Helon Habila photo by Jerry Bauer
Helon Habila was born in Gombe in Nigerias oil-rich north but Lagos has fascinated him since he first arrived there as an impressionable teenager who had never seen the ocean. I made the trip by bus, at night. On the way we passed wrecks of cars on turnings, and often the driver had to switch off his lights to deceive highway robbers lurking in the forest. All night the bus was filled with sounds of desperate prayers. Then we reached Lagos and the night gave way to dawn. I saw the Atlantic with the sun seeming to emerge out of it. It was glorious, ineffable.
The adolescent city
Now West Africas wild cosmopolitan heart, Lagos is suffering an extreme adolescence. In just thirty years, its population has grown twenty-fold and half of Lagosians are under 16. The citys creative and entrepreneurial energies hold the key to the regions future, but darker forces also grip it. Residents live with astonishing levels of everyday criminality, while riots regularly engulf the city.
For an earlier generation of writers, Habila explains, Lagos symbolised an alien, western corruption of the true Africa. They sent their characters there to lose their innocence. Its not surprising to see authors talking about Lagos as the Devils City, he says. People see Lagos as a certain violent place. Its almost like a living thing like some animal thats going to devour you.
As a background for a novel Lagos is brilliant. Half the things you dont have to invent, they happen straight in front of your eyes.
Younger writers, however, are ready for a more direct creative engagement with the city. Lagos may be a very difficult place to live in: the slums, the agitation, the poverty and the violence. But as a background for a novel its brilliant. Half the things you dont have to invent, they happen straight in front of your eyes. Stories just jump at you. As a writer, I just had to meet writers. In the north, there were no writers. No one understood what I was doing when I told them I was going to be a writer. They had never seen a writer before. In Lagos, these people became my friends. We had the same desire, the same passion.
But there is something desperate about this passion. In his debut novel, Waiting for an Angel, Habila himself appears as a character, vomiting drunkenly over a balcony at a writers party. Amidst the repression, the party is a crazy, reversed wake where no one is able to cry.
The distinct sounds of violence
The violence of the story crackles off the page right from the start. A nameless prisoner pounds the face of a warder into effluent flowing from the prisons toilet block. A sentence later, he, too, is beaten to a pulp. A chapter on, a man sits in a bar, sipping Coca-cola, and waiting to die. Through the window, he sees a mob catch a thief, cudgel him, and then set him alight. I watch the fiery figure dancing and falling, he says, until it finally subsides onto the pavement as a black, faintly glowing, twitching mass.
And so it goes. A car crashes. A crowd is fired on. A friend is tortured through the night. The reader is led steadily to Ken Saro-Wiwas judicial murder, the emotional heart of the book.
As revolution is whispered on the street, Habila describes a peaceful demonstration, destined to meet a violent end. The scene is witnessed by a 15-year old boy who shins up a mango tree as the riot police charge. I closed my eyes, he narrates. I discovered that I was whimpering like a lost child. I couldnt help it. Even now, many years later, the distinct sounds of the violence echo in my mind whenever I think about it. I can still hear the thud of blows, the oomph! of air escaping mouths and the shrill, terrified screams of the women.
Waiting for an Angel is in many ways a writers journey. But it starts at the journeys end. In prison, Lomba, a novelist and journalist, arrested on a demonstration, keeps a secret diary. Inevitably, he is betrayed, his roll of papers and stub of pencil seized. From the darkness of solitary confinement, he is rescued only by the vanity of a warder, who needs poems to impress his educated girlfriend.
As Lomba is transferred from prison to prison, his diary peters out, and all trace of his existence is eventually lost. Habila leaves his readers with a number of possibilities about Lombas fate. Was he executed like so many others? Did his tenacity allow him to survive? Or perhaps when General Sani Abachas death ended his terrible reign, perhaps Lomba was one of those released.
This might have been how it happened, Habila writes. Lomba was seated in a dingy cell in Gashuwa, his eyes closed, his mind soaring above the glass-studded prison walls, mingling with the stars and the rain in the elemental union of freedom; then the door clanked open, and when he opened his eyes Liberty was standing over him, smiling kindly, extending an arm. And Liberty said softly, Come. It is time to go. And they left, arm in arm.
The chance of escape
Waiting for an Angel has a sinuous and subtle structure: as Lombas story is ending, the book is starting. The reader confronts, with Lomba, the arrests and the poverty, the heat and the repression, the fractured loves and the overbearing vigilance of paranoid men. All the time, at the centre, is the demonstration where, as the reader already knows, Lomba must lose his freedom.
Lombas instinct is to struggle against his fate. At first, he is tentative, an onlooker. At a rally, he feels like an impostor, unable to join the chants of the crowd. But the political voice calls to him, softy, insistently. Nigerians have been silenced. He must try to be their voice even if the effort is futile and Nigerias rulers never allow him to speak.
Lomba has his chances of escape: a bored and cynical painter invites him to bed. He turns her down, having promised to report from the protest. When the violence starts, he escapes with the wounded in a taxi, only to slip back into the action after a few blocks. His progress towards arrest is inexorable. But the arrest itself is not shown, and his disappearance from the book takes the story full circle.
Lomba is frozen, always struggling with his destiny, always on the point of capture, always maybe executed, always perhaps let free. At the end, the books message lingers: hope is not the certainty of a happy ending, but the chance of one. The writers duty is to define what is possible. In a place like Nigeria, the people are already depressed, he explains. What use is it just giving them back their depression?
Nigerias stigma
It was a terrible time to be alive. Most intellectuals had only three options: exile, complicity, or dissent. Needless to say, there was more of the first two than the last.
In the novels afterword, Habila urges his readers: Imagine yourself young, talented and ambitious, living in such a dystopia: half the world has slammed all sorts of sanctions on your country; you cannot listen to the radio without hearing your country vilified; you cannot read any international paper without seeing how much lower your country has sunk on the list of nations with poor human rights records. The weight on the psyche could be enormous; all Nigerians became stigmatized by their rulers misdeeds It was a terrible time to be alive. Most intellectuals had only three options: exile, complicity, or dissent. Needless to say, there was more of the first two than the last.
Habilas own escape, however, didnt come through arrest (youll have no problem with visas after that, you might even get an international award), but self-publishing. Nigeria may be at the heart of an exploding film industry (dubbed Nollywood, but the audience for literature is small. So he scraped savings together to publish 1,000 copies of the short stories on which Waiting for an Angel is based. Habila-the-publisher then entered Habila-the-author for the Caine Prize for African Writing.
The exiles quandary
Thanks for your mail, he wrote to the Caine Committee, when it announced its shortlist. Well let the author know of the good news immediately. We hope that God will guide the judges in their choice. When the prize was given, he had won.
Now a fellow at the University of East Anglia in England, Habila faces the familiar quandary of the exile: how to render the world he writes of, from the world he lives in? James Joyce sent his emissaries to measure up Dublin as he painted its definitive portrait from his continental home. Chinua Achebe painted many of his portraits of the disintegration of rural Africa during his time as visiting professor in Massachusetts.
Today it is the cities that bear the continents hopes, and Habila thinks Lagos still waits for its great novel. I now have a huge platform and so much to say. African literature needs to do something dramatic, something great to force itself onto the world stage.
David Steven talked to Helon Habila at the British Councils Cambridge Seminar, 5 July 2003