|
Book Review
Review Title:
Nigeria's Macabre Carnival
Book Title: The Carnival
Author: Alpha Emeka
Publisher: Cehmes
Publications, Jos, 2007
Pages: 301pp
Reviewer: Jerome Terpase Dooga
On a quiet,
moonlit night, petrol bombs are used to set the
Katako market on fire. Nothing escapes the fire.
Three figures disappear quietly into an alley.
The people of Rom village are roused from their
sleep by the sound of rapid gunfire which
appears to be coming from every direction. Many
houses are set ablaze. Many villagers are
killed. Eye witnesses say some Fulani men were
seen entering the village earlier in the day.
The villagers move swiftly for a brutal
reappraiser attack. Another village is attacked
too, but thanks to two private detectives, two
of the assailants are killed. A young university
student is gunned down near the university. Each
cult group on campus accuses the other, but none
accepts responsibility. The dead man’s friend is
also accused, but there is no clear motive. A
police inspector sitting in his patrol van by
the roadside in the city is killed along with
members of his patrol team.
Set in Jos,
the author’s note states that The Carnival
is a work of fiction, thus “the characters and
events . . . are entirely imaginary.” The novel
unravels the process of destabilization
orchestrated by power-hungry military
politicians in order to legitimize the abortion
of democratic structures and the consequent
perpetuation of military rule.
The book
describes how two students of the University of
Jos along with a private detective discover the
sinister plot by some high ranking military
officers and their civilian collaborators; a
plot initiated in Jos, to be spread to all parts
of the country.
The students
of the Biochemistry Department of the University
of Jos have planned a grand carnival that Shola,
Obi, and Mark, as well as Cynthia, Chioma and
their other friends hope will differ from the
shoddy carnivals of their predecessors. The
daytime activities involve campus processions of
colourfully costumed participants accompanied
with music and dance. This is to be crowned with
an all-night campus party, where all will dance,
eat, drink, smoke, embrace and kiss their
girlfriends. And for those who have none,
hopefully, this night of bliss will be an
opportunity to get one. The night party has
already begun, and all appears to be going well,
the DJ for the night is on top of things,
performing at his peak. But for Obi, something
is not just right.
Three weeks
earlier, Obi had noticed four men around the
campus consulting with one another and somehow
not behaving like students. As it turned out,
one of those was killed in a motor accident and
none of the other three who had been with him a
few minutes earlier could step forward to
identify him. Three weeks have passed, and the
corpse is still in the mortuary, unclaimed and
unidentified. Tonight, Obi has spotted the same
strange faces—again! Moreover, a number of other
incidents have been taking place in the Jos
metropolis: a number of markets gutted by fire.
And now these three faces at the carnival, Obi
and Mark decide they must follow them as they
recede into the dark night.
The two young
students discover that the strange men are
moving a cache of arms in heavy wooden boxes
from an abandoned story building: AK 47s and
other assault rifles. But before they could come
to terms with what this could possibly mean, the
strange men return, discover that there have
been intruders. They pursue Obi and Mark, and
shoot Mark dead.
Mark’s death
is immediately attributed to cultism, but none
of the cult groups accept responsibility.
Meanwhile,
elsewhere in town, detective Brown was assigned
to investigate the murder of Mark. It was
supposed to be a routine investigation, just to
fulfil all righteousness, just to indicate that
the boy’s death had been investigated. But Brown
has taken it too seriously, and his employers
feel he has gone too far. They want him to close
the case, but he would not. So, Brown teams up
with his friend Ishaya and they link up with
Obi. In the course of the investigation, Brown
discovers that arrangements have been made by
very high-ranking military and civilian
personnel to unleash terror on Jos and environs
and make it appear as if the crisis is
ethnically or religiously motivated.
To achieve
this, they contract and pay a team of deadly hit
men, including some foreign nationals. The
initial plan is to induce the students of the
University of Jos to stage a violent protest to
agitate for their needs. This plot fails. The
group spotted by Obi and Mark is actually made
up of four men. Their mission is to return to
the carnival with the arms following their
survey and kill as many students as possible and
thus destabilize the system and create a sense
of insecurity.
Another team
led by Umandi and sponsored by Kalika poses as
Fulani cattle rearers and enters Rom village,
concealing heavy weapons. At the agreed signal
in the night, they unleash hell on the village,
killing hundreds and burning many houses. In the
ensuing panic and mayhem, the mercenaries
quietly withdraw, leaving the villagers with the
impression that the Fulani community attacked
them. These deadly attacks are repeated in a few
other villages. In fact, twenty four camps have
been set up in different parts of the city, and
recruited hit men are mobilized from these camps
and sent out on these missions. The leaders
pretend that these are camps for trading in
marijuana, and have paid the police heavily to
permit them to operate. Unknown to the police
though, what the people are transporting to
these camps is not weed but guns and ammo.
But the plan
begins to fall apart when the leaders of the
different cult groups are helped by detective
Brown and Obi to realize that the cult groups
were being set up to fight and kill one another,
and that in fact neither was Mark killed by Obi
his friend, or by a cult group. So in a rare
show of unity, the cult groups unite and are
able to discover most of the yet-to-be used
weapons hidden in the various parts of the city,
and these are burned up in fire.
Finally, the
pieces are put together and the grand plan
unfolds. General Ifala announces that the army
has taken over power. The coup fails, the
perpetrators lose out and normalcy returns to
the country again.
The book is in
two parts, though it does not appear from the
content that this division is anything but
arbitrary. It consists of fifty one fast moving
chapters which are followed by an epilogue. The
narrative is unpretentious and sharp. There is
no dull moment in the tempo of the narration.
Indeed, one of the strong points of the novel is
its simplicity of language.
But it is
clear that the author was ill equipped. Alpha
Emeka had a great story, a great idea. But like
I said in another journal article on this book
(forthcoming), it is one thing to have a
creative idea; it is a completely different
thing to have the tools to transmit such an
idea. In the business of writing, the primary
tool is language. Thus, Ike’s (1991) kindly
advice to aspiring writers is: “Nobody enjoys
reading prose punctuated with grammatical
errors. It is, therefore, of utmost importance
that you write accurately. Your writing must
comply with the rules of grammar” (10). Of
course, Ike admits that “there are times it is
permissible to write sentences which flout the
rules of grammar” (12), but usually, the reader
will not be in doubt that such deviations are
deliberate, and their intent will be apparent in
the context. Really, such deviations demonstrate
complete control over the medium, rather than
indicate limitations. In The Carnival,
errors of tense, spelling, punctuation
inappropriate use of pronominal reference, wrong
use of prepositions, improper collocates and
crises of signalling time in the narration are
so numerous that, after reading the book,
I summed up my experience with the words “a good
story badly written.”
Read in the
context of recent events in Nigeria, the
narrative rings so true that the reader is in no
doubt that it has happened before, but is left
with the eerie feeling that this could happen
again. The novel may not have circulated widely,
and this may be its first published review, but
it is a book all Nigerians and those who have
the country’s interest at heart should read.
Pitched against the macabre carnival currently
in play nationwide such as the total breakdown
of security in some parts of the country,
manifested in the unholy harvest of kidnappings,
the pockets of sporadic civil wars that, for
lack of a more appropriate term we still call
armed robbery, and the increasing acts of so
called religiously motivated killings; the book
reads like an advance warning system or a
historical text—written in advance. The novel
has a happy ending, but if the music of
Nigeria’s macabre carnival does not change soon,
the ominous scenario painted in The Carnival
will play out, with devastating
consequences.
|
|
