POINT OF VIEW: Love in a post-colonial world

In Dependence

By Sarah Ladipo Manyika

271pp; Legend Press (London)

Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s In Dependence is ambitious, like all debut novels ought to be. Its setting alone moves from Nigeria to Oxford to France, to Nigeria, to Senegal, to America, and concludes, finally, on a romantic note by a river in Oxford. The time of the action spans from the undergraduate days of the main characters, Vanessa and Tayo, and ends with them in their sixties. This is an attempt, mostly successful, to tell the story of Nigeria—from the colonial to the post-colonial.

The book opens, a bit shakily, in 1963, on the eve of Tayo’s departure to Oxford. He has won a scholarship to the prestigious Balliol College, the first Nigerian to do so.

This symbolic linking of Nigeria with England launches Manyika’s project of examining the colonial relationship of the two countries. This is a novel of ideas, a historical novel not only in the sense of it being set mostly in the past, but historical in the sense that history, and the politics of history, is centrally thematised in the book. But the author does so without being boring as alas, most such novels sometimes do.

Post-colonial inquiry is couched within a love story, the story of Vanessa Richardson and Omotayo Ajayi (Tayo). But for Tayo, before Vanessa there was first Christine. At Oxford, Tayo becomes something of a ladies’ man. Christine, “kept commenting on the number of women that liked him, but at the same she was seeing him more often so that he grew bold again and asked if she would like to come to his rooms for coffee.”

The affair with Christine is short lived, really nothing but a prefiguring of the central affair between Tayo and the English girl, Vanessa. But Christine is an interesting figure, an early African feminist, intellectually alert, independent, she represents all the promise of people like her, and the people she could inspire, but she is a contradictory figure, because despite her positive outlook, she also represents the rootless, deracinated African.

Her death highlights the theme of loss and displacement which later in the story will be revisited in Kemi, Tayo’s daughter. Christine’s death introduces a rather dark, pessimistic note into the story; an end to youth and laughter and all the promise that Oxford at first seems to represent.

The story could really be said to begin with the introduction of Vanessa in Chapter 4, in a sudden shift from the third person limited focus on Tayo; and suddenly the narrative is released, the language becomes more fluid, more playful, more detailed, and one notices what Manyika can do if she relaxes her sometimes tightly held narrative rein.

Here is Vanessa introduced with a very good use of the free indirect, “Vanessa cursed herself as she and her friends left the pub. A wet October night was not the time to have worn, of all silly things, a strapless dress with summer sandals. And what on earth was she doing splashing through rain and stubbing her toes on paving stones as she ran towards Balliol?”

Vanessa and Tayo’s love story serves as the central trope with which the author explores complex issues of race, colonialism, history, politics, that are central to the novel.

Sometimes one feels perhaps too many issues are being analysed. But the writer gets away with it because the thread of the story is never lost. After Tayo’s intentions towards Vanessa become known to her family, her father, an old ex-colonial officer who has served in Nigeria, tells Tayo bluntly, “What I am saying, young man, is that the challenges would be great and, as someone who is older and wiser, I must advise you against the idea.”

And these words ring the death knell for the possibility of any union between Tayo and Vanessa—at least for the time being. Events in an almost deus ex machina way begin to happen to frustrate the relationship. Tayo returns to Nigeria to be with his sick father, and he can’t go back because of the civil war, and gradually the distance between him and Vanessa widens, even though their love remains as strong, if a little bit shaken. As ever, they end up married to other people.

Tayo becomes a professor at the University of Jos, and with this the focus of the book now shifts to the military years—the dictatorships, the decay in the educational system, and while Tayo’s friends one by one desert the country, he remains, even when his wife, Miriam, leaves.

This, in many ways, is the most unsatisfying section in the book. It seems both writer and reader know that the true story is that of Vanessa and Tayo, and anything apart from that is mere stuffing, a stop-gap. But the hopeful, romantic ending more than makes up for this lack.

This is a good first novel, a touching love story, and one hopes to hear more from this promising writer.