The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories, and: The Remains of the Last Emperor, and: Bulletin from the Land of the Living Ghosts: Romance in the Reign of Commander Cobra (review)

Funso Aiyejina—born in Nigeria but presently living in Trinidad, where he is a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies—is best known as a poet. His first collection, A Letter to Lynda and Other Poems, won the Association of Nigerian Authors' prize in 1989. His poems also can be found in a number of anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, wherein he is described by editors as "one of Nigeria's finest satirists" (413).

Now Aiyejina has turned his keen, penetrating vision to another genre, the short story, with an auspicious debut, The Legend of the Rockhills, which won the Best First Book award for Africa in the 2000 Commonwealth Writers competition. Aiyejina has characterized his own upbringing as "a combination of the rural and the cosmopolitan" ("I Am Interested in Words") and this is evident in The Legend of the Rockhills. Written in clear, straightforward style, these stories highlight some of the contradictions still haunting Africa in the period long after things ostensibly fell apart, even after the following heady moment of independence when things were going to be put right. Like a number of other contemporary African authors, Aiyejina shows us that while, on one level, things keep falling apart, deeper down, at the bedrock of culture, they stubbornly endure.

In "The New Pastor," for instance, a Christian minister clashes unsuccessfully with a persistent "heathenism," in the process revealing the narrowness of the "new" dispensation in comparison with the greater tolerance of the old. When his parishioners persist in honoring an ancient ancestral ritual, Pastor John demands they abandon it in the name of the single truth his faith proclaims, despite an elder church member's insistence that "Every society has its own customs . . . and in every custom, the people must have seen something good before adhering to it" (19). Another elder advises him, "One of our proverbs insists that a woman attends whichever market best suits her needs. If two markets suit a woman, let her attend both" (17). He stubbornly ignores this wisdom, with unsettling consequences for himself and his rigid beliefs.

Many of the stories deal in one way or another with the vagaries and common viciousness of the military regimes that have vexed Nigeria and other African countries in the wake of independence. In fact Aiyejina has gone so far as to declare that colonialism was not as bad as "the destruction wreaked by forty years of military dictatorships" (see Albinia). The opening tale, form which the volume draws it title, ends with the soldiers' apparent victory over the people of a village, while the concluding story, "State Burial for the Chief," ends with the assassination of the dictator of the moment—though what this will lead to is not at all certain, despite the assassin's imagining "his vindication by history" (152). Aiyejina is only too aware of the fact that the demise of one tyrant has often signaled the ascension to power of yet another of the same ilk (see the conclusion of "The Governor's Tree," for example).

In view of his outrage at the indignities heaped upon his nation and his continent, Aiyejina exercises an admirable control, maintaining an ironic distance in most cases. He is able, too, to mix the comic with the serious in order to remind us that life remains complicated despite our oftentimes narrowly focused concerns. In "The Brand-New Chair," for instance, academic politics is rendered all the more arcane and absurd in comparison with the politics on the national scale...