The Fishermen

A Family Tragedy

Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen is a dazzling literary addition to the list of books that have been written by African authors. In recent years, writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole have left their mark on the scene, after forerunners like Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe.

Obioma is Nigerian, like Achebe, and writes of the traumatic times in the 1990s under the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. The narrator is nine-year-old Benjamin, one the large brood of a bank official and his wife, who runs a food stall in the local market. Their father wants his children to get a good education and become successful professionals.

When the patriarch is transferred to another town, the boys run riot and play at being fisherman in the town’s sewer-like polluted river the Omi-Ala, while their mother is out at work. Walking home one day, the encounter a mad, soothsayer, Abulu, who prophesies that the oldest Ikenna will be killed by one of his own brothers.

The prophecy wrecks the happy household, as Ikenna seems to self-destruct. The mother has a nervous breakdown, the father is shattered. Around them the country falls apart too.

The novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Award last year, is moving and disturbing. In an interview Obioma said that thebook was “a critique of the British occupation of Nigeria,” suggesting that he madman who destroyed a happy family/country is like the colonialists, who took advantage of a society divided by tribes. But even without this interpretation, the book is a deeply felt chronicle of a family—a striking debut by a young writer.

The Fishermen

By Chigozie Obioma

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Pages: 297