Ayòbámi Adébáyò|A Spell of Good Things
In 2009, the Nigerian government scrapped history from the secondary school curriculum on the basis that history graduates had limited employment prospects, teachers were scarce and students generally skipped the subject. Overnight, history teachers across the country found themselves jobless, their years of imparting historical knowledge, of explaining how the nation’s past events informed the present were suddenly rendered out of step with the times, one that fanatically favoured degrees in medicine, engineering and law over all others.
This fixation on “professional” degrees, while not new, is a corollary of the global careerization of education, where the main aim of attending university isn’t expanding humanity’s understanding of itself in the world but rather finding a white-collar job that fulfils capitalism’s inexhaustible quest for production and consumption. In other words, students are programmed like automatons to function under the narrow strictures of a curriculum geared towards guaranteed, money-making careers, and, thus, learn to regard anything outside that goal with disdain, as a waste of time. As such, philosophy, literature, history and other humanities that explore the meaning of life fall by the way side, belittled for their focus on the messy nature of human existence, culture and emotional intelligence, for not yielding hard, measurable results like science and technology.
Within this warped context, the Nigerian’s government misguided decision to ditch history makes sense given it doesn't impact the economy by x amount or raise GDP by x percent in a direct, quantifiable way, indices that ostensibly indicate progress. But that line of thinking, of privileging so-called rationality over emotions, of placing numbers over lives often leads to heartless policies that not only remove human beings from the cold, calculated decision-making process but also ignore the consequences of said decisions as evinced by the recent fuel subsidy removal that has pushed millions of Nigerians, already reeling from multi-dimensional poverty, deeper into the chasm of desperation. But for investors with dollar signs for eyes, the government is on the right path to success.
Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things, is an invigorating dive into the ramifications of poor governance on a working class family and middle class one that ultimately and fatally bind them. The first of these materialises when Ẹniọlá’s father, a history teacher, loses his job following the Osun State government’s retrenchment of 4,000 teachers that include instructors for fine arts, Yoruba, religious studies and food and nutrition, courses that “would do nothing for the nation’s development” according to the governor’s aide. Slowly but surely, the family’s circumstances turn dire, his father sells his car, his mother takes to scavenging plastics in dump sites for sale, while Ẹniọlá settles for a cheaper but shoddy private school rather than one of the better-funded secondary schools his father once promised he'd attend. Even then, his parents can barely afford to pay his and his sister’s fees, which prompts regular floggings from their head teacher, one of several indignities visited on him for being poor.
On the other end of the spectrum, twenty-eight year-old Wúràọlá, leads a financially stable life as a medical doctor and daughter of a successful entrepreneur whose business sells office supplies to the government. But charming as her life may seem from the outside, the frustrations of an underfunded and understaffed healthcare system where patients are lost to preventable deaths wrought their own havoc on her psyche. Also, her middle class existence remains tenuous without the buffer of intergenerational wealth, something her mother knows all too well given her own precarious origins. It’s not surprising, then, that she invests her upkeep money in gold jewellery and land, of which the latter attracts her in-laws ire, and is particularly pleased when Wúràọlá accepts her well-connected but controlling fiancé’s marriage proposal despite him not being a doctor himself as she would have preferred.
“Real wealth,” she muses, “was intergenerational, and the way Nigeria was set up, your parentage would often matter more than your qualifications.”
The plot thickens when Wúràọlá’s fiancé’s father decides to run for governor and asks her father, his friend, for support, complicating the latter’s relationship with another aspirant, an incumbent legislator who threatens chaos if he’s not allowed to represent their political party at the gubernatorial elections. Like most Nigerian politicians, neither men possess any substantial plan for seeking office beyond attaining power for its own sake. For instance, Wúràọlá’s fiancé, who serves as his father’s campaign organiser, recycles the same, empty rhetoric of providing “better healthcare, good roads, good education” when she presses him for specifics, then rudely dismisses her clever suggestions on the ground that she doesn’t understand politics. Meanwhile, the light in Ẹniọlá’s world dims even further when his parents transfer him to a public school, where teachers rarely show up, so his more intelligent sister can continue her private education, a decision that drives him to the end of his tether into the seedy underbelly of politics.
A Spell of Good Things offers a brilliant commentary on class, sexism and political corruption, alternating between Ẹniọlá’s harsh economic situation and Wúràọlá’s financially secure yet patriarchal world, where angry patients are quick to call her a girl and marriage is seen as a woman’s crowning glory. Adébáyò’s unpretentious yet insightful prose not only infuses a visceral quality into the story, such as the joy Ẹniọlá expresses when he buys new toothbrushes for his family, but also firmly nails the narrative in a specific place with distinct particularities. Her untranslated Yoruba, un-italicised names of local food, prolific use of Nigerian slangs and regular references to indigenous musicians like Style Plus, 2Face and Lagbaja are as assertive and authentic as Burna Boy’s unadulterated Nigerian accent on the world stage. Taken together, they almost seem to say: Take it like that or leave it. Either way, e no consain me.
In a world where money confers power, public goods are non-existent, and wealth is a weapon and shield against the dehumanising whip of poverty—one conveniently exploited by rapacious, intellectually-challenged politicians who do nothing to improve the status quo so as to have an army of impoverished people at their disposal—the stakes remain high albeit to varying degrees for Nigerians of all stripes as Adébáyò beautifully demonstrates in this sobering yet brutal tale for survival between the haves and have nots.
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