Memoirs

A memoir in the conventional genre this is not; it is rather more delightful than that. This is a cornucopia of stories told with the salt of irony and the mouth of wisdom as the master teller makes certain that 'A story must be factual, not imagined, and must capture the drama of places and faces' (p. 138). So while this work certainly is a literary masterwork to be enjoyed for its own sake, it is not just literature: it also recreates people and things past.

Despite its deceiving appearance though this definitely is an African Memoir: a memoir about growing up in Ibadan and gradually discovering the world, a memoir of the social history of the city of Ibadan between 1953 and 1966, and above all a memoir about the acquisition of identity. The main plot line tells us of the various metamorphoses the hero undergoes gradually to emerge as the Yoruba teenager known as Toyin Falola. The tale opens with the intricacies of dating births and with naming to create an early identity. Then follow the praises of Ibadan, the soil in which the forebears flourished, Ibadan, the metropolis that engenders violent behavior and raises ambiguity to an art. Next, the nine-year-old is first lost to a fascination with trains and then recovered which makes clear that he is no ordinary child but rather the dreaded sort of aberration called emere. In the next chapter the hero discovers who his true mother is and learns more about names while he is moved to an entirely different part of the city as the result of an inheritance. There he learns about the politics and tensions of polygamy and is steeped in family history while in the following installment he turns into a real Yoruba. Then he meets Leku the herbalist, the most dramatic personage in the book, who initiates him into he knows not what. Next the boy leaves the city for the village where his mother's father is a pastor and witnesses the kind of political injustice that would later involve him in a major rural revolt. An interval about the seasonal pleasures of various cults follows before the book concludes with the struggle for legal redress by the pastor during which the hero acquires the final touches to his identity (269-70).

But all along this highway of the main tale there are many diversions. Here the story bursts into exuberant poetry or song, there little stories seep in to explain contexts or feelings, further along one stumbles on engrossing panoramas conjured up by mere association of images or ideas, and all of this is cunningly put in