Tale of life behind bars

May 7 2010 by The Journal

Debut novelist Kachi A Ozumba, from Nigeria, tells David Whetstone about his emergence as a talented writer in the North East.

IT OFTEN seems to be the case that writers most vividly portray a place they know well when they are away from it. This is borne out by Kachi A Ozumba, whose first novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2010.

The Shadow of a Smile offers a sobering insight into the Nigerian criminal justice system, without making the country seem like a place you would never want to visit.

The Observer called it “brilliantly funny and gripping”. The Independent praised the author’s “astonishing” gift for detail.

Yet the story of corruption and imprisonment it relates to took shape in this country and Kachi is currently based in Newcastle with his wife and baby son.

He is a jovial and engaging character who speaks without bitterness of his parents’ lack of support for his ambition to be a writer, nor of his brief and undeserved spell in prison.

Born in Nigeria in 1972, Kachi got his first degree there, in philosophy. From his father it drew the remark that philosophy couldn’t be cooked in a pot and eaten.

“But I enjoyed the course so much,” says Kachi. “I remember one New Year’s Day, when it’s usual for families in Nigeria to sit together and share their aspirations. When it came to my turn, I said I’d really love to be a writer. My father said: ‘You get ready to die of hunger’.”

Dutifully he signed up for a Masters course in business administration that was destined never to be finished. “It wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I loved writing more.”

Laughing, Kachi says he has inherited his father’s stubborn streak. So when the university staff were on one of their prolonged strikes – a factor of Nigerian higher education back then – Kachi took himself off to Denmark and enrolled at one of the country’s folk high schools.

“The whole idea is to help you to discover what you should do.

“It gave me the courage to please my heart’s desire not dictated by economic considerations,” says Kachi in words that would hardly be music to his father’s ears.

He wrote a short story and sent it to the BBC who published it in their Focus on Africa magazine. The BBC also broadcast a programme called The Art of Writing, which he watched avidly.

Learning that the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, had studied at Leeds University in the 1950s, Kachi decided to follow suit.

After sending examples of his written work, he was duly accepted, and graduated with an MA in creative writing in 2005.

Despite his year in Denmark, he experienced culture shock here.

He recalls with a smile how his first landlady in Leeds called him “love” from their first meeting.

Having already established that they were both fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber, he wondered if this was a case of “love at first sight”.

Also, he couldn’t work out the buses. “In the UK, you have to pursue your buses. I couldn’t understand why you have to run and sweat for a bus.

“In Nigeria they’ll stop anywhere to pick you up. In fact, they’ll hunt for you and the conductors practically drag you on.”

Kachi looks back on his year in Leeds as “an audition”. Now he acknowledges: “The UK has made my dreams come true.”

Having earned his MA, Kachi moved to Newcastle in 2006, the year he won the Decibel Penguin Short Story Prize, to study for a PhD, taking as his study area the literature of incarceration.

At Newcastle University he studied under Jack Mapanje, who was jailed for three years in Malawi for his poetry.

He also pored over the work of other writers who had suffered, including Ngügï wa Thiong’o from Kenya, who was forced into exile, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in Nigeria in 1995, South African anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus and the Russian dissident Irina Ratushinskaya.

He was able to draw on personal experience, having been locked up in Nigeria where, he says, “the justice system is not something that runs as well as it ought to”.

He was sitting with friends one day and the police, responding to a false alarm, came and arrested everybody.

This is not unusual, he says, adding that it is also usual for those arrested then to have to pay for their release.

Kachi should have been out in days but a strike meant he was imprisoned for six weeks.

“You have to prove yourself innocent,” he protests. “The result is that the idea of detention and imprisonment are trivialised. All the politicians have been through the detention situation.”

A system corrupted by institutionalised greed provides the setting to The Shadow of a Smile, in which a student, Zuba, is locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.

Inside, Zuba must struggle to maintain his dignity and good humour with a real and metaphorical stench in his nostrils.

Kachi’s debut novel has made waves back home following radio interviews.

“People get de-sensitised to things that are happening, but I do believe fiction can in some way influence social change,” says Kachi.

That said, he insists he is a writer rather than a campaigner.

His debut novel has had another effect in that it has made his parents proud. Movingly, he tells me he now owns the manuscript of a novel his father once wrote but couldn’t get published.

Looking back on his opposition to his son’s chosen career, Kachi says: “He was trying to save me from disappointment and rejection.”

:: The Shadow of a Smile is published by Alma Books. www.almabooks.com