Violence, the first literary work by Dr. Festus Iyayi and published in the Longman Drumbeats series in 1979 was one of the first novels I read as a young man just leaving High School. I will never forget the impact this novel had on me several years after I dropped it. Nor can I forget the striking similarity between Dr. Iyayi’s Violence and Meja Nwangi’s Going Down River Road, the latter having appeared in the now rested Heinemann African Writers Series, and a rival of the Longman’s Drumbeats series. Violence is probably Festus Iyayi’s greatest work.
While Going Down River Road was set in a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, Iyayi’s violence was set in Nigeria. But both shared the theme of the sufferings of the down-trodden and workers exploitation in post-independent Africa. They both told the stories of young people, living in slums and struggling to survive amidst grinding poverty wrought by misrule and mismanagement of resources in post-colonial Africa of the 1970s. Political independence was supposed to provide the medicinal leaf by attending to the socio-economic needs and aspirations of a people enslaved for decades the West. But that was not the case as x-rayed by the Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah in his magnum opus, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
In Violence, Festus Iyayi told the poignant story of a young man called Idemudia and his young wife, Adisa. Poverty and hardship forced Idemudia to retort to selling of his blood for money and working at a building site (as in Going Down River Road) where he (along with other menial workers) were exploited by capitalist business men.
Dr. Iyayi effectively mirrored a heartless society that had little sympathy for the weak and down-trodden. Interestingly, Dr. Iyayi’s Nigeria of 1970’s was no different from the Nigeria of today. Nothing has changed. Any wonder Festus Iyayi died in the circumstance he did?
This fantastic novels ends with Idemudia’s wife being forced to commit adultery in a desperate bid to save her husband’s life when he took ill and had no money. Even when Idemudia got to know what transpired on recovery, the bond between husband and wife only became closer. It was a most moving novel and although, I read it decades ago, it was as if I read it only yesterday. It was a very good story and it was well told.
In 1982, Festus Iyayi published his second novel, The Contract also from the stables of the famous Longman Drumbeats series. It was also a story of corruption in contemporary Nigeria. It was the story of a Nigeria where women’s thighs were turned into tables where contracts for the award of contract were signed. That was Nigeria of the 1980s and 70s. Today, the situations have degenerated. Public officer now award the contract to themselves.
Festus Iyayi’s third novel, Heroes was also published by Longman in 1986. In this award winning novel (he got the 1987 Commonwealth Prize for it), Iyayi laments the tragedy of the Nigerian civil war which he blamed on British imperialism. As far as Iyayi was concerned, the war was an investment in blood and the beneficiary was the West who instigated it in the first instance. It told the story of a Benin man who put his life on the line to convey the corpse of an Igbo man to the latter’s home town. Like Violence, it was another moving novel told with lots of sympathy for the victims of the war across the divide. Heroes are a novel every Nigerian must read.
His last work, Awaiting Court Martial (Malthouse Press, 1996) was a collection of his short stories and was also well received by the reading public.
Nigeria and indeed Africa has lost an outstanding voice in the passage of this great son of Africa. May his great soul rest in peace.
Patrick Tagbo Oguejiofor is the Vice Chairman of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Abuja Chapter.
Sahara reporters
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