Makwala

Jackson and Ende, growing up in a post-conflict and cosmopolitan Kano City slum of the early 2000s, find themselves in a world where they have to grapple with questions that relate to identity, destiny and society. While Ende is troubled by the absence of a mother he knows nothing about and a rather strange father who makes matter worse for him by withholding information regarding his mother. Jackson, a biracial boy also called Lebanese Pikin, is trapped in deep self-hate resulting from abhorrence of his mother’s prostitution. Their friendship begins on the day Ende discovers Jackson’s drawing of “a frail woman stuck against a wall by a long iron bar.” This is the beginning of a haunting narrative of hate and love, of violence and compassion, of concealment and revelation. In this cutting urban realism, the reader will encounter memorably quirky characters in a setting that reflects their precarity and their hopes. Told descriptively with the sophisticated simplicity and blending of the comic and the tragic of the author’s first novel Sterile Sky, this new novel brings our attention the deep entwinements of individual struggle with the survival of a community and, ultimately, of a postcolonial nation.