Reviewed: A Wall Is Just A Wall by James Ogunjimi. Publisher: Bahati Books, 2/18. E-book $6.97, 111pp.

Home // March.2.2018 // Chukwuebuka Ibeh

The Fragility of Obstacles

In the suspense-filled novel A Wall Is Just A Wall, James Ogunjimi takes on street crime and religious extremism against the backdrop of an iniquitous Nigerian polity. When police officer Inspector Denja is fired from his post for standing up to a corrupt superior, he is forced to seek an alternative job to ensure survival. He lives in semi-solitude, constantly reflecting on—and bemoaning—the injustices meted out to him, until he receives a call from a young lad willing to hire him as a personal bodyguard for the sum of ten thousand naira a day. What was supposed to be a simple service-for-payment procedure gets complicated as Denja comes to realize before long that much has been hidden from him, and that his new line of work will force him to go face to face yet again with the dreaded Jaguar, a man from his former life he thought he had defeated.

Early chapters set the stage for action. We are introduced in a series of flashbacks to Denja's upbringing under strict religious parents in the small Christian town of Kafanchan. In the course of violent clashes between the Christian and Muslim community, Denja's world falls apart when his entire family is killed. Forced to flee the town and his past, Denja manages to get a fresh start in the quiet town of Ijebu-Igbo, working as a security man in a bank until he gets a job with the police force. After Denja's superior is replaced and Denja gets fired by the new CSP for refusing to go with the flow, Denja happens to become acquainted with Kelechi, a young kid fleeing from his pursuers. The chief among these is Jaguar, an infamous criminal who is released from prison illegally for the sole purpose of eliminating Kelechi.

Kelechi tells Denja that Jaguar is after him because he is in possession of a huge sum of money which he found in a waste bin some time ago. It is not until later into the novel that we learn that this is only a half-truth. The plot thickens: the man behind poor Kelechi's persecution is none other than the governor of the state. He is after not the money, but a flash drive that holds a record of every atrocity he has ever committed. To avoid exposure, Kelechi has to die.

Besides Denja—the disgruntled ex-police officer for hire—and Kelechi—a brave lad in possession of dangerously incriminating evidence against the governor—a third character comes into play. This is Chioma, a misfortunate law student turned waitress, whom Denja takes in after he saves her from being harassed by men of a vigilante group.

Ogunjimi depicts a fascinating chemistry among Denja, Kelechi and Chioma; it is amazing yet never implausible how they quickly bond together and come to look out for each other like family. They find reason to laugh even in the midst of evident anxieties. More to this point, I found the novel remarkably good at dishing out small bouts of humor at regular intervals, giving readers the chance to burst into laughter along with the characters. One epic instance is where Denja threatens to shoot the Jehovah's Witnesses who strike him as being too adamant in their refusal to let him be; another example, sad as well as funny, is when Denja's mother defends the Muslim-turned-Christian preacher who instigated the internecine riots in Kafanchan.

Besides joblessness, Denja has to battle loneliness—his wife moved out, taking their children and leaving the marriage when she could no longer compete with his devotion to police work. Such circumstances are enough to break a man's spirit, but Denja is a rare breed, a man incapable of “staying out of trouble” as his colleagues aptly put it. There are several instances where looking away would have ensured his own comfort (such as stepping up to stop four men harassing a young waitress, or going further to help Kelechi even after the case proves more complicated that it initially seems and that it would be safer for him to walks away). In Denja, we see a kind of unsentimental role model, which I'm willing to call a glimpse of hope for a nation: a selfless, diligent man who damns the consequences in order to bring the state governor to book. He refuses to back down, not even when his life is threatened time after time, not even when his wife is kidnapped, not even when he is offered a huge sum of money in exchange for returning a small piece of evidence.

We are moved by his devotion to duty, by his personal desire to bring about a revolution, and by his self-willed astuteness, even though this trait is described ironically by Officer Raji as “admirably naïve” in view of Denja's devotion to Colonel X, a former Niger Delta activist who retreated to blogging after he grew disenchanted with the politics behind so-called civil activism. With this strand of the plot, Ogunjimi seems to be calling out a fundamental problem with Nigerian activism—namely, that it becomes inactive the moment activism becomes inconvenient. The social trope attacked here is the tendency of people to swiftly turn from critics of the status quo to defenders of the tyrants they once fought against, just as soon as they are able to tap into—and gain from—the corrupt system.

Over the 111 pages of this tightly-plotted novel, Ogunjimi explores complex themes of religious extremism, political tyranny, corruption, love and loyalty, human rights activism, and more, engaging each theme in detail without leaving the reader lost. I think all these strands knit together to make a central argument, one signaled in the metaphor used for the title. A wall here symbolizes everything wrong with Nigerian society as it is, representing corruption and political tyranny, solid as brick, built so strongly and with such deep foundations that it stops even the most focused assaults of justice-crazed men. It isn't for nothing that Ogunjimi names African leaders on the verge of sparking revolution—Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and others—and tells how they met their ends even before they had begun. The wall kept them out, or in, or down, however you like; it got them in the end.

But there is hope. With graceful, self-assured prose, Ogunjimi shows Denja achieving a kind of victory. Though the wall seems unassailable, perhaps the ostensible obstacles to freedom are more fragile than they seem. Perhaps change is possible; perhaps it is made possible by revolutionaries whose will is strong enough. Sometimes the wall can be taken down, with the right kind of determination, show by the right kind of people with the right kind of courage.

Banner graphic source: Photo (detail) of Occupy Nigeria protesters at a rally at Gani Fawehinmi Park, Ojata, Lagos, in 2012. Taken by Temi Kogbe, and used here with modification under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Sourced via Wikimedia.