reviews
Reviewer: DIKE OKORO
Title:
The Debt-Collector and
Other Stories
Author:
by Tanure Ojaide
Publisher: (Trenton:
Africa World Press 2009)
ISBN 1-59221-693-5
$19.95
“This is surely an
exciting collection that will arrest every reader’s
attention,” writes the famed Sierra Leonian poet and author
of The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, Syl
Cheney-Coker, on the back cover of The Debt Collector and
Other Stories, Tanure Ojaide’s recent short stories
collection published by Africa World Press (2009).
The ten stories in the
collection are provocative, mind-puzzling, intense, and
occasionally humorous. How successful Ojaide handles his
themes tells us a lot about his familiarity with recent
Nigerian history and the inescapable wave of conflicts
people, especially the middle class and poor families,
experience in a country healing from its umbilical ties to
Britain. And yet, for a reader to truly appreciate the bread
and butter of these tales, he or she must be patient with
the author’s slow but tactful attempt to explore the
intimate lives of his male and female characters. And this
is one aspect of this book that its reader will find both
interesting and exhilarating. These stories take us to
different places and contexts throughout Nigeria’s
landscape, but the Niger Delta town of Warri takes a central
place in the author’s narratives. In the lives of each
character we find a dichotomy of dreams we might share or
situate within our own individual dreams.
In “When the Widow
Remarried,” a love story that begins on a sad note with news
and reactions following the death of Nana’s husband, we are
quickly introduced to a wave of conflicts that will later
shape the decisions and struggles of Nana, a widow and the
story’s central character. Largely based on events
foretelling the impact of personal struggles and public
struggles that seem to trail a widow and her children, this
story depends on suspense, fate, and introspection for its
climax and the resolution of conflicts. Nana’s husband,
Madidi, was a lecturer at the time of his death. That his
fellow lecturer at the same Polytechnic, Omatie, soon falls
in love with his wife is no mere coincidence. After all, men
with good intensions follow their hearts when it comes to
finding the woman they desire most. With Omatie, we are
presented with a character whose intensions at the beginning
we might question, for his silence each time he visits Nana
and her children could have been taken for something
suspicious and manipulative. But this is what makes the
story interesting, for sooner than later the author throws
down the curtain and we learn at greater depths his
heartfelt love for Nana whom he later betroths.
“Next-of-Kin,” much
like “When the Widow Remarried,” begins with news of a plane
crash that claimed many lives, including some of Nigeria’s
top ranked army officers. This story is centered on greed
and chauvinism. The author, for the most part, does a good
job of tracing the origin of the conflict and using humor to
humiliate the antagonists, the immediate family and
relatives of the late Major John Ubido. Like the rest of the
stories in this collection, the women take on roles that
evoke pity but show their empowerment in the end.
Exploitation for personal gain seems to be at the core of
the story. The late Major’s brother cleverly tries to claim
his compensation from the military. But mounting pressures
from family, who knew of the deceased's relationship with
his wife and how that relationship could not be classified
as an established form of marriage, sought a loophole to
deny the widow and her child access to the compensation the
military had for her husband. What follows in this story is
a quagmire that shifts base from courts and hearings, from
Abuja to Kaduna and then to Warri, where a resolution in
favor of the family is eventually passed. The moral of this
story, which is clear from the beginning, is that the
African culture is symbiotically dependent on age-old
traditions of bride price and family influences that, if not
taken seriously, might deny a widow her rightful place and
rights in the absence of her husband. But Ojaide’s careful
handling of this story portends to some window of hope for a
culture that is finally changing and recognizing the
importance of the institution of marriage.
“The Debt Collector,”
the story from whose title the collection is named, is a sad
tale with a triumphant ending. The narration of events in
the story is identified with rigid forms of beliefs within
the community the author explores in the story. A dead man’s
corpse is denied to his family because he owed debts to a
rich man at the time of his death. This story becomes a
parody for critics who might find its conflict difficult to
believe. But shocking incidents such as this happen today in
civilized societies on the continent. The onus of the tale
is the ancient saga of debt and debtors. Ituru, for all we
know from the author, was a poor man who earnestly wanted to
survive the hard times and make a living for himself. The
loan he received was not monetary but was based on palm oil.
Yet, as with most of Ojaide’s tales, fate threw a fastball
at the poor fellow, for he soon became sick and died. But
Chief Shegbe, the merciless character who had loaned him
palm oil for money in return, would not accommodate any
excuses from the dead man’s relatives. Thus, to send a
strong message to everyone in the community who wishes to be
a future loan borrower from him, he opted to use the corpse
to teach poor people a lesson. Anger, resentment, and chaos
soon broke. It is at the height of all of these that the
dead man’s family, apprehensive of the many possibilities of
what the rich chief might do with the corpse of their very
own, since word had begun to fly about of the use of body
parts for rituals, rallied around to raise money and bring
home the corpse of Ituru for proper burial. At least pride
in family strength is restored at the end of this story, for
the poor man’s family did not want to be held accountable by
future generations for whatever curse or shame the community
might attach to their legacy had they allowed the Chief to
keep his corpse.
Much as I enjoyed
reading the stories in this collection, I am forced to admit
that some of them could have been longer pieces. But to do
so would be to question the author’s liberty and thus engage
in criticism that deviates from the norm. Ojaide’s stories,
a collection far more improved when compared to God’s
Medicine Men and Other Stories, his first collection,
leaves us with some food for thought. His language is
sophisticated, something already echoed by novelist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who says Ojaide writes beautifully.
In the same vein, I believe readers will find the beauty in
these stories that crisscross a range of themes including
greed, pride, myths, culture and family conflicts,
witchcraft, and the impact of fate on people’s lives. SLQ
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OCTOBER INDEX EDITOR'S NOTE DRAMA ESSAYS & REVIEWS FICTION POETRY COMPETITIONS

Dike
Okoro, PhD, is a
professor of world literature/creative writing at
Olive-Harvey College, Chicago, USA. Okoro obtained both his
MFA in creative writing and MA in African American
Literature from Chicago State University. His poetry
collection, Dance of the Heart, was published by Malthouse/ABC
Books in 2007. He is the editor of three anthologies of
poetry and one selection of contemporary short stories from
Africa (Trenton: AWP, forthcoming). As a scholar, he has
contributed essays/chapters to Dictionary of Literary
Biography: African Writers Series (Detroit: Broccoli Clark
Layman 2010) and Emerging Voices of Post Colonial African
Literature (New York: Cambria Press 2010).
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