A RARE SOURCE OF INSPIRATION

Joseph Ushie

The excitement that greeted the publication of Audacious Journalism by Anietie Usen, a world-class journalist and technocrat, in October 2018, did not suggest there would be room for another publication, soon after the 706-page book. The much acclaimed Audacious Journalism was the summation of the author’s thrilling writings as a meteoric and multiple award-winning journalist. It was, and is still, a collector’s item, and many had concluded that the book was a parting gift from the gifted writer, who had already veered successfully into other fields of endeavours.

However, when I perused the present book, Village Boy, the first thought that came to my mind was the famous statement by Helmut Schmidt, the former Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, that: “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” Village Boy is therefore a solid competitor, if not an improvement on Audacious Journalism.

If Audacious Journalism was a must-read for journalists, writers and academics, one outstanding quality of Village Boy is that it is a sweet book for all generations, for all climes and for all seekers of information and knowledge about typical African societies and lifestyles in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a book of record, which brings back in a rather humorous and refreshing way, the fading memories of my generation. It is bound to amaze the younger generation, now in schools and various spheres of life.

Strikingly, Village Boy is not just a combination of true-life stories and experiences of underprivileged children, with its instructive underpinnings for readers of all ages. It is also a purposeful guide to the incredible yore, when life was simpler and a deep sense of community orientation and interdependence was overwhelming. It is written as facts of life, sandwiched, as it were, with native wisdom and the thrilling fiction that African folklores and fables are famous for. To this extent, this book is simultaneously a fact and a fiction, or what modern literature now recognises as faction.

The correspondences cover existence both in the purely rural African villages and the period of transition from the rural setting to the western ways of life. Indeed, the portrayal of rural life in a typical African setting as depicted here in this book deserves a deeper study from many perspectives, as the veritable path and part of the African Renaissance. It would serve both in recovering the typical African mode of survival as well as an agent of unification among the peoples of the continent in view of the cultural communalities it will help to discover.

The storyline in Village Boy is built around Akan, a fragile but curious village boy who, having tragically lost his father at the tender age of two in an automobile accident in Lagos, is relocated to Afaha Akpan Ekpo village (Afaha for short), where he comes, not just into the warm care and protection of his grandmother, but harsh realities of poverty. Unlike Lagos, where he was born, Afaha is a world without clocks or wristwatches, and where encounters with ghosts are perhaps real; and the world of lizards, owls, toads, frogs, monkeys, and other neighbours of the wild, is in close communion with that of humans.

In the Afaha community of yore, as in all rural Nigerian communities, Akan’s grandmother is nearly everything. She is a farmer, a herbalist, native doctor, a birth attendant, a counsellor and a community leader.

Afaha community of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, is indeed, a most fascinating place whose traditional marriage practices, particularly in the songs and dances, are snugly in tandem with what obtained in the pre-colonial Old Obudu, where I hail and many other parts of the Cross River State. This makes Village Boy a potential thread, linking Nigerian, if not African communities’ cultural practices. Besides living in a house in which “the walls, rafters and roof members belonged to lizards, geckos and cockroaches while the dusty floors were ruled by rats, jiggers and black stinging ants”, Akan had to accompany his grandmother to distant streams for water, go hunting rats, and play various traditional games and sports, including the incipient football.

The narrative of the early beginnings of western ways in Afaha community is also masterfully woven around the personal growth, development and transition of Akan, the young, skinny orphan boy. We find him being taken to school on the frame of the bicycle, as most members of his generation, whether in the present Akwa Ibom or Cross River or Benue or Bayelsa State did. We find also the rigour of early photography with pinhole cameras, tripod stands, black clothes covering the camera like a masquerade. The power of description that the author is known for, right from his active journalism years around the world, is brought to bear in nearly every sentence. Reading the manner in which he captured the photography of the 1960s, transported me instantly back to my village in Obudu. It brought back to my mind in a most nostalgic manner the magical Igbo-speaking photographer known as Ayakata A. I. Photos of Old Obudu.

Not to talk of the newly arrived football in the village, whose owner you must not tackle during the game, otherwise he would keep you out of the field. There is the church, which comes in with its own humour among the early converts, including a particular covert, who feels cheated and has to found his own church even as he is sometimes in such stupor that he loses control of himself before his congregation. There is the historic journey to Aba by Akan, which affords him the luxury of boarding a lorry, The Lord is My Shepherd, for the first time in his life.

These life experiences of Akan, which begin at the rustic Afaha village, are the floods that take the young boy through the rural secondary school and ultimately empty him into the prestigious University of Calabar, where he studies Political Science and graduates to become a prominent public figure. In sum, we may see Village Boy as the journey of majority of rural children from humble beginnings in thorns and thistles and thickets to the towers of fame, in their chosen professions and careers.

As a faction, Usen brings to bear in this work the very best of the literary devices – suspense, imagery, hyperbole, a sudden twist in the tale, his inimitable descriptive skills, and, above all, nerve-wracking humour such that makes the reader laugh out loud, even when he is reading the text alone. The title of every chapter is poetic, unveiling the rhythmic prose that characterizes every paragraph. Take a look at the content page. They include ‘Footsteps of the Ghosts; A Castle in the Jungle; Rats For Peppersoup; Barbecue of Termites, The Vernacular of Lizards, just to mention a few. For any reader, these chapter titles and the choice of wordings are served deliberately, as appetizers for the buffet within. As an example, the author would have used burrows to describe the dwelling place of giant rats. Instead, he deliberately opted for ‘bed rooms of giant rats”. Such use of language is certain to capture the imagination and rouse the curiosity of young readers. For the author, he was speaking the rat language. As far as giant rats are concerned burrows are their bedrooms. They are only called burrows by man, in an attempt to deny giant rats their dignity, he said.

We also find the deployment of beautiful hyperbole, “…tension was so thick it could be sliced with a knife like a yam”. Chapter Seven is especially laced with fine fables which are both didactic and hilarious. Perhaps the highest display of these devices is in the last chapter of the book, Chapter 23, which is entitled “Advantage and Disadvantage”. This whole chapter is made up of just two sentences. The first sentence is one word, “Smile”, while the second sentence is eleven words: “To be raised in poverty is an advantage, never a disadvantage”; and the chapter ends. It is like a movie that suddenly ends when the audience is warming up for more action. By this device the author does not only leave his readers in a state of suspended animation but he loudly illuminates the main thrust of the book, namely: never give up, if you do find yourself in extremely challenging conditions, because these are only the furnaces that purify you as a gold for a greater future.

Village Boy is, hence, a rare source of inspiration, motivation and encouragement to those children who came into the world without the proverbial silver spoon. While this message is almost enough reward for reading the book, there is the author’s added value in his style which reaps bountifully from his communicative finesse as an accomplished journalist and avid reader of fiction himself.

On account of its universal application and relevance to all generations, especially in African setting, and in view of its originality, imagery and humour, Village Boy, should attract the attention and interest of not just curriculum designers for secondary and tertiary institutions, but also the interest of script writers and actors of African movies.

 Ushie is a professor of General Stylistics & Literary Criticism and Dean, Faculty of Arts at the University of Uyo