Here’s a story full of spirits and spooks, wizards and witches, demons and monsters, and just about every conceivable mystical, mythical and magical phenomena you could ever imagine. Not exactly the stuff you would expect Sporting Polemics to be bothering itself with. O contraire! This is a book firmly rooted in the reality of today. Employing the literary technique of magical realism, so brilliantly pioneered a decade earlier by a Mr Rushdie, Okri is able to shine a fierce spotlight on Africa’s rural poverty and thwarted dreams like no dry political text book could ever hope to do. In fact, the more fanciful the images that Okri summons up, the greater the impact of his prose when directed at the day to day impoverishment of Nigerian village life.

A few months ago, or possibly even a few years ago, I recall reading a UN report that proclaimed that for the first time in human history, more of us were living in cities and urban conurbations than in rural settings. When exactly that statistical moment arrived is neither here nor there; the point to be made is that a process of urbanisation has been gathering pace relentlessly throughout the twentieth century, and is now showing an almost exponential growth in the twenty-first. Okri situates his gripping story precisely at this transitional juncture he transition zone between village and giant sprawling cities. The picture he paints is one of an impoverished village ghetto somewhere on the outskirts of an equally impoverished city separated from each other by thick forest. But that forest, although home to any number of spirits both benign and malevolent, is under remorseless attack by modernity, as once impenetrable forest tracts give way to newly bitumised roads.

Steadily, over days and months, the paths had been widening. Bushes were being burnt, tall grasses cleared, tree stumps uprooted. The area was changing. Places that were thick with bush and low trees were now becoming open spaces. In the distance I could hear the sounds of dredging, of engines, of road builders, forest clearers, and workmen chanting as they strained their muscles. Each day the area seemed different. Houses appeared where parts of the forest had been. Places where children used to play and hide were now full of sandpiles and rutted with house foundations. There were signboards on trees. The world was changing and I went on wandering as if everything would always be the same. P122

But the modernity that Okri sees is one of ruthless personal ambition, greed and brutality.

There is little doubting where Okri’s sympathies lay. He is, like his contemporary novelist, Arundhati Roy, a fierce champion of the downtrodden, the oppressed and the impoverished. But the enemy is not just the white western capitalist. Those that seek advancement at the expense of the simple villagers are both white and black, foreign and home-grown. Here is the party of the rich making its election promises just before they try to bribe the villages with poisoned milk:

VOTE FOR US, WE ARE THE PARTY OF THE RICH, FRIENDS OF THE POOR
The poor have no friends, someone in the crowd said. Only rats.
IF YOU VOTE FOR US
we are finished someone added.
WE WILL FEED YOUR CHILDREn
lies
WE WILL BRING YOU GOOD ROADS
which the rain will turn into gutters!
AND WE WILL BRING YOU ELECTRICITY
so you can see better how to rob us!
AND WE WILL BIULD YOU SCHOOLS
to teach illiteracy
AND HOSPITALS. WE WILL MAKE YOU RICH LIKE US. THERE IS PLENTY FOR EVERYBODY. PLENTY OF FOOD, PLENTY OF POWER. VOTE FOR UNITY AND POWER. P145

And what of the poor? Okri excels at painting a picture of their intolerable poverty.

As I walked down our street, under the persistence of the yellow sun, with everything naked, the children bare, the old men with exhausted veins pumping on dried-up foreheads, I was frightened by the feeling that there was no escape from the hard things of this world. Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds, the stark huts, the rusted zinc abodes, the rubbish on the streets, children in rags, the little girls naked on the sand playing with crushed tin-cans, the little boys jumping about un circumcised, making machine-gun noises, the air vibrating with poisonous heat and evaporating water from filthy gutters. The sun bared the reality of our lives and everything was so harsh it was a mystery that we could understand and care for one another or for anything at all. P189

The action takes place in the years leading up to Nigerian Independence, but Okri is adamant that independence alone will not alleviate the suffering of the rural poor. Foreign politicians and money grubbing landlords will quickly be replaced by local ones whether they belong to the party of the rich or the party of the poor.

If I was to find fault with Okri’s vision, it is that it relies overly on individual enlightenment. The dialectic between individual empowerment and collective organisation is skewered heavily towards the former. There is a noticeable scepticism of political organisation (probably well founded) that leaves the onus on the individual to stick to the road ahead no matter how brutal and famished that road becomes. One of the key protagonists does dream of organising the beggars and his fellow desperadoes but in the end the reader is left not with collective social organisation but with an individual’s spiritual journey.

But Okri’s invocation of a spiritualism and a fatalism and his apparent belief in a true and caring god does not detract one iota from a powerful political and social materialism that shines through every page of this towering achievement of a novel.While he takes his readers through a quite magical roller-coaster ride between his imaginary spirit world, Okri never, ever loses sight of the poverty and political corruption that blights so many of his fellow countrymen. Somehow, after reading the famished road, Africa seems a whole lot closer, a whole lot more real than it did before. A worthy booker prize winner A good way to close is with a passage that perfectly encapsulates both the harsh materialism and the idealistic spiritualism that Okri is able to so eloquently summon and combine at will.

When white people first came to our land we had already gone to the moon and all the great stars. In the olden days they used to come and learn from us. My farther used to tell me that we taught them how to count. We taught them about the stars. We gave them some of our gods. We shared our knowledge with them. We welcomed them. But they forgot all this. They forgot many things. They forgot that we are all brothers and sisters and that black people are the common ancestors of the human race. The second time they came they brought guns. They took our lands, burned our gods, and they carried away many of our people to become slaves across the sea. They are greedy. They want to own the whole world and to conquer the sun. Some of them believe they have killed God. Some of them worship machines. They are misusing the powers God gave us all. They are not all bad. Learn from them, but love the world. P325

Substitute the word nature for God and you have a powerful an anti-imperialist, pro-humanity sentiment that you will find from any modern novelist. It is not the spirits and gods that reverberate in the memory of the reader, but rather the universal humanism that Okri so brilliantly espouses.