guy dey drive na.” “And so? Na why you go call am Abakaliki? Igbo go dey criticise fellow Igbo.” The passenger returns to his phone, his brows having lost their smooth, relaxed shape.
Being born and bred in Eastern Nigeria is to be cognizant of the many ways Abakaliki indigenes, in present-day Ebonyi, are denigrated and looked down upon as second-class Igbo by their so-called betters. “Nwa Abakaliki” has, with time, become a slur. Such intra-ethnic politics of identity appears to be the underlying theme of Obinna Udenwe’s latest novel. Patrice Ikebe, the protagonist, is an oppressed Abakaliki man; and his boss, Sir Douglas Akidi—who from all indications is a colonial product—is his Igbo brother, in whose hands he undergoes several humiliation rituals, reduced to the status of second-class citizen in his own land.
The story, set amidst the Ọgụ Teteri (or Izii Revolt) of 1969-1970, opens in 1976, seven years after the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, with Patrice—“a lone figure on a lonely, narrow road”—and traces his downfall, laying bare what it means when fate and hubris coalesce to become a man’s undoing.
Patrice Ikebe is obsessed with status, like the ill-fated Okonkwo of Umuofia in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: he intends to marry a “second wife to cement his status as an important man,” and on surveying his children’s belongings, remarks self-satisfyingly that they have “more clothes than all the other children in the village.” He also accuses his kinsman of stealing profits from his rice farm, money he’d brought back to his village of Ogada from his time Abakaliki. And though the elders plead against it, he insists on taking a dreadful oath—the ukpa ji-ukpa-nwa—which can cause loss of wealth and children, rather than one of lesser ramifications, to prove himself.
This story unfolds as a multi-generational epic told in the third-person omniscient, and traverses over 30 years of history following not just Patrice Ikebe but his daughter and her own offspring. The narrator chronicles the outcome of the erstwhile oath and examines the power of fate and mysticism in the lives of men. This is, however, only one strand of the story, as Udenwe investigates what years of Aro dominance has done to the Abakaliki people, and what happens when one man holds on to a supposed grievance and, with it, metes out hate. He does this through the character of Sir Douglas Akidi, Patrice’s boss, who inspires such fear in Patrice that, in his presence, the latter behaves like a “caged bird, like a toad with broken limb.”
The Arochukwu, from 1640-1902, exercised dominance in most, if not all of Igbo land. Their influence extended into parts of Equatorial Guinea and Southern Cameroon. They were renowned for their military, economic, political and religious prowess, aided by Ibini Ukpabi, their proclaimed oracle. After the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 and the partitioning of Africa, British interest grew in the area now known as Nigeria. This interest would lead to the Anglo-Aro war of 1901-1902, as the Arochukwu reigned in most parts east of the Niger. After the British’s victory, the Aro aided their colonial rule and were rewarded with positions within the administration. Udenwe represents this with Sir Douglas’s father—“a feared warrant chief, an infamous land and slave owner.”
Trauma is a living, breathing thing. The horrors wreaked by the Aro confederacy remain fresh; the natives are yet to recover from the ravages of the Nigeria-Biafra war. Patrice’s suffering at the hands of his boss plagues him, and he unburdens it on his people. Udenwe seems to be telling us that oppression does not occur in a vacuum, nor does it end with a generation. He demonstrates an acute understanding of abuse and what it does to the human psyche, as seen not only in how Patrice speaks of his kinsman who is not as rich or well-travelled—“How would he raise such amount to pay me, he being a pauper? Eh? Answer me.”—but also in his abuse of his daughter. Oppression is transferable; Sir Douglas oppresses him, then “whatever frustration life heaped on Patrice, he poured in his young daughter.”
If there’s criticism to be made for this book, besides certain editorial faults, it is the theatrical and melodramatic descriptions of Ekwutosi, Sir Douglas’s first wife. We get passages like “Ekwutosi had grown bigger. There was no need talking about her stomach, for when she sat, her stomach protruded down in folds, almost extending to the floor. Now, she mostly did not go out, for to walk was a herculean task. Her face was puffy, with assorted flesh covering her cheeks and jaw area, ensconcing her ears…”—which appear in virtually every section of the seven-part book, redundant in its multiplicity, as it neither moves nor propels plot. Additionally, one has to wonder how a man, said to be intelligent, leaves his many farmlands in the village to go grovel for work, and when he is given the pitiful job of a handyman, he obliges, without giving a single thought to the prospect of seeking employment elsewhere. Perhaps this is excused by the epigraph: “When the gods want to bring down a man’s house, they set in motion a chain of events that lead to his downfall. They look the other way and allow him make a grievous mistake.”
Research-heavy novels sometimes suffer the pitfall where research overpowers story. This isn’t the case here. And though the language feels uninspiring, it works just enough for the narrative energy required. The prose is simple, devoid of flourishes. Proverbs and idioms are richly reflected, both in dialogue and narration, accentuating the story’s sense of time and place. Udenwe does no small job in situating Abakaliki on the literary map, with peppered descriptions of popular landmarks and culture that evoke a picturesque of the city.
If Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun reimagines humanity during the Nigeria-Biafra war, and Uwem Akpan’s New York, My Village speaks of the minorities who were oppressed by the beleaguered Igbo during the war, then Years of Shame tells the story of the aftermath of a lesser-known war that unfolded beneath the shadows of those infamous years. William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”It is such a trail we come to encounter in Udenwe’s Years Of Shame—an important story chronicled by an attentive writer who is not afraid to hold a mirror to history.♦
Azubuike Obi is an Igbo storyteller who believes in the transformative power of language. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared online and in print in The Republic, Efiko Magazine, and Naira Stories. He was nominated for Chika Unigwe’s Awele Creative Trust Award and H.G. Wells Short Story Competition in 2024, and is currently pursuing a bachelor’s in English Language and Literature.