Cassava Republic Press - Two Novels

Founded in 2006, Cassava Republic’s mission is to ‘change the way we all think about African writing.  We think that contemporary African prose should be rooted in African experience in all its diversity, whether set in filthy-yet-sexy megacities such as Lagos or Kinshasa, in little-known rural communities, in the recent past or indeed the near future.’ Ten years on, Cassava is publishing in the UK for the first time, with launch titles Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika and Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle, novels which reflect the diversity of the company’s list.

Primarily set in San Francisco, Like a Mule… tells the story of a 75 year old woman, Marayo. Living independently in the city, Marayo is still an active member of the community; on the eve of her 75th birthday, she is planning a tattoo, socialising and keeping up to date with art and literature, while her narration shows she still has an active libido. All this changes when a fall suddenly sends her to the Good Life Rehabilitation Centre.

From this point, the novel separates into multiple perspectives, and we learn that Marayo’s narrative is not totally reliable, though she doesn't realise it herself. From the outside, the reader can see the details which Marayo has overlooked, the increasingly chaotic state of her apartment, the strange purchases she has made. Ladipo Manyika draws a parallel between Marayo’s gradual decline, the gap between her self-image and reality, and the expatriate’s nostalgic view of Nigeria, which she remembers as 'the warmest, most generous place on earth' where 'Muslims celebrated Christmas and Christians broke the fast during Ramadan with their Muslim brothers and sisters', but the narration tells us was also the site of a massacre on 9/11, and is now under threat from Boko Haram.

Despite this, Like a Mule... is a largely optimistic novel. Marayo is able to draw on her heritage to inspire the people around her, including the husband of a woman with dementia, a young black chef who has never been to Africa, and a homeless white woman who sleeps in her neighbourhood. Like a Mule balances a warm emotional pitch with memorable characters and a subtle prose style.

Talking about the representation of displaced people, nomads and refugees in literature, Sarah Ladipo Manyika says:

Let me tell you a true story – all true except for the names of real life characters, which I’ve changed for the purpose of this piece. Last week, I gathered the courage to talk to the Palestinian shopkeeper (I’ll call him Salim) on whom my fictional character, Dawud, is based. I asked Salim if he'd be willing to read, out loud, two pages of my novel so that I could hear the intonation of his voice, which would serve as a guide for me when I had to read the fictional character’s section aloud. He agreed and suggested we go for a coffee to talk about it. We went to a nearby cafe and as I read the two pages in which my character appears, tears started rolling down Salim’s face. "I don't know why I'm crying," he said, "I think it's because you've seen me, you really see me."

Eventually, once we'd both got past our tears, Salim asked me to tell him more about my writing. When I explained that I'd just finished a piece on our neighbourhood, focusing on the homeless, he told me an incredible story of how he’d once spent some years helping to pull an older white man out of homelessness. The story was written up in the local papers more than a decade ago, but what's in the public story is only half of what really happened. Apparently Oprah Winfrey read the story and tried hard to get Salim and Billy (the formerly homeless man) to appear on her show, but they both refused, each reluctant to be cast as heroes. I asked Salim if he and Billy might allow me write the full story. He said he'd love that.

There is something so incredibly powerful about Salim and Billy’s story, the story of an Arab immigrant helping a white American, especially in the climate of hate and fear that appears to have returned to the U.S. in the wake of recent election campaigning. And now, maybe one day an African immigrant will write their story. All this to say that there are many, many stories – both fictional and true, on the subject of refugees and the displaced, that are just waiting to be told.

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Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist, by contrast, is a Lagos-based thriller with hints of Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. While Marayo remembered Nigeria’s capital as ‘a flamboyant and crazy megacity’, Adenle’s novel exposes the city’s dark side: prostitution, corruption, black magic and murder.

Easy Motion Tourist was inspired in part by the 2001 murder of an unidentified African boy in London. The case has never been solved, but it was strongly rumoured that the boy’s body parts had been ‘harvested’, for use in black magic rituals. The novel begins with Guy, a white British journalist, travelling to Nigeria to cover an election for a minor news website. Whilst he is investigating the local nightlife, he inadvertently witnesses the mutilated body of a prostitute being dumped at the roadside, and is one of many onlookers taken in for questioning by police. He is rescued by Amaka, a campaigner who is determined to expose the corruption of Lagos’s elite.

Amaka shows Guy the difference between the public appearance of the Nigerian establishment, and their public behaviour. Through her work with the charity Street Samaritans, she has developed a spreadsheet detailing the sexual habits of powerful men, unveiling the mixture of power, sadism and greed which characterises their lifestyle. Amaka takes a hands-on approach to her investigative work, seducing and drugging people she suspects of being involved. Guy is less forceful, being guided largely by chance and error. He is often mistaken for someone more influential than he is (a misapprehension which he is not quick to correct), and his involvement in the story is largely down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A sub-plot adds an element of farce, as various low-level gangsters cross and double-cross one another, in the hope of gaining favour with the wealthy men who control the trade in women and body-parts. There is an understated humour beneath the novel’s critique of Lagos society, as in Adenle’s description of a girl sent to live with 'a distant relative who made her sleep on the floor in the sitting room, next to the driver and the house girl, who were on intimate terms... in that first year, Florentine lost twenty kilograms and failed half of her courses'.

There are a number of loose ends at the novel’s finish, clearly leaving the way open for a sequel, and there is enough intrigue in the characters and their situations to make this worthwhile.

Talking about his novel, Adenle says:

The idea for Easy Motion Tourist came from a conversation with my mother and two of my brothers. Whenever the four of us get together we always have long, spirited, discussions that branch into related, slightly related, and unrelated issues as such discussions tend to do. Sometimes they are debates. No topic is ever taboo.

My mother, long retired, used to be director general for women’s affairs in Oyo state where we grew up. On this particular evening we had been discussing violence against women and how sex workers are particularly vulnerable, part of the reason being that prostitution is illegal in Nigeria, and part of it being the laws, or interpretations of the law, that are unfair to women.
We were soon talking about the naked bodies dumped on public roads. Usually young women, usually naked, usually missing body parts or organs or both. The preference seems to be for breasts. Even though no arrests ever seem to be made, after thorough investigations that never seem to take place, everyone knows who the victims are, what the motive is, and who's responsible: prostitutes, black magic, and voodoo priests. In that order.

A thought occurred to me as we discussed the morbid, disturbing, vexatious issues, and I knew I had solved a crime, found a way to prevent the crime, or both, and I had to share. Such was the strength of my believe in my epiphany, that I went home that evening and started writing. A chapter a day, until the first draft was done.

I did not consciously set out to tackle the difficult issues of violence against women, black magic rituals involving human sacrifice, and trade in human organs, but once the story landed in my mind whole with its alarming plot, I had no choice but to write it down. It’s almost like a quid pro quo. I got to write the novel, the victims get to have their stories told.