A Review of Femi Ademuluyis New Man: The New Man Femi Ademiluyi’s “The New Man” is a contemporary Nigerian novel, first published in 1994. In it the author tackles the perennial problems of inter-ethnic conflicts and corruption in politics and social life that have plagued the country since before its 1960 independence. Ademiluyi does not so much tackle the problems, rather he lays them bare again in a narrative built around the central figure of a young government official. We meet the young official, Ayo Badejo, as a 25 year old agricultural science graduate newly posted as Produce Inspector to Ipaja Village – a hilly community somewhere in the Banwuya tropics. The year is 1959 and Banwuya is preparing for the last general elections before independence from British colonists. Everyone in the village is at first surprised at the youth of the new Produce Inspector, but such appointments were not unusual for the period – a critical period of transition when colonial officials were having to handover many aspects of government administration to invariably young native graduates. When young Badejo comes to Ipaja, his righteous idealism worry the leaders of the village who are better used to older men as produce inspectors, with understanding and appreciation of their ways. But none of their concerns makes any good impression on the new and young produce inspector. Badejo is a man on a self-appointed mission to save the village from itself. It is his determination to bring change to the community and teach them to appreciate and accept the benefits he would bring them. Ayo Badejo’s dreams are not limited to this rural village. He feels “certain that he could only have been born, and could only have survived the great odds of penury because Fate had a mission for him. He concluded that the mission must be to liberate and unite the whole of Africa…” P. 24 He would liberate Africa, beginning from his own country, Banwuya; and in the process he would create the detribalized “New Man,” an ideal citizen, devoid of corruption and much of the weaknesses of contemporary man. The idea of the “new man” is not original, as we are made to know in the novel, it is borrowed from Hitler’s Nazism. Such ideas, and his attack on their established ways of doing things, inevitably bring Badejo into direct conflict with the Ipaja villagers. Not surprisingly Badejo fails in his bid to ‘save’ the village and, from there, begins a headlong downward spiral that sees him betraying every ideal and pledge that he seemingly held to heart. A man who had proclaimed it his life’s work to save the people from evil and backwardness turns around to blame the “rabble” for his downfall. In the end Badejo had become the very evil he had initially set out to conquer. Even though Ademiluyi sets this novel in a fictional nation called Banwuya, it is obvious that his real interest and subject matter is his own country – the very real nation of Nigeria. His descriptions of inter-ethnic squabbles between Ipaja and Iwuya villages mirror the goings-on in the real country. Even the timeline of events in the novel coincide exactly with Nigeria’s historical development – from pre-independence and beyond. The division of the fictional Banwuya into two provinces of the Tropics and the Sahel also mirrors the south/north divide of the real Nigeria. The name “Banwuya” obviously derived from the fictional Wuya River which bisects the country, mirrors the naming logic of the naming Nigeria which is derived from the River Niger. Ademiluyi makes no attempt at objectivity in this novel. He inserts himself without guise into the novel, playing the role of a journalist and groupie after the beautiful singer and lover of Ayo Badejo, Sade. This lack of objectivity is one of the reasons that make it difficult to suspend unbelief as one reads the novel. For instance, it is difficult to appreciate why Sade or even Chimezie, the acolyte, would remain so dedicated to such a self-centered and vacuous character as Ayo Badejo. Perhaps, the fault here is that the author did not succeed in constructing a believably great but flawed character in Badejo. Ademiluyi appears unable unsnarl himself from the peculiar psychology the novel is meant to explore and explicate. He remains trapped in that psychology, unconsciously floating along the well-beaten routes of a familiar narrative – the political seascape of Nigeria – without ever truly penetrating it to dig up something new, something enlightening. One other problem is the setting of some of the ideas in the novel. Social and political ideas originating in the late 20th to early 21st centuries have no business being mouthed by mid 20th century colonials, unless we are dealing with science fiction where time travel is made possible. This is the type of problem we have, early in the novel, where a young Sade and Badejo are discussing feminist ideas that could only have arisen in1970s America, not colonial Africa of the late 1950s. In the same token, the political arguments of later-day Western apologists for the plight of the “developing world” could not believably be considered part of the ruminations of a pre-independence African intellectual. The novel is replete in cant, whether in the ideas attributed to Badejo, the anti-hero, and many of the other characters; or in the situations described. For the fictional Banwuya we see regurgitated the usual clichés about the ills that plague Nigeria; but there is no added value in the way of useful insights. Ademiluyi may have been trying to (but he did not succeed in this novel) rocket-launch the popular ideas and complaints concerning Nigeria beyond the gold-fish bowl universe of colonial and post-colonial verities. Despite intentions, where that is the case, the novel remains moored and churning in place, held there by the mad gravitational pull of the contemporary Nigerian situation. In any case, Ademiluyi has written an important novel which is included as required reading for Nigerian students of literature. This is one of the reasons a good review of this novel is required. The novel is important because it provides a different setting and focus for discussing important Nigerian issues. Because this is a work of fiction it is possible to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the work and consider issues raised from a literature point of view without generating the kind of opposition and closures that can occur in purely political discourses. For these reasons alone, Ademiluyi should be commended for his literary effort.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 11:38:45 +0000
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