Tag: African literature

Nigerian erotica: how the church leader became a sex symbol

“When he talks the breeze ceases and the roof trembles. He commands the crippled to rise, and they rise. He lays his fingers on the blind, and they see. He touches a widow’s sick son, and he is healed.”

“He” is Pastor Samuel, the protagonist of a new fiction series, Holy Sex, that is using the erotic genre to examine the influence and power that the church pastor has over women’s lives in contemporary Nigerian society.

Published by Brittle Paper, an African literary blog, editor Ainehi Edoro explains that the fictional pieces key into an important social phenomenon. Wealthy and operating intimately in people’s lives, pastors are equivalent “to Oprah or they are Dr Phil… they give people a sense of hope,” Edoro explains.

The author, Obinna Udenwe, is the first to eroticise the Nigerian church in fiction, according to Edoro.

Your pastor is handsome. His nose is finely chiselled. His clear white eyeballs are draped in long eyelashes. His lips are full and sensuous. His broad shoulders fill out his designer suits. And when he doesn’t wear a tie, his 22-carat gold necklace sparkles in the reflection of the glass pulpit. A thick gold ring on which is mounted a cross and a bleeding heart adorns the finger he uses to swipe the iPad screen during his sermons

Holy Sex, episode one

Shaming the church?

Throughout the series Pastor Samuel has numerous affairs under his wife’s nose and extorts money from women in exchange for sex. The author describes female characters dressing in “plunging necklines” for Sunday service, with some antics resulting in unwanted pregnancies.

In episode two, one woman’s monologue reads: “To be perfectly honest, who doesn’t want to sleep with God’s anointed, these days?”

Was injecting taboo into the social power-centre of the church meant ruffle feathers? No, says Edoro, it’s playful fiction and not meant to be threatening: “It’s partly about the sex, it’s partly about the system,” she explains. The church has a certain power over women’s bodies, but as an editor didn’t mean to offend, just to encourage people “to think”.

Readers of Holy Sex have certainly recognised some truth in Udenwe’s tales: “I am dumbfounded, but this is exactly a replica of what ladies see in Nigerian churches – it is such a shame,” writes Amaka, a commenter on Brittle Paper.

Anonymity

Though the series has been extremely popular, most online readers were not comfortable commenting publicly or sharing the link via Facebook or Twitter, says Edoro.

Anonymity via e-readers and the internet has been attributed to the runaway success of books like Fifty Shades of Grey, but in Nigeria blogs read in private are the main way people like to consume erotica, Edoro adds.

He continues to come to your house once a week. Sometimes he sleeps over. He asks for money. You give him double of whatever number he requests. You gossip with your friends and tell them everything. You tell them that no one kisses like him. They envy you.

So this Saturday, Pastor Samuel visits your house. You’ve just paid a lot of money into his account that afternoon. You also agreed to fund his trip to Sweden for an evangelical conference, so he has come to say thank you for paying four million naira into his account

Holy Sex, episode five

Others who’ve made their names writing about love and sex in Nigeria include “romance author” Kiru Taye, based in London but specialising in “multicultural romance set in Africa”, and Dames Caucus who describes her style as “telling fictional stories laced with a little sex”.

Then there’s Abuja-based Cassava Republic Press who’ve set up a romance imprint. The team made a bundle of love and romance stories free to download on Valentine’s Day this year, and say their aim is to demonstrate “that romance can be empowering, entertaining, and elegantly written”.

Caucus, real name Vickie Aluta-Obueh, publishes steamy blogposts twice a month but wishes she could do more. She thinks that blogs are the preferred way for Africans to consume erotica because they’re often free to access, and, she says, can be printed out and added to people’s “naughty stash”.

Both Aluta-Obueh and Edoro talk about erotica being enjoyed by both men and women alike – unlike in the west, where the market is largely divided and marketed along gender lines.

Playing catch-up

African erotic fiction is very much in it’s infancy, according to Edoro, who says it has a long way to go to catch up with Nollywood or the music industry, who have both been successful in selling African desire for the mass market.

Edoro puts this down to African fiction still being the “preserve of the intellectual classes” and while some pop fiction , like sci-fi and fantasy, are starting to find their feet, the genre needs time to flourish.

She explains that the obstacles relate to the lack of investment in popular Nigerian writing, suggesting there’s little money for local authors beyond celebrated names like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole.

Just as doubts begin to fog your mind, his hand, his long and smooth hand, wanders to your dress. He lifts it and reaches your thighs. You recoil, but he pulls you close.

Holy Sex, episode four

Writer Aluta-Obueh blames Nigerian culture’s conservative attitudes to sex for choking the market: “There are so many talented erotic writers out there but fear of being vilified curbs their zeal to write,” she says. But despite what she describes as a “hypocrisy” where “anything sexual is frowned upon”, her feedback from readers has been overwhelmingly positive.

A few other comments from the readers of Holy Sex suggests that a burgeoning market is out there for erotic fiction: “Brilliant. I cringed at holy milk each time but in Naija [Nigeria] reality is stranger than fiction”, wrote a user known as Snapes. “A lot about the ease of the writer convinces me of the validity of such a story. I really appreciate such creativity”, added another user, Olatunde.

Maeve Shearlaw for the Guardian Africa Network

9 years ago

6 African novels to fuel your wanderlust

(Pic: Flickr / Susana Fernandez)

We’ve picked out six African novels about travel guaranteed to delight any wide-eyed traveler like yourself looking for adventure. No matter how classic or unconventional your taste in fiction might be, you’ll find something on the list to comfort your travel-weary soul or tease out your inner adventurer.

1. Traveller To The East by Thomas Mofolo
Thomas Mofolo’s turn of the century classic is a petite, purse-size novella, but it chronicles the larger-than-life experience of a man called Fekisi, who abandons family and land and heads east to a mythical land where he hopes to encounter God.

Mofolo’s first novel is a travel story made alluring and exotic with the intensity of poetry and myth.

2. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola
Who wouldn’t want to get enveloped in a fog of magical delight?

Tutuola’s second novel is what Alice in Wonderland could have been if Lewis Carroll had enough grit and gumption to imagine a world haunted by outrageous beasts and ghouls.

The novel charts the adventures of a little boy lost in an enchanted forest. His search for the way back home seem to take him deeper and deeper into secret colonies of creatures living in a plane of reality at odds with human life.

3. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Reading a novel this good can be good or bad – good because it blows your socks off, bad because it’s a once-in-a-life-time experience.

There is literally nothing out there like Beukes’ time-traveling serial-killer romp of a novel.

Harper is a creepy slime of a man who travels through time to kill women. Kirby is his only failed attempt. She survives his assault and commits her life to finding Harper and putting a stop to his murderous hatred for women.

For the lover of crime thrillers, this quirky time travel novel is a gift straight from the god of fiction.

4. Nigerians in Space by Deji Olukotun
Wale is a Nigerian lunar geologist. He is under the spell of a life-long dream to traveling out to the moon when the mysterious Mr. Bello offers him the chance to man a Nigerian space-exploration mission. But like most dreams, what starts out as the magical fulfillment of desire quickly slips into the realm of nightmare. Wale is caught within the complicated web of an African political illuminati. His attempt to piece the puzzle of his ever crumbling reality takes him on a nomadic jaunt through Houston, Stockholm, Basel, Paris, Abuja, Bulawayo, Lagos, Capetown, Johannesburg and Paris.

An exquisite blend of unpredictable twists and lightening-speed plot.

5. Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo
Ama Ata Aidoo’s quirky novel is a tourist adventure set in Germany and London. It charts the journey of Sissie, a bright and self-assured Ghanaian student who wins a European travel scholarship. Like any good explorer, she is very aware of her surroundings—an awareness that she conveys in a blend of poetic and prose expressions. In novels like this, travel through space easily becomes a journey into the self.

6. The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
Step aside Marco Polo! Estebanico, a Moroccan survivor of a doomed Spanish expedition, is our latest guide through the alluring enigma of unknown lands and peoples.

It is 1527 when a ship with a 600-man crew and a calvary of 600 horses leave Spain and heads out to the gulf coast of the United States. Ravaged by a series of misfortunes, their great number is decimated, but Estabanico lives to tell the story of their subsequent travels across America and how their dream of becoming wealthy conquistadors becomes a humbling journey in search of self-discovery and redemption.
Give yourself a priceless gift. Get Laila Lalami’s new novel.

Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.

10 years ago

Film adaptation of ‘Beasts of No Nation’ set for 2015 release

Yet another African novel makes a bold entrance into Hollywood.

Way back in 2013, Deadline announced that Cary Fukunaga, the director of the critically acclaimed HBO show, True Detective, was teaming up with Idris Elba to film Uzodinma Iweala’s war drama titled Beasts of No Nation.

Word has just come through that the project is done and that Netflix, the US media-buying giant, has purchased the worldwide rights for 12 million dollars. The rights covers online streaming and theatrical release.

Those of you who know your Fela would recognise the phrase, “beast of no nation.” It’s the title of Fela’s 1989 album. Iweala, a Harvard-trained Nigerian novelist, clipped the title for his 2005 novel about a child soldier, named Agu, in an unnamed war torn West African country. Beast of No Nation, alongside Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Chris Abani’s Graceland, and Habila’s Waiting for An Angel, spearheaded the big comeback of Nigerian fiction on the global literary scene.

This is such exciting news.

Apparently, Netflix is really hoping that the movie catches the attention of the Oscar committee, so they’re putting all their weight behind the it.

“According to insiders, the media distributor is planning a strong Oscar push for the feature,” reports Variety.

Netflix is yet to announce a release date. But since they’re hoping to get it out in time for the Oscar season, later this year is a good enough guess.

Fingers crossed. There are African literary critics who don’t care for Iweala’s novel, citing it as a classic example of the “poverty porn” genre. Add to this the fact that Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to representing the continent.

Either way, it’s one more African novel making its way to the big screen. Definitely worth celebrating.

Of course, we’re also looking forward to Adichie’s Americanah starring Lupita Nyongo and David Oyelowo and Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls optioned for TV by Leonardo Di Caprio’s media company.

10 years ago

African novels are not anthropological documents

Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo with her award-winning debut novel . (Pic: AFP)

We have to be careful how we position African novels, that we don’t make claims for the African novel that it does not make for itself.

So when someone comes to you looking for a novel that represents Africa or African life, say you can’t help.

A novel is not an anthropological document, meaning that it can only give a peep into life through a very, very, very narrow frame. That’s why it’s dangerous to get into the habit of thinking of novels as expressive of truth and reality.

I remember an American student asking, after reading Things Fall Apart, whether human sacrifice was a thing in Africa. Now imagine your first American novel was American Psycho, would you ever think to ask an American if most American men were prone to a similar kind of psychosis?

From years of studying British and African novels, I find that people make demands on African novels that they don’t make on other kinds of novels. Whether realist or fantasy, African novels are required to offer direct access to Africa’s way of life.

The truth is that no matter how true-to-life, how history-based a novel such as Things Fall Apart might be, it is first and foremost a fictional work. Things Fall Apart is a fictional representation of life. It is not life. It is not a document on how African fathers kill their foster children. It is not a document on how polygamous marriages work. It is not a document on why Igbo men love yams so much. It is not a document on late 19th century Igbo laws and customs. It is a story.

There is nothing more unattractive and annoying than a naive novel-reader, someone who believes everything they read in novels, who can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that novels tell us very little about real life, even when they claim to do so.

But isn’t this a question as old as Aristotle – the question of how life relates to fiction? Since Aristotle, European philosophers and novelists have written themselves to death about how much of life can be captured in art. The sad thing is that today, Africa bears the burden of the most simplistic understanding of that link between art and life. So many readers go about expecting African novels to tell them a political and anthropological fact about African life.

To be fair, there is a certain sense in which every novel whispers something to us about a real world out there. But you have to love the novel for itself first before you can hear what it says or does not say about that world.

So never encourage anyone to expect an African novel to tell them the truth about Africa and its people. It is far too much to ask a novel. And people who put such a burden on a novel are being lazy, small-minded, and sorta cheap.

If you really want to learn about Lagos, get a plane ticket.

10 years ago

Africa’s mad and most loved emperor

Who doesn’t love a good story about the rise and fall of empires, blended with a spicy bit of romance and the gothic intensity of a mad king?

Chaka, by Lesotho writer Thomas Mofolo, is that kind of novel – a weird and gripping tale about one of the most enigmatic figures in African history.

“I do not believe,” Mofolo writes, “that there was ever a human being whose life was as full of mystery as that of Chaka.” An attempt to capture this mystery led Mofolo to write Chaka in 1910. But his missionary publishers were so freaked out by the novel that they refused to publish it until 1925.

Chaka is the guy who grew up knowing that everyone, except his mother, wanted him dead. Tough luck for a kid born near perfect. Tall, handsome, brave, hardworking, and self-sacrificing, Chaka could not understand why everyone hated him. Like any oppressed soul, Chaka believed that things would change since right and justice was on his side. That illusion faded away when he heard his father order his death even as he stared Chaka in the eye.

Chaka is on the run from assassins when he meets one of the most ruthless witchdoctors that ever graced the pages of an African novel. Isanusi is the guy who makes things happen. He is the magician, the sorcerer, the therapist, the priest, the conman, the strategist, the visionary, the confidante, the doctor, the hit-man, the fixer—the everything man – that every great empire-builder in history has had by his side. The novel is worth reading just to see Isanusi at work.

He’s the one who “inoculates” Chaka with the “medicine of blood.” “If you do not spill blood,” Isanusi explains to Chaka, “it will turn against you and kill you instead. Your sole purpose should be to kill without mercy, and thus clear the path that leads to the glory of your kingship.”

Isanusi turns Chaka into a killing machine. A man who had been hunted all his life had returned to bring the world to its knees.

Mofolo’s novel is a dark, mysterious, and poetic critique of the principle of violence that defines all empires.

By living up to this mandate to kill or be killed, Chaka instituted a political order never before imagined in his part of the world. But the blood on which his beautiful empire is built does not stay still forever. Chaka is eventually consumed by the violence that made him king and lives out the rest of his days in what Wole Soyinka has described as schizophrenia. The story of great emperors gone mad is old and familiar, but Mofolo tells it with all the dark, romantic flair of an African storyteller – sorcery, the supernatural, graphic violence, and tragic love.

No story about war and empire is complete without a special someone. The love of Chaka’s life is the “amazingly beautiful” Noliwa—the girl with the “light brown complexion like a cannabis seed.” How Chaka screwed things up with such a goddess of a woman is a depressing and perplexing story. It is easily one of the most sublime moments in the history of modern African tragedy.

If Achebe had not happened, Mofolo’s Chaka would have been the Things Fall Apart of our generation. There are novelists in Africa – a multitude of novelists. But there’s only a handful of storytellers. Achebe was one. Mofolo was another.

Anyone who loves a damn good story should partake of Mofolo’s dark and quirky love song to a king who inspired a continent and paid the ultimate price.

Buy Chaka by Thomas Mofolo trans. by Daniel Kunene here.