AiW Guest: Ademola Adesola.

Ademola with his copy of Akande’s novel

Lola Akande’s latest novel, The Truth about Sadia (Tunmike Publishers, 2023), follows Sadia Onaolapo Oyelowo’s journey from childhood to adulthood. Set in a recognizable Lagos, Nigeria, so crucial is Sadia to the novel that every “truth” it relates, every misfortune in any of the other characters’ experience, stems from their connection to her. 

As well as Sadia’s positioning, perhaps equally central to this novel’s explorations of its characters’ interconnections is the city setting. The narrative unfolds within the late 90s and early 2000s in a Lagos whose multi-dimensionality is as confounding as it is compelling. Through this, Lagos and other adjoining city spaces, such as Ibadan, come forcefully alive. Coupled to this liveliness, Akande’s use of various Englishes facilitates the emergence of her characters, each with distinct personalities. Taken together, Nigerian English, Yoruba English, and other variations of non-standard English provide a vivid and graphic backdrop against which the events of characters’ lives are enacted. This closely mirrors the dense multi-dialectical nature of real-life Lagos and its many “truths” of existence in the city. 

Sadia’s troubles, and so those of all of the characters in the novel, begin after her father, Pa Oyelowo, decides that her elder brother, Akin, must give up his pursuit of higher education. Following his excellent school grades, Akin hopes to gain admission to university. However, his father redirects this ambition so Akin can support the family financially and help pay, instead, for Sadia’s education. In a streak of revenge, Akin then determines to make Sadia’s life meaningless. What follows are his marred attempts to punish her. 

Although he enlists the service of a medicine man to redirect the course of Sadia’s life as unfit for marriage, she does eventually wed Mofeoluwa Bolarinwa. However, her husband is plagued by an addiction to drugs that is, moreover, encouraged by her brother-in-law, Uncle Aremo. Despite this, Sadia does have a child with Mofeoluwa, Sesan, who she raises largely on her own with her meager income as a school teacher. The story then takes an even darker turn, after which Sadia must consider her future.

The Truth About Sadia is told in a linear, third-person narrative. In light of this narrative direction, organisationally, Akande’s decision to divide the novel’s 299 pages into a prologue, 27 chapters, and an epilogue has interesting effects. Notably, the prologue not only serves to foreshadow the characters and events that go on to eke out the rounded believability of the titular premise; it also presages one of the main narrative devices, namely keen visual imagery, which is then employed to suspenseful effect in the plotting. Akin’s medicine man “infects” Sadia with a repellent spiritual “maggot”, satanically designed to re-engineer her so she is off-putting to men. While Sadia’s marriage defies this, crucially, in what ensues, there are several scenes and people that are presented to be both morally and ethically repulsive, blurring lines and crossing boundaries. This provides a consistent recall of the circumstances established by the inferences of the early worm-like imagery. 

Significant as the prologue is then in the unfolding reading experience, its connective strength also raises questions relating to the plot and its eponymous character that are indicative. Sadia is a devoted, numinous mother, particularly given the difficult circumstances of her marriage. This encourages the reader to look beyond the surface and to draw out Sadia’s admirable qualities — her strength, determination and loyalty, despite being surrounded by some incorrigibly poisonous people — as a triumphant self-possession, that works against the intentionally inverse, pre-determining nature of her brother’s earlier plotting. However, another, careful reading of the novel is also available, one which inspires a question as to whether there is potential disconnect between what the prologue projects and what is encountered in the ensuing story. What, for instance, is the nature of the connection between the spiritual maggot Sadia is laced with and Mofe’s travails? Who, between Akin and Uncle Aremo, is more significant to the darker plot lines snaking their way through her life?

Given such silences, a reader may well wonder what would be lost if the prologue were skipped over, or even removed altogether. In an associated sense, the reader may also find themselves questioning the motivation behind some of the frequent authorial intrusions. While the character displacements of the omniscient voice are important in guiding the reader, holding together some of the complex narrative threads, at times, an authorial figure could be discerned, a presence that becomes somewhat disruptive in the closeness between its voice and characters’ thoughts.

This lack of “showing” in favour of “telling”, alongside the gaps and the drops in verisimilitude that the prologue initiates, may not necessarily be enriching, breaking the reading flow. But no such concerns are evident in Akande’s presentation of Lagos. A kaleidoscopic manifestation, in The Truth About Sadia, the city-scape is a culmination of Akande’s keen observational skills combined with the more fulfilling aspects of the allusive qualities in the writing. It recalls the memorable assertion of novelist and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o that “literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given shape, impetus and direction by what is going on in a particular society” (p.xv). 

In chapter four, for example, the novel depicts the infamous Lagos traffic that is a daily struggle for residents and visitors alike, describing it as “hellish” to travel to work in the morning and a “nightmare of intractable traffic and bad roads” in the evening (p.36). Akande also utilises these skills to highlight the overpopulation in some areas of Lagos through a tour of its various neighborhoods. Bariga is “densely populated and with a varied reputation,” as the narrator explains:  

“It was home of the legendary CMS Grammar School, the oldest secondary school in the country, as well as Methodist Boys’ High School. It was also home to some movie stars and music icons like Obesere, Olamide, 9ice and Lil Kesh. Prominent tertiary institutions such as the University of Lagos and the Federal College of Education, Technical were just down the road” (p.36-37).

The density in these observations jostle up against the less tangible, more relational nature of the experience of Akande’s Lagos. There are hints at the reputation of areas: Oshodi Under Bridge, a place where “the unfortunate class of homeless Lagosians” finds refuge (p.72); the novel provides a glimpse of “the fame and infamy of Allen Avenue,” (p.283), a known locale where sex workers operate (p.283). Additionally, through the commutes of Akande’s characters, popular areas and bus stops such as Unilag Junction, Yaba Tech, WAEC, Under Bridge, Abule Egba, and Iyana-Ipaja come alive, so, too, the mannerisms of bus conductors and motor park boys: 

“‘Oga mi, wole kanle, eleyi gbomo,’” – “My boss, you need to park properly; this passenger has a child with them” (p.74).

The phrase “wole kanle” is a sexually suggestive statement that is familiar to frequent riders of Lagos’ popular yellow buses, linking the streets they travel together with this particular thread.

In other words, Akande does not only reveal the glamorous side of Lagos, but also a range of challenges that its residents face, providing us with a more nuanced portrait of the city. While some informed readers might rightly claim that some of the Lagosian scenes in the novel belong to the past, these portrayals of old Lagos perform the vital work of memorialization. Lagos’ overwhelming vivacity and vigor – its social inequities and iniquities; its segregated ghettos; its ostensibly gentrified and manicured spaces; its glitz, glamour, and hideousness; its punishing and time-thieving traffic debacles; and its profile as a land of opportunities and prosperities – this is a square portrayal of the city that Odia Ofeimun observes in his comprehensive Editor’s preface to the anthology, Lagos of the Poets (Hornbill House of the Arts, 2010), as a site considered by many to be “the Archmedian standpoint for the dreams and pursuits of everyday life” (p.xx).

In representing the cultural and socio-economic facets of life in Lagos – variously described in the novel as “the city by the lagoon” (p.108), “this dreadful city” (p.131), and “the city of cities” (p.204) – Akande’s novel finds a place among several other imaginative works whose setting is Lagos State. Such works include Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), the famous precursor to novels like Wole Soyinka’s Interpreters (1965), and to others as diverse as Ben Okri’s The Landscapes Within (1981), Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004), Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005), Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Toni Kan’s The Carnivorous City (2016), Chibundu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018).   

Together with those aforementioned, The Truth about Sadia celebrates Lagos’ different eras and depicts it as a city with a complex and diverse character of its own, as well as those of the lives it helps to determine. This is a novel with a highly entertaining exploration of the avoidable tragedies and existential dilemmas that Sadia and other characters face, where suspense, paradox, irony, and humor are all used with intelligence to examine important themes. Furthermore, in one of the novel’s primary strengths, through the characters’ more difficult inclinations, The Truth About Sadia addresses salient issues such as mental health, drug addiction, kinship, and motherhood. In so doing, it manages to maintain a positive didactic quality that makes it useful for complementing the cultivation of young people’s minds and behaviours. In this sense, its endorsement by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency is not surprising.

Indeed, all readers will find in the novel such gems of ideas that invite scrutiny of what it means to be human in various critical contexts of their lives. Akande’s novel reinforces the idea that works of art set in real places can teach newcomers about the unique qualities of those spaces, and the shaping forces they hold for those who encounter them. What is noteworthy here is that the novel’s depiction of all the “truths”, the complexities and paradoxes of human behaviour it relates, eventually transcends the city in which it is set, thereby echoing Chinua Achebe’s conclusion to his notable essay, ‘The Truth of Fiction’, that there is significant truth in the fiction that imparts to us deeper knowledge of what it means to be human.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. ‘The Truth of Fiction.’ Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-87, edited by Chinua Achebe, Heinemann International, 1988, pp. 95-105.

Akande, Lola. The Truth About Sadia. Tunmike Pages, 2023.

Ofeimun, Odia. ‘Preface to Lagos of the Poets.’ Lagos of the Poets, edited by Odia Ofeimun, Hornbill House, 2002, pp. xiv-xl.

wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. Homecoming. Lawrence Hill Books, 1973.

Dr. Ademola Adesola is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada. Ademola’s research and teaching interests are postcolonial studies, African and Black diaspora literatures, child soldier narratives, war and literature, popular culture, and human rights. Ademola’s research and teaching emphasize the celebration of differences. Ademola has published essays and book chapters on African and Black literatures and sociopolitical issues. 

Ademola’s current project is on representations of child soldiers in African narratives.

Lola Akande is a Nigerian academic and fiction writer. who teaches African Literature in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos. She has published three novels and a collection of short stories: her first novel, In Our Place, was published in 2012 by Macmillan Nigeria Publishers Limited; the award winning What It Takes followed in 2016; and her latest novel, The Truth about Sadia, is endorsed by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA). A collection of short stories, Suitors Are Scarce, won the Association of Nigerian Authors award for Short Story in 2022.

Among other academic publications is her monograph, The City in the African Novel – A Thematic Rendering of Urban Spaces (Lagos: Tunmike Pages).

Photo by Lola Akande.

Find The Truth About Sadia available at various outlets.

And read Carli Coetzee’s AiW review of Akande’s novel, What it Takes, ‘Self-help as Warfare: Lola Akande’s campus novel and What it Takes to be a Woman who Succeeds on a University Campus‘, which opens:

The title of Lola Akande’s novel What it Takes can be interpreted in more than one way. The novel can be read as a celebratory narrative of the extraordinary achievements of the protagonist, Funto Oyewole, as she faces the challenges and difficulties on her path to completing her PhD thesis and becoming “Doctor Oyewole”. She has, one might say, “what it takes” to overcome the many obstacles in her way. As we near the end of the novel, she prepares for her graduation in the company of a man who has many of the qualities she desires in an equal partner. Yet this optimistic reading of the novel as an account of how she comes to have it all hides the darker meanings of the title. The novel is also an account of the high cost to her, and of what it took, and takes, for a woman academic to achieve her goals.

Categories: Research, Studies, Teaching, Reviews & Spotlights on...

Tags: Ben Okri’s The Landscapes Within (1981), Chibundu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004), Davina Philomena Kawuma, Katie Reid, Lagos, Lola Akande, Nigeria, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005), Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Toni Kan’s The Carnivorous City (2016)