Ennul

inla, a sociopathic policeman. Thoroughly incapable of learning, Kabiru drops out of school

I finds himself mentally incapable of.

to become a commercial bus driver, an occupation he eventually

A stolen certificate gets him into the police force where he pursues a career of extortion and terror. He makes friends with a robbery gang to share their loot, but soon kills them in a disagreement about sharing. His income drastically reduced, Kabiru resorts to indiscriminate fleecing of street miscreants. Eventually though, a vengeful old man with a voodoo vendetta summarily terminates his criminal career. There is also the essential assortment of hopeful adventurers, including Dennis Tom-Dick-Harry, a migrant from the violent, oilrich swamplands, who comes to Lagos seeking a new and easier life. It is a dream that seems destined never to be realised because his family has suddenly grown as large as a football team. Again, there isAJiyu Mai-Guard, the eponymous drifter from the hot, dozy and desert North, dreaming also to come to Lagos not only to escape the languor of his village but to possibly also become rich. In Lagos, life proves to be really not what he expects it to be and he soon, again, craves the sanity of the place he left behind. Duncan Hill is the outsider looking in. Duncan is a British computer engineer visiting Lagos on holidays with his new wife. Feeling very adventurous and desirous of getting a good feel of the city, he finds accommodation in a hotel on the mainland, where he meets with a shifty London businessman, who soon disappears with a large amount of his clients' money. A case of mistaken identity nearly gets Duncan lynched by a mob. Regardless of this unhappy experience, when Duncan is offered a job in Lagos by a friend, he is able to ~ . an opportunity too good to miss, beyund the social imperfections of the city. How and where do all these disparate threads connect? For Herbie and Tom-DickHarry, the courses of their lives collide in a Lagos Molue bus. It is an extremely hilarious encounter, which sends Herbie on his way to a psychiatric hospital where he would meet Kabiru the policeman as well as Femi Falase, who has suffered an unfortunate nervous breakdown. Present here as well is an assortmen, of other patients of various miseries. Here, life in Lagos succinctly gets summed up in discussion by Jamba, one of the inmates: 'You know, I read a newspaper article once. And the general argument is that there are so many people out there in the streets doing nothing except embarrassing our government by behaving like lunatics. Government people say they are about ten million in Lagos alone. By simple arithmetic, there are three hundred and fifty million lunatics in this our beloved country, excluding the Federal Capital Territory.' The doctor's office at this hospital is the opening scene of the book. It is also where it ends - with the doctor engaged in a discussion with Femi and his wife. Femi, tired and defeated, finds himself torn between the choices of a quiet future tucked away in the mental hospital and the need to remain strong for the sake of his two children. Love seems destined to win. The pleasure of reading A Conference in Ennui lies mainly in the selection of impeccably rendered non-sequiturs rather than in an epiphany or surprise achieved by the aggregate. The characters are believable and look real enough to actually walk off the pages of the book. The background canvas of the story is of historical facts and all conspire to nearly make the story to be regarded as non-fiction. Indeed, if one were to write a post-oil boom history of Nigeria, it might not be possible to do it any livelier.

7Gofiq Adu is a freelance editor and media consultant.

TheNEWS
July 08, 2013

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