/ 14 August 2001

An act of will

Nigerian Helon Habila has just won the Caine Prize for a short story. As he tells Jason Cowley, he wrote it by candlelight.

Helon Habila, who has won the second Caine Prize for African writing, was 22 when his father and one of his brothers was killed in a road accident in Nigeria. Habila was living at home at the time, having returned after dropping out of college. He was directionless and despondent. “I had no idea what I would do or what would become of me,” he says. “I used to quarrel so much with my father.” It was then, after the accident, that he began reading literature for the first time — Shakespeare, John Donne, JM Coetzee — and the dream of becoming a writer took inchoate form.

Habila had never been outside Nigeria before arriving in England to receive his award at the prize-giving dinner in Oxford. He grew up in Kaltungo, a Christian area in the Muslim north of the country. His father was a civil servant and his mother a seamstress. Together they had 10 children. “Large families are common,” he says, laughing.

As he was being congratulated at the dinner by Lili Momple from Mozambique, whose story Celina’s Banquet was one of the five shortlisted stories, Habila seemed bewildered by his success, momentarily lost in the rapture of the moment. When I met up with him, though, for a walk in St James’s Park, he was calm and controlled, speaking of how he had written his first book of short stories, Prison Stories (from which his winning entry Love Poems was taken), by candlelight because the generator in his Lagos tenement block had failed and the authorities took more than four months to repair it.

He was working at the time on what he calls a “romance” magazine, mechanically producing sentimental love poems and Mills & Boon-style tales of love lost and won. “Sometimes two a day,” he sighs. At night he would return home exhausted and begin writing all over again. He worked with little hope of finding a publisher for his night-time stories. “I was writing for myself, the kind of stories I wanted to read,” he says. “To finish my book was an obsession, an act of will, and I sacrificed so much: friends, girlfriends, going out. I couldn’t think of anything else.”

Nigeria, he says, remains a country of cronyism and corruption. “If you win a literary prize there it means only that you know someone important. And the only way to get on is to be a politician yourself, or to know politicians.”

Prison Stories was eventually published by the father of one of Habila’s friends, a businessman who had never published anything before. It was issued in a flimsy limited edition of 1 000 copies, under the imprint Epik Books, and somehow found its way, among more than 100 entries, to London and to the Caine judges — the writers Dan Jacobson, JM Coetzee, Véronique Tadjo, Buchi Emecheta and myself.

The Caine Prize concentrates on the short story, reflecting the oral and contemporary development of African storytelling traditions. It is authentically pan-African: work in translation is actively canvassed. Worth $15 000 to the winner, it was established by Liberal Democrat European Parliament member Emma Nicholson in memory of her husband, Michael Caine, the former chairman of Booker plc who died in 1999. Caine helped set up the Booker prize in Britain and then, in 1992, the same prize in Russia. Like the Booker, the Caine aims to inspire a new generation of writers and readers.

Love Poems is a remarkable work of prison literature, the account of a young journalist who is incarcerated without trial during the years of General Sani Abacha’s oppressive military rule. One day the prison superintendent, a brutal near-illiterate, visits the journalist and asks him if he would write some love poems, which he then claims as his own, sending them to his “educated” girlfriend. Soon the young man is struggling for inspiration, though he wants nothing more than the freedom to write, and so from memory begins adapting great works of poetry, while all the time sending covert messages to his female reader: “Save my soul, a prisoner.”

It is a remarkably subtle, agile story, at once brutal and tender, melancholy and funny. It has the authenticity of deep conviction — many of Habila’s friends and one of his cousins were imprisoned for many years without trial, disappearing into the lower depths of Nigeria’s prison system, with its violence and warring prisoners, its ritualised brutality.

“Under Abacha, Nigeria was like a vast prison, both real and metaphorical,” he says. “You felt continually under pressure, watched. And a kind of military system operates inside the prisons, too, where the prisoners are in cahoots with the wardens. It is all based on physical strength: the strongest prisoner becomes the president of the prison, and then you have generals and subordinates. And then sometimes there are coups, when rival groups attempt to take over the prison. It is terrifying.”

Despite the return to civilian rule in 1999, little has changed. People still live in fear of arbitrary arrest and the government remains rigidly resistant to any move towards greater federalism for a country that is an unhappy artificial colonial construct of more than 250 distinct ethnic groups and languages. Winning the Caine prize has made Habila, he says, a “very rich man” — at least inside Nigeria. Where before he wrote with a pen and by candlelight, he now plans to buy his own apartment, a car and a computer. He works for a newspaper called Vanguard and may take a break from that.

“As a writer,” he says, “you always dream of winning an international prize, but it tends to be a forlorn hope. Now, all I can do is write more books and hope for the best.”


Tenderfoots, the first Caine Prize volume, is published by M&G Books – e-mail: [email protected]