The Forger's Tale: The Search for Odeziaku (review)

The Forger's Tale: The Search for Odeziaku is the biography of John Murray Stuart-Young (1881-1939). Stephanie Newell opens the book with a scene that has historic importance, when several thousand Nigerians gathered on the streets of Onitsha in 1939 to take part in mourning a British trader and writer. At the time, Stuart-Young, who was supposed to have been related to Oscar Wilde, had lived among the Igbo people of the then Eastern Nigeria for not less than three decades.

As Newell details for her readers, Stuart-Young had left Manchester, England, for Nigeria and had chosen to settle in Onitsha. The title of the publication reflects the fact that Stuart-Young had left behind in the United Kingdom what was considered to be a criminal record—indeed, a history of forgery and embezzlement. In Nigeria, he started life with a clean slate, as he began to trade in palm oil and concentrate on his writing.

As her facts underscore, Newell searched for clues among Stuart-Young's Nigerian hosts. She provides her readers a rich piece of African history. The book has eight chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. In an elaborate and lucid introduction, Newell discusses how her subject's life story had in effect been buried beneath imperial history. She uses the opening chapter to discuss several aspects of what she terms "forging ahead the secret gentleman of Ardwick Green" (chapter one), and she utilizes chapter two to discuss several aspects of Stuart-Young's dealings in palm oil. Confirming Stuart-Young's literary links, the third chapter traces "fragments of Oscar Wilde in Colonial Nigeria." The remaining chapters deal with Stuart-Young's past romantic world (providing an Igbo name for him and its politics), how cordially he was treated in the Nigerian press, his class act, and his poetic escapades (chapters five through eight).

In the words of critics and commentators, Newell tells an engaging story, which uniquely deals with a subject that, in varied ways, enriches our understanding of the history of Africa and Britain. March Epprecht, for example, sees The Forger's Tale in both fascinating and important perspectives. The author writes: "The colonial setting allowed Stuart-Young to relinquish his own subordinate working-class identity and take up the position of a philanthropic gentleman" (p. 83). In the conclusion, readers learn that, while in Nigeria "and for most of his life, he remained in his Little House of No Regrets on New Market Road, managing several small stores around town" (p. 161).