(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
Coming-of-age stories are known for asking big questions about life.
The novels usually feature a protagonist going through the messy business of sorting out who they are, how they it into the world around them and what matters to them, not just in the moment but in the years to come; there is, it’s fair to say, a lot going on.
But in The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa by Stephen Buoro, the questions move far beyond the domestic connection and friction between Andy and his mother who are Christians from the south of Nigeria living in the Muslim North in the religiously divided town of Kontagora, Niger State.
In this stunningly incisive and thoughtful debut, Buoro takes us deep into the world of a 15-year-old boy who is inextricably bound to what it means to be African, and more specifically Nigerian while being infatuated with Western fashion, food and women (“I love white girls. Especially blondes.”)
Andy Africa – he hates being called that but his “aunt” Zahrah has coined the name and his friends aka “droogs” Morocca and Slim (who is gay in a hyper-religious country) and others have adopted it so Andy has little choice to go along with it.
Andy is that age where he is trying to figure life and its many complexities out, and while that’s a challenging process at the best of times, it becomes even more so for a young man who ends meeting one of the white women of his dreams (and no doubt fantasies) and finding himself caught between reality and hopes & desire.
I’m sure Ydna cares about me … His voice filters into my head, repeating poems and phrases, pretending to be earworms. I often want to call him out on it. But I don’t. I’m afraid that it would further chase him away from me. From my horizons, from my closed-bounded intervals.
It’s a tricky place for anyone to inhabit at any age and you have to be whip smart to figure out where fantasy ends and the real world begins; it bedevils even the brightest and the best, and Andy, who crafts sublimely insightful poems and who is clearly a fiercely bright person, and sweetly charming and decent into the bargain, is just as lost in the maze between the two as anyone.
Complicating things is that his mother is clearly estranged from her family down south, and when they make an appearance after a decade and a half in Andy’s life, and truths, particularly about his parentage, are revealed, it sets in train even more complicated figuring out for Andy who wants so much but who is also unsure if he’s ever get it.
He wants Eileen, the niece of the local Catholic priest, who visits Kontagora and seems sweet at first though she eventually reveals her hand as someone more apt to fetishise Africa than to genuinely and authentically embrace it.
Andy is, for much of his time with Eileen, blind to this but when he does figure out the game Eileen is playing, he struggles to separate himself from her even when the lovely Fatima, a Muslim girl he’s known all his life and for whom he has great affection, emerges as the one he really loves.
(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
Filled with poetic insights by the book’s protagonist and a willingness to call a spade a spade when it comes to Africa – it is culturally rich and vibrantly alive but as Buoro observes through his titular character, it’s also hot, corrupt and vulnerable to religious and political whiplash of the most destructive kind – The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is a brilliantly told book that goes deep into the heart of who Andy is.
You really feel for how hard it is for this bright, empathetic young man, who has an impressive future ahead of him if he can just survive unpalatable family truths and exploitive souls including the person who places him in a precarious place by book’s end, to figure out life.
He is exposed to endemic Africanness and loves it while at the same time caught up in this idea that all good things come from the West and that it is there, whether geographically or culturally in his home country, that he will find true happiness.
At it dawns on him that this may not be the case – he talks many things over with his stillborn older brother Ydna, who appears and disappears at will and often when Andy needs him most – he has a metric ton of dark truths places upon him, and as you imagine with someone still trying to figure life out when it isn’t overwhelmed with new thoughts and ideas, Andy becomes deluged by the revelations.
‘Your mother is the strongest woman I’ve ever met,’ he says. ‘The most optimistic. She never stopped believing in love even though it failed her several times. And I can see a lot of her in you. That unwavering strength. That proclivity to do the impossible, to make the best of whatever life has handed you.’
Buoyed by a remarkably vivacious sense of time and place that Buoro sustains no matter where Andy finds himself, and filled with characters who come alive with vibrancy and fullness, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is an absolute gem of a novel.
Its beating heart and intellectual core is Andy Africa who, through his relentless curiosity, often expressed through his poems, muses about whether there isn’t a dark malevolence at work in Africa, which he dubs HXVX or the Curse of Africa, and if in fact his home continent might be all made-up, given the inherent contradictions it, and its people like Andy has to wrestle with on a daily basis. (“How else could we explain the sun and hunger vs our laughter and dancing, the corruption and killings vs the churches and mosques in every corner of every neighborhood?”)
Filled with some truly in-depth examination of the way Africa, and by extension Andy, are caught between a damaging colonial legacy and the glittering prize of modern Western culture, and how this makes coming to a truthful realisation about yourself and where you belong all the more difficult, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa beats with a thoughtful, authentically rich heart, powered by a truthful protagonist who may be caught in the tumult of growing up and competing thoughts and ideas and feelings, like any teenager anywhere, characters who feel as if they could step off the page and a story that heartbreakingly real and funny and honest all at once and which leaves an impression on you than does not dissipate easily.