Uzodinma Iweala, Speak No Evil

Summary

The trouble with Uzodinma Iweala's first novel, Beast of No Nation is the problem of authenticity. The language of the novel is far too contrived to register a correct West African speech, whose rhetoric of the creolised, the broken Pidgin English was thoroughly insulted by Iweala, in his attempt to appropriate it in Beast of No Nation and echo its long-tenured insouciance. He failed. But Iweala's debut novel was praised roundly in the best of the metropolitan press beyond its value and, one suspects, for the wrong reasons. It was even turned into a movie with Idris Elba acting the role of a warlord. Iweala's debut was about war in Africa; topical and hot, and feeding into the unquenchable voyeurism of an audience quickly, and routinely titillated by gore in Africa. It is the kind of story by which, as the novelist Achebe once noted, Europe saw Africa and Africans as ‘a foil’ of its true self. Beast of No Nation is about child-soldiers who became victims as well as perpetrators of violence, in a war imagined as a cross between Biafra and the civil wars in Sierra Leone. The image of Africa in Iweala's novel is Conradian. It serves the kinds of imaginary fault lines that particular kinds of audiences expect of stories about Africa: war, pestilence, disease, hunger, brutality; children sent to wars by barbaric war lords who become thus evidence of the irremediable ‘bastardy’ of civilisation in postcolonial Africa. There are hints here of what I call the ‘Richburg disease’ – a condition which I ascribe to Keith Richburg, one-time African correspondent for the Washington Post, whose book Out of America: A Black man confronts Africa (2009), now one of the great classics of the genre of Afro-pessimism, details with pure outrage, the historical and moral failures of Africa and its great poverty and violence, to the point that he thanked his God that his African ancestors were captured as slaves and taken out of Africa; otherwise, he suggested, ‘I would have been one of them, now’. But he is not. ‘Thank God I am an American.’