Radio Sunrise by Anietie Isong

This is a satirical novel set in a radio station in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. Ifiok is a young journalist working for a Government owned radio station. He has a beautiful girlfriend, Yetunde, runs a radio drama on the station, The River, and has a mentor of sorts in Boniface, an older and more cynical journalist.

The start of Ifiok’s troubles come with the cancellation of his radio drama, the station manager telling him frankly that this is down to funding. Basically, one of many evangelical churches has bought the slot for religious programming and unless Ifiok can get sponsorship, his drama is history. Boniface tells him to forget it and just throw himself into his reporting. We soon discover that reporting in Nigeria is a lot different than in the UK (where this reader is based). Reporters turn up and if the interviewee has a brown envelope for each stuffed with money, then the journalists report favourably. If not, then they are likey not to get on air at all. This is unsurprising when the country is corrupt from top to bottom, from politicians down.

Ifiok comes from the Niger Delta and when millitants kidnap westerners in his home region he’s worried. When the government offers the militants training and careers if they will lay down their weapons he travels home to make a radio documentary. This gets him out of Lagos, a good thing really as his girlfriend has left him after she found him in bed with an intern.

Radio Sunrise is a cutting depiction of modern Nigeria. It portrays the country as deeply corrupt and dysfunctional. There is some humour and some poignant moments. I felt it suffered however by the lack of a strong narrative thread. Ifiok was simply buffeted by a series of events and was quite a passive protagonist. I found it hard to warm to him or any of the other characters in the book. I also found the portrayal of some of the characters problematic, in particular the intern he has an affair with. The men in the radio station have a view that the interns (predominantly women) are just after sex, and lo and behold, she is.

In conclusion, this is an interesting read and one that gives a cynical insight into Nigerian society, but the narrative lacked direction and the characters failed to draw me in.

3 out of 5 stars

The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton

This is an odd, original and quite brilliant novel. It’s genre crossing, encompassing crime, noir, dystopia and sci-fi. In many ways it might be best described as a kind of dystopian fairy tale, and it’s certainly narrated in such a way, the prose being lyrical.

The story is set in Dublin, but this is a future, dystopian cityscape. A long time before the events of the book, lost in the backstory, some kind of climactic disaster took hold where it started raining and never stopped. Much of Ireland is now flooded and people have never seen the sun. The author uses the constant rainfall to great effect, people have to wear skins when they go outdoors – waterproof honchos basically – but more than such obvious facets are the subtle details, the constant sound of rainfall, the size of the raindrops, all of which imbue this novel with real atmosphere. Then there are the slugs. Due to the giant rainfall, the slugs are all massive. There are harmless, this is no schlock horror, but it’s just an icky detail that works and gives the world the author’s created more depth.

The story itself is based around the Kid in Yellow, a kid who wears distinctive yellow skins and who works as a runner for the Earlie King, a gang boss in charge of the brutal Earlie Boys. One day, the Kid meets the King’s daughter, T.  A romance blossoms and T falls pregnant. Her pregnancy lasts for twelve months, not uncommon in this polluted world and she dies in childbirth. The Earlie King banishes the Kid after giving him a beating, but the Kid in Yellow can’t bear the loss of T and promised her he would care for their child. He sneaks into the Kings home, takes the child and goes on the run.

I won’t divulge any more of the plot for fear of spoilers, but this is a book that is well worth a read. If I have one criticism it is that Danny Denton’s writing style takes some getting used to. In particular, when writing dialogue, instead of using the traditional inverted commas he uses this symbol: /.  At the beginning I found this very distracting and was worried I wouldn’t through the book. As it is I persevered, soon got used to it and was rewarded for doing so. For The Earlie King and The Kid in Yellow is a beautiful tale beautifully told.

5 out of 5 stars

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

Paul Kenyon is a renowned BBC journalist who’s worked on various hard-hitting current affairs strands, not least the BBC’s Panorama. He’s someone whose work I’ve long admired. When I saw he had written a book on the dictators who’ve wreaked havoc throughout Africa, I was keen to read it.

Dictatorland is certainly well written and split into four parts, each corresponding to the “resource curses” which allowed brutal thugs to seize and keep power – gold, oil, chocolate and modern slavery -  he troops out a succession of tyrants and their horrific idiosyncrasies for his readership to gawp at.

One of the strengths of Dictatorland is how the author demonstrates that Africa, a continent rich in natural resources, was uniquely placed for such misrule. First the colonial empires, and later those who replaced them, had untold wealth at their fingertips and thus had no need to consider the wishes, or even the needs, of the populace. The world’s thirst for gold, diamonds and cocoa ensured that brutal misrule was tolerated at best, actively facilitated at worst, by the international community.

That said, there are a number of flaws to this book. While the author does give the background of colonialism and does demonstrate how the colonial rulers abused their colonies, the lion’s share of the narrative focuses on the dictators that came after. I felt that the link between the two was missing somewhat. The brutalism of colonialism and how it stunted civic and political development; the arbitrary division of the continent into artificial states which often lumped hostile ethnic groups together; just how actively the Western powers turned a blind eye to the dictators’ behaviour, was not fully fleshed out.

It is also unclear just how the author selected dictators to appear in the book. As The Economist pointed out in their review, some like Mobutu of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Gaddafi of Libya and Mugabe of Zimbabwe are obvious choices. But why Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the first President of Ivory Coast, and not the far more brutal Idi Amin of Uganda or Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic? On can only presume that Houphouët-Boigny was chosen as he based his rule on the cocoa trade.

A final issue, is that while this is a fascinating read, it can also be a little tiring. Reading of the wickedness of dictator after dictator, with no real prognosis for change, is a bit repetitive and blunts the reader’s outrage. Reading Dictatorland, one might be forgiven the temptation to write Africa off as hopeless, a continent uniquely susceptible to misrule and oppression.

That all said, this is a very well written book. Despite my misgivings outlined above, it did keep me turning the page. If you’re interested in dictators, what colonialism has reaped, the damaging legacy the European empires left the continent and the misrule that more often than not results when a country’s rulers have untold riches at their disposal, then this is an enlightening, if depressing, read.

3 out of 5 stars