Book review: Frightening shadows of the past

A review of Oluwaseyi Adegun’s Shadows by Folorunsho Moshood.

IN broad daylight, humanity is in darkness. In that daylight, human beings are mere shadows of themselves. Darkness and shadow in art often portend dangerous settings. Acts of inhumanity usually take a blanket of darkness as cover. But when the acts are seen in broad daylight, the ‘Being’ in ‘Human Being’ must have been removed, which means that human beings are no longer appearing for one another. In Hannah Arendt’s Power and the Space of Appearance, it is postulated that human beings are mere humans except if they appeared for one another.

Oluwaseyi’s Shadows, written in third person narrative, deepens the reader’s understanding of what resilience and perseverance can achieve on one hand and what sheer wickedness and hatred can birth in the not-too-distant future on the other hand. The reader will get some lessons on love at first sight, hatred in the garment of love, and cruel events of the past that threaten the present and the future. Cruelty as the central theme is vividly explored to provide lively settings in the stories. This 119-page book is a collection of three short stories, ‘The Dark Vengeance’, ‘The Turnaround’ and ‘Nonso’, that touches the acts of inhumanity. This 2021 publication of New Touch International Limited, Bradford, the UK presents histrionic and gripping stories to the reader.

The first story, ‘The Dark Vengeance’, opens with a familiar tryst in a restaurant involving the protagonist, Rhema and her new found love, John Okafor. They eat, drink, dance, and discuss about their relationship. They also broach on the past that is leading them to the future. While Rhema knows much about John, he has no feeble knowledge of her because he has once been involved in an accident that made him lose his memory. Unknown to John, who has just found an ideal marriageable lady, his future with her bleaks because she is only interested in exerting revenge on the Okafors.

Oluwaseyi uses a flashback style to reveal the cruel act of Mr. Okafor as a killer and human trafficker in the past. He and his gang mercilessly killed Rhema’s parents and younger brother, and put her and her sister, Tega into trauma for life. They harvested their wombs and sold them into prostitution. Rhema survived the ordeal, but her sister was presumed dead since she could not find her. This past lingers on in the mind of Rhema, and when fate brings Okafor’s son closer to her, she relishes the opportunity of vengeance.

The story ends in horrific twists and turns that will jolt the reader into reading the entire story at a stretch.  John, oblivious of Rhema’s mission, takes her to his family house in Lagos from Abuja.

The vengeance turns dark when members of Okafor’s family are being ruthlessly killed one after the other by unknown assailant. At the end, the entire family of Okafor is wiped out by two people, who also die leaving Rhema as the only survivor of the imbroglio.

‘The Turnaround’, which is the second story, has its setting at the University of Ibadan.

It features two female students, Clara and Laura, and their boyfriend, Jide. The positive themes of the story are tolerance, contentment, perseverance, and diligence while the negative themes are jealousy, extravagance, envy, and hatred. The story is about a social war that is waged by Clara, an extrovert, on Laura, an introvert. Between Clara and Laura is Jide, who is at the vertex of the triangular relationships. The author weaves the negative themes on Clara while he allows Laura to flourish with positive themes. Whenever Clara is stepping on Laura’s toes, Laura usually finds a way of avoiding her.

Clara is also fond of complaining about Laura’s lifestyle on campus – she complains about her looks, clothes, and shoes. But Laura maintains her positive attitude towards life and living. With that approach to life, Laura easily catches the attention of friends including Jide, a boy that Clara is dying to have as a boyfriend. The fact that Jide talks more with Laura brings out the beast in Clara. She is simply jealous of Laura. The turnaround eventually comes when Laura wins a scholarship to further her education at the prestigious Harvard University in the United States of America. Everyone, including Clara, congratulates her on the achievement being facilitated by one of their lecturers, Dr. Adeyemi.

The last story in this collection, ‘Nonso,’ touches issues of kidnapping, banditry and insurgency as well as tribal and religious sentiments in Nigeria. It is a tale of the present that explores the past and predicts the future. The author uses dates and places to illustrate the past and the present as well as the settings. The movement from Kaduna to Aba, which happens in few weeks, reveals so much about Nigeria, and what the author imagines for Nigeria – a confederation being ruled by the military.

Nonso Okoye is mysteriously kidnappedalongside three other passengers by militants inside a 10-seater bus that is heading to Zaria from Kaduna. Inside the bus, Nonso is busy sending an email message to his friend, Ikechukwu Vincent who resides in Geneva when the incident occurs. The author uses the content of the email message to present the prevailing security challenges to the reader.

Nonso’s plan to be in Zaria later that day to meet his girlfriend, Fauziya is truncated, and the militants of Igbo origin take all the four kidnapped passengers towards Aba, the Eastern part of Nigeria. At the camp of the militants, events of the past in Nigeria begin to unfold. Who is Nonso Nwachukwu Okoye? How is he related to Osita Kelechi Nwachukwu Okoye? How can a newspaper of the past reveal with the present? Who is the militant group fighting against and for? Find answers to these questions in Oluwaseyi Adegun’s ‘Shadows’, which is a must-read for all and sundry.