The Five Sorrowful Mysteries Of Andy Africa
By Stephen Buoro

Fiction/Bloomsbury/Paperback/311 pages/$12.51/Amazon (amzn.to/3O00ggH)
4 stars

From Nigeria comes this modern and refreshing debut by Stephen Buoro. It is full of humour, yet one of the most savagely unflinching looks at the curse of Africa in recent memory.

Editorially, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries Of Andy Africa makes little concessions – from devoting nearly 50 pages to a bizarre African welcome of a white pastor’s niece to a pitiless ending in the Sahara desert.

While pitched as a bildungsroman, it is much more, telling powerfully of the doomed fate of those born in Africa.

Buoro makes a timely, convincing case that this has been made worse in a time when the superiority of the West is beamed into the consciousness of African youth every day through the Internet and television screens.

The resulting internalised racism seems to point to only one logical solution: Risk it all to escape the continent or die living a broken life in a place where “life is a long prayer”.

Buoro’s simple conceit for these complicated sentiments is protagonist Andy Aziza’s professed love for white girls, “especially blondes” – a preference the 15-year-old tells readers from the get-go.

Living in Kontagora in north-west Nigeria, he has never met a white girl, but is convinced he will marry one.

When English girl Eileen comes to stay, the politics of envy underlying this desire drive him to make some ill-considered decisions that have implications for not just himself but also his precocious friends, one of whom already has a child.

As this is a coming-of-age novel, Buoro dutifully gives Andy a relationship with Eileen, but this gives him only a taste of what could be – and must be – setting him on a course of reckoning with the self-hatred of his dark skin.

There is no epiphany or redemption, with Andy stuck in a loop beyond his capacity to process.

He asks Eileen if she loves his skin when he himself cannot, feeling “light departing from him” when he leaves her.

Justifying his romantic choices, he wonders: “Do I think Black girls are ugly? Of course not. That would mean Mama is ugly. And I’m not gonna take that s*** from anybody.”

Buoro has opted here for a congenital breezy mix of youthful English and Ososo, Hausa and Igbo dialogue and words, thriving in the colour of the four or five countries that Nigeria really is.

Though living in northern Nigeria, Andy’s family is originally from the south, and this has significance for the language he speaks and his Christianity. He is surrounded by Hausa Muslims, and a riot after a Christian insults Prophet Muhammad leaves the community riven.

Yet he also represents a new force on the continent. A fluent English speaker, he is a stand-in for the educated, modern African youth, who cannot help but view the goings-on around them with distaste, a visceral aversion that jostles with their attempts to take pride in their heritage.

This latter project is gestured to in Andy’s teacher Zahra’s religion of “anifuturism” – a fusion of animism and Afrofuturism – that is treated throughout as a bit of a joke, evangelised by an eccentric, privileged woman.

Buoro’s vision is a wry challenge to readers on the nigh impossibility of believing in Africa. For Andy and his friends, it is no philosophical question, but a matter of crushed dreams and wasted lives.

If you like this, read: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Penguin Classics, 2001, $20.99, Amazon, go to amzn.to/44zz3aX), the acclaimed debut by the now-canonical African novelist which depicts pre-colonial Nigeria and the invasion of Europeans and their values in the 19th century.