Wahala By Nikki May: A Review

 

Nikki May says she wrote Wahala because she wanted to see herself in a book — middle-class, mixed-race Nigerian living in Britain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iq5NJMhxL8. It’s a novel inspired by a “long and very loud lunch with her Nigerian friends in London”.  That aspiration has been met. She also believes the success of the book will mean that she has been forgiven for dropping out of medical school. She shares this characteristic with a character in the novel. The average helicopter Nigerian parent sparingly forgives such acts but it’s not unknown to happen.  

Three female best friends based in London have a close bond. They share several characteristics, as close friends often do. They are all of mixed race (more popularly described in Nigerian society with the word “half caste” which is a pejorative in the West and a compliment in Nigeria). All of their fathers are Nigerian, their mothers are Caucasian. Ronke (Ronks), Boo (Bukola) Whyte and Simisola (Simi) first became friends when they first met at university in Bristol, thus sharing an alma mater. “Father issues was the only other thing the friends had in common. And a subject best avoided. Ronke’s — perfect but dead. Simi’s alive but disappointed. Boo’s — non-existent and good-for-nothing. They are all women in their mid-thirties.

Ronke, unmarried dentist, has had a string of broken relationships, mostly with Nigerian men. Simi and Boo are seemingly happily married; the former to Martin who is a white Briton, the latter to Didier, a white French man. Ronke’s friends feel degrees of pity and contempt for her choice of men. “I just wish you’d find someone you could count on, who’d treat you right. Someone white. Or at least not a Nigerian. Dull and steady, like Didier,” Boo says to Ronke in the opening pages of the novel. Almost needless to say, Kayode King, Ronke’s boyfriend does not impress her two closest friends.

Into this ordinary (dare one say “mundane”?) dynamic catwalks Isobel Babangari-Adams, Simi’s mixed-race childhood friend, offspring of a marriage between a Nigerian man and a Russian woman. Their friendship was severed when Simi’s father fell from grace and was expelled from the Ikoyi Club in Lagos, ostensibly for loss of financial wealth, because he lost his single client, Isobel’s father. The three women’s lives are turned upside down in what seem like happenstances and mere serendipity. The denouement causes Boo, Ronke and Simi to reevaluate their lives and their friendships — they find out that their lives were even interconnected long before they met. They start to understand, first hand, what betrayal feels like (“So, this was how betrayal felt — like being punched in the stomach”), or confiding secrets in people whose tongues have no censor (“It was like being in primary school — back-stabbing, rumours, he said, she said,” Simi muses to herself at some point.)   

The novel is well-paced and good humoured. It introduces the outsider looking in on the lives of young mixed-race Nigerian women, their aspirations, dreams, career drives and shows that they are as human as anyone else, and subject to the same pressures that young Nigerians resident and working in Nigeria, face from their families, in respect of educational attainment and accreditation, career progression and getting married. Simi’s father is unhappy that she dropped out of medical school, but is forced to come to terms with her success as a fashion magazine editor; his expression of his disgruntlement in various verbal and nonverbal cues are keenly observed in the novel.

The efforts of the diaspora Nigerian to fit into British society are well documented. “Simi marvelled as Ronke morphed into a Nigerian; she sounded as if she had never left Lagos. Simi had worked hard to master her English accent and didn’t drop it for anyone ever.” One is reminded of the complaints of this demographic about being too alien to fit into either Nigerian society or their new home countries. “In Nigeria, Simi would have been called oyibo or akata but mostly she’d been called yellow. It wasn’t meant to be offensive, it was a compliment.” In typical millennial quest to add to an ever-growing list of forbidden words, the word akata has been added to a list of racial slurs against African Americans.

One cannot but observe the place of food in the narration of the story. Almost every other page of Wahala drips with oil, carbs and allied edibles. There’s food-food-food everywhere — British, French Nigerian!

One couldn’t help but be discontented at the representation of the Nigerian man in this novel as some philandering, unthinking brute whose existence is to make women, be they Nigerian (mixed race or solely black) or white, into a miserable person at the end of romantic or marital interactions. The only Nigerian man with a semblance of faithfulness comes to a violent end. “They don’t trust me because I am black. They’ve both got white husbands and I am not good enough because I am Nigerian,” laments Kayode King. “Simi believed it was impossible to be racist if you were mixed. The more of us (mixed race people) the better. If only the world would shag racism into oblivion,” is Simi’s thought on the subject. “But I don’t get it. What on earth were our mothers thinking? I am not being racist…Why would any sane English woman go for an African bloke?” says Boo during a lunch meeting with Ronke, much to the dismay of the latter — who dates mostly Nigerian and African man in relationships that end badly. This pigmentocratic dating preference based the premise that Nigerian, and African men, are less than their white counterparts is so popular today among certain categories of African women that it’s not unusual to find on dating sites, Nigerian women stating without equivocation on their profiles that only white men may apply. The concept of the unthinking, deceitful, and unfaithful Nigerian man is becoming overused trope, both in literature and on social media. And cheating isn’t gender specific, as one of the three friends shows us when she strays from the nest and has an affair with a colleague. In a society where the “kidnap value” (amount of ransom likely to be paid by a kidnap victim) of a mixed-race person is higher than that of a person who is a hundred per cent black; a Caucasian fetches more.

The representation of the Pidgin English spoken by the characters in the work leaves much to be desired and caused my eyes to roll more than once. This is remarkable, given that the title of the novel is a Pidgin English synonym of “trouble” or “upheaval”. I doubt if a truly Nigerian novel about contemporary Nigeria would be regarded as complete without the appearance or use of Pidgin English; it’s important that authors confer widely to get its cadences and nuances. “Where did you get tis effigy, ehn?...It fine pass, o!” exclaims Mama T, Simi’s stepmother, upon sighting a pricey sculpture — the Ife head — Isobel gifted all three friends. Any Nigerian caught speaking Pidgin English this way on Nigerian origins and street smarts questioned immediately.  

Wahala is a fun novel. It was an interesting ride, watching friends come to terms with factors beyond their control and realising the importance of friendships and relationships in our lives.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars