This novel is an essential text — the kind of book that many will return to for reference.
Karen King-Aribisala won last year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book in Africa, but my brazen assertion isn’t prompted by that, because a few inferior books have won that gong. The importance of The Hangman’s Game (Penguin African Writers Series) is in the connection the author makes between Guyana in the Americas — the destination of some of the millions of slaves who left Africa — and Nigeria, supplier of about 3,5-million slaves.
A number of books that deal with slavery at the Cape, in Ghana and elsewhere — including Yvette Christiaanse’s Unconfessed, Manu Herbstein’s Ama, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book — have been written in Africa, although not many of these readily and exhaustively make the transatlantic link with the Americas.
It’s a link one expects to see more often, especially given the scope of the devastation that slavery wrought. It’s almost as if we, the people who stayed behind — whose ancestors might have been involved in the trade — are too embarrassed to confront the sad fact of slavery. Step forward King-Aribisala, a Guyanese-born writer and professor of English at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.
The unnamed narrator in The Hangman’s Game is a pregnant word-game-playing mother of a girl child. She’s researching and writing a historical novel about the slave revolt of 1823 in Demerara, Guyana, and she goes to Nigeria where she meets and marries a Nigerian clergyman.
The slave revolt she’s writing about happened about 15 years before the emancipation proclamation of 1838, the edict that freed black slaves in British colonies. Some years before that, in 1804, Haitian slaves revolted to establish the first independent black state.
The writer discovers that the offspring of those who stayed behind aren’t doing too well. As she negotiates her way through the grime, anarchy, blood and death of 1990s Nigeria she sees a scenario eerily reminiscent of her native country circa 1823, the difference being that the master is a black soldier-president presiding over what he calls, in all seriousness, a “military democracy”.
Faithful to his name, the Butcher Boy kills, maims and imprisons hundreds of journalists, opponents and whoever dares to stand in his way. By “shooting the opposition dead” he has found a simple way to get his democratisation project under way.
We are aware of parallel narrative unfolding in 1823. An English clergyman, based on the historical figure of John Smith, is shut up in a colonial prison awaiting his execution. The colonial authorities have condemned him to die because, they say, “he was instrumental in inciting the slave rebellion”.
The clergyman, sent by the London Missionary Society, has been accused of teaching slaves “from parts of the Bible which he wasn’t supposed to”. Murrain, the governor of this British colony, is opposed to any teaching that might stir the slaves. “Teach the slaves to read, teach them from parts of the Bible which let them feel all men are equal in the sight of God, and you teach them revolt.”
The modern-day Nigerians lie cowed and seemingly unable to find the resources needed to confront Butcher Boy’s monstrous regime. “I am — banking on God to set us free. No one else has been able to do it,” one of them says.
I have always been struck that among the most religious people I have met are Zimbabweans, Nigerians and the Congolese (from Kinshasa). It’s not a coincidence, I guess, that they hail from countries that are seen as undemocratic, corrupt, failed or dysfunctional.
I am reminded of a friend who, years ago, regularly went to meetings called by civil society organisations opposed to Robert Mugabe’s rule. For one reason or another, these meetings usually began with a prayer. Unfailingly, the prayers catalogued Mugabe’s wrongs. Mugabe hangs on to power, the faithful would cry to the divine. His policies have driven millions into exile, they would say, before concluding with a plea to God “to please remove him from office”.
The Hangman’s Game examines the role of Christianity for enslaved black people. In fact, it abounds with what James Baldwin called, in The Amen Corner, the “come-to-Jesus idiom”. Strangely, the black people in Guyana do not feel that “Christianity is the white man’s religion”, as Malcolm X said in the 1960s.
Quamina, a slave and a deacon, even has a carving of a black Jesus Christ. Quamina is appropriating the symbols of the religion of his slave master, perhaps foreshadowing James Cone’s Black Theology & Black Power, the seminal 1960s book that some scholars interpret as explaining why liberation of the poor (read: black people) is the central message of the gospels.
The Hangman’s Game picks up speed rather slowly, but when the story is in motion, it skids towards a climax. It’s a naughty, improvisational book (think of a jazz session), allowing us to peek into the author’s creative processes. We are witness to her almost whimsical decisions on what happens to this or that character.
Ingenious and enjoyable, it is penned by an author groping in the darkness of the past for clues to the puzzles of the present and future.