A Tale of Disappearance and Mayhem

A prevalent subject for the author is the destructive extraction in the Niger Delta region…

Reviewed by Ezioma Kalu. April, 2024

And After Many Days is a contemporary Nigerian novel that centers on family, loss, grief and political instability. In 2016, Jowhor Ile’s debut novel won the Etisalat Prize for Literature, making the author the first Nigerian writer to win the award. Set in the rainy season of 1995 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, the story follows the life of Paul Utu, the 17-year-old firstborn child of a family of five: Bendic, Ma, Paul, Bibi, and Ajie. And After Many Days opens with Paul’s mysterious disappearance after stepping out to visit his friend nearby. 

The novel, written from the third-person perspective, follows the Utu family, focusing on the father, Bendic, and his son, Ajie. Though he is the last child, Ajie is quite intelligent and observant. As the last person Paul talks to before leaving home on that fateful Monday, Ajie is traumatized with regrets and self-blame, which stems from his lack of interest when Paul tells him he’ll visit his friend in the next house. So, he blames himself for being the cause of his brother’s disappearance. Paul’s disappearance propels the narrative arc in that Ajie travels to Ogibah, their hometown, to find answers. As a result, Ajie uncovers the family’s secrets, and this knowledge helps him understand their lives better. 

The novel opens in media res, and the author relies on flashbacks to move the reader through the past to anchor the present. Through the flashback technique, the reader peeks into Paul’s life and the circumstances surrounding his growth from a baby to the seventeen-year-old boy he was before the disappearance. Ile is a master craftsman in that he simultaneously builds suspense around Paul’s disappearance – which keeps the reader engaged with the work – while introducing other characters and subplots. The writer’s adept handling of style and technique in the novel is commendable. 

With the backdrop of Nigeria’s political instability in the 90s, the novel tells how a single occurrence changes a family forever. What starts as a typical Monday turns into a full-blown missing child case and rocks the family in ways they never envisaged. The grief of losing a child and the uncertainty of not knowing whether the child is dead or alive change the Utus in varying degrees. While Bendic, the father, would lean on many strategic ways to find and bring back his son, Ma, the mother, would cling to religion and become a different person after trying everything to get back her son, unsuccessfully. Through his use of Nigerian isms and traits, Ile’s characters are familiar and relatable to his Nigerian audience.

Various themes such as grief, trauma, coping with love and loss, political unrest, insecurity, oppression and instability are tackled in the novel. The author presents the violence of the 90s through police brutality and the unlawful shootings of protesters and innocent bystanders as the background in which different outcomes play out. A prevalent subject that the author tackles is destructive oil extraction in the Niger Delta region and how its impacts on the people. Ogibah, the homeland of the Utus, is in the oil region, and its imbrication with oil politics is unsavoury. A mysterious multinational known as ‘Company’ infiltrates the community and engages in deforestation, excavation of pits, damaging farmlands, laying pipelines and pollution. The Company attempts to coerce and buy off the people, resulting in diverse opinions and stances. According to the narrator,

there had been an explosion in an oil well near the farmlands in Ogibah, 

which left the area ankle-deep in crude oil, pervaded with the stench 

of rotten fish floating belly-up in the ponds” (178). 

Bendic is an activist who fights against pollution, corrupt and oppressive government and the oil multinational (called Company) for the freedom of his community in the Delta from tyranny and dispossession. Although Bendic lost the court case, the community united as one voice and exercised their fundamental right. The destruction of the Niger Delta fragile ecosystem and the extra-judicial murder of the Ogoni Nine are also mentioned in the novel. And After Many Days is a gripping story; however, the author leveraged this fact and dragged the story on for a little too long. The resolution of Paul’s mysterious disappearance was shocking and horrific, but it brought the needed closure to the Utus. Although I do not like the back-and-forth storytelling technique, I applaud the author’s expertise and commitment. And After Many Days is an intriguing read and will prove beneficial to scholars of military-era literature, environmental literature, urban literature, Niger Delta literature, and African and Nigerian literature.

Genre – Novel.
Author: Jowhor Ile
No of Pages: 287
Publisher: Farafina, Nigeria

The reviewer, Ezioma Kalu, is a Nigerian writer, editor and book blogger.