Shadows of a Troubled Republic (II)

SHADOWS: Protest Essays on Africa’s Most Consequential Country (1999–2023), Volumes 1 and 2 by Eniola Bello, Cable Books, Lagos, 2026

Overview of Volume 2

The second volume of Shadows completes a project that was halfway completed after 468 pages, and which got rounded up in the 460 pages of the second volume. The front matter of repeats Kukah’s Foreword and the author’s Introduction. This is consistent with the two-volume structure, and also rhymes with the “shadow” metaphor governing the project.

This collection is the more varied of the two books, as it goes beyond the single long “Governance” section of the first volume, to track party intrigue, godfatherism, PDP and APC succession battles, and presidential elections from the late Abacha transition through the 2023 Tinubu victory. 

The collection moves from essays on Nigeria’s retired military rulers, religious and ethnic tension, Boko Haram, and the moral character of public life, to a handful of essays from the author’s reporting trips to Japan, China, and a Chicago visit tied to Tinubu at the time. It showcases tribute with an obituary-style and anniversary essays on figures like Abiola, Bola Ige, and Pope John Paul II, before closing with a first-person Epilogue recounting the author’s own encounters inside Nigerian Government Houses across several states.

Like in Volume 1, the essays are also dated and arranged chronologically within each section; closing with an Acknowledgement after a name index.

Observations

Consistency of Political Narratives

Readers of Volume 1 will recognize the same rhetorical toolkit in the Politics section of this volume. Anaphora, rhetorical-question cascades, and the use of extended metaphor as an organizing device are now applied to party primaries, godfather disputes, and succession battles rather than presidential administrations in this volume. In the essay “Grandmasters of the Game” and ”2023 and the Tinubu Conundrum”, we see a tracking of the mechanics of power transfer within a party. We also see how the dynamics of zoning arrangements, delegate arithmetic, and backroom deal-making determine outcomes that are later dressed up as democratic choices. The element of institutional dysfunction mentioned in Volume 1 also presents itself here as elections change faces, but without changing the underlying principle of subversion.

Wider-Range Focus

It is in this volume that we see the author’s full range of colours as a writer on display. The essays on politics retain the same brisk, editorializing voice we have in Volume 1. The Society and Travel section shows a more reflective, sometimes gentler, author who is even willing to let a scene or a piece of dialogue carry the argument without throwing in a direct commentary. 

In “A Night in a Japanese Home,” we find an account of a homestay in Hiroshima during a press junket, as warm, purely observational travel writing. It is free of the polemical register that dominates the writer’s political essays. This was a welcome change of pace that shows that the author is capable of enjoying the evening breeze without complaining about the wind speed.

An Experiment Worth Noting

A close look at the essay “Telephone Conversation” (April 2000) shows it to be one of the collection’s most inventive piece. It is an imagined afterlife, staged entirely as dialogue, in a phone call between the late Chief MKO Abiola and the late General Sani Abacha. Here, Abiola needles his former jailer about his fate, making this departure from the straight op-ed form used almost everywhere else in both volumes a welcome respite. The result is a stronger emotional impact, which a conventional essay on the same subject would not have had; giving the reader a varied the reading experience of the 900-plus combined pages.

Profiling the Epilogue

Looking at “Notes from Government Houses”, a first-person memoir of the transactional, and often degrading, culture the author witnessed around Nigerian governors on official visits, especially of how young women from local universities were paraded for state guests, night-outs bankrolled by public office. It portrayed an endemic casual corruption of hospitality that marks the piece as one of the strongest essays in the twin-volume work. 

It is also as candid and self-implicating as a writing could be. Perhaps without knowing it, the writer includes his own discomfort and complicity as an observer rather, while convinced that he is writing only about others. Put together, the author’s sentiments and the sordid reality it depicts retroactively sharpen some essays in the Politics-section, wherein the same governors are presented in different contexts.

Structure and Thematization

The four distinct sections of Volume 2 appear to offer more textural variety than Volume 1. Though the sections are uneven in size, with Politics running to roughly 250 pages, while the Travel section captures only five essays.  We note in this review that particular pieces in the Politics section could have been accommodated in the Society section; and that some could actually have come under Tribute, rather than Society.

Further Observations

A reader moving from Politics into Society may struggle to see why, say, essays on Babangida’s culpability for June 12 sits in the Society, rather than the Politics section, or why some Tribute pieces (the Abiola essay, in particular) overlap significantly with material already covered in Politics. A future edition of the book would require a short editorial note, explaining the sorting principle.

Final Submission

Whereas Volume 2 seems to be the stronger of the two books because of its variety, with the political essays extending Volume 1’s central argument about institutional dysfunction, the two together give a fuller picture of the scope of the author’s works. The “Telephone Conversation” experiment and the Government Houses epilogue are easily the two most memorable pieces across both volumes, showing us a writer with more range than the bulk of the political columns, taken alone. When read as the second half of a single project, Volume 2 rewards patience, because some of its best material not found on the periphery.

I invite us to celebrate this remarkable chronicling of a critical aspect of our national history by a master wordsmith who has bestrode the Nigerian journalism landscape with deep concern, uncontrived candour and genuine patriotism. The two volumes should find their way into every university library, as well as the book shelves of every serious media practitioner within and outside Nigeria.