“The Fishermen,” a notable debut by Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma, multiphases unsettling threads of a dark childhood to process the mistakes of history. Obioma registers touches of genius in this critically acclaimed debut and stakes his claim among the masters of African literature – no mean feat at the age of 28. Although he has already been called the heir of Chinua Achebe, Obioma’s mastery of the questions of the day and rich blend of influences uploads into the African canon a mythic feat uniquely his own. An undercurrent of tragedy courses through the novel, several layers of memory foreboding loss and destruction.

While violence looms lethal in the novel, its destablising trail in the lives of the characters goes beyond crude entertainment. There is a method to the madness. It courses a critical scalpel into the world as we know it today – a world where trigger-happy ideologues perpetuate suffering driven by the erroneous conviction that violence is a solution. The novel merits a monumental rating for its allegorical precision, its mastery of a terror-riven world through the lenses of myth.

Obioma is essentially paying homage to the children of war. We see dreams “malfoliate” and lives destroyed in their prime, as systems which turn brother against brother hold the world in trance.

Set in the 1990s, the novel revolves around the star-crossed middle class family of Mr Agwu whose dreams and bond are ravaged, despite spirited efforts to keep the centre in place. Obioma tags into his narrative the memory of democracy martyr M.K.O Abiola, the presumed winner of Nigeria’s 1993 elections.

Abiola’s electoral mandate was invalidated by the incumbent on allegations of irregularity, triggering mayhem and setting the stage for the accession of military villain Sani Abacha. Abiola, who ran under the campaign theme “Hope ’93: Farewell to Poverty,” died in prison three years later from suspected torture. While his country’s fortunes in the event of the actualisation of his mandate remain the subject of pure conjecture, Abiola is fondly remembered as an emblem of lost promise and a progressive figure in the country’s history.

The Agwu brothers, Ikenna (15) Boja (14), Obembe (11) and Benjamin (9), meet Abiola at the high tide of his popularity and are awarded scholarships and given a campaign calendar, both of which are shattered in the unraveling of the tragedy. Obioma, however, cuts away from the political arena to Mr Agwu’s household for the setting of his dark tragedy. The four brothers escape surveillance as their strict father who wants professors, pilots and and doctors out of them is transferred by the Nigeria’s Central Bank to another city living them in the custody of their mother.

The doting mother is, however, not privy to the young men’s adventures as she spends most of her time minding a food market stall. The brothers’ failed attempts to fit in with their peers take them on a daring adventure to forbidden ground! In the company of few “next doors,” the boys go fishing by a feared river which is a subject of superstition and a site of dark secrets.

The river has been deserted by the community after the discovery of a mutilated corpse. It is, however, frequented by the shady fringe of the community, notably a white-garment cult which worships marine spirits and a madman feared for his dark soothsaying.

The innocent adventures take a turn for the tragic when the young fishermen encounter the mad soothsayer in what is meant to be the last day of their six-week escapade. Abulu, the madman casts a fatal spell on the brothers with a prophecy that Ikenna would die in a red river at the hands of a fisherman, implying one of the brothers.

The prophecy becomes the seed of discord. Ikenna undergoes a dark metamorphosis as a result. Impaled by a paranoid meltdown, he shuts his brothers out, openly defies their mother and sleeps in the rain.

“The prophecy, like an angered beast, had gone berserk and was destroying his mind with the ferocity of madness . . . until all that he knew, all that was him, all that had become him was left in disarray,” recalls Benjamin.

“To my brother, Ikenna, the fear of death as prophesied by Abulu had become palpable, a caged world within which he was irretrievably trapped, and beyond which nothing else existed,” the narrator recalls.

One of the mythic feats of the novel is the narrator’s detailed ascription of jungle attributes to the characters.  The river, the eagle, the python, the falconer, the locusts, the sparrow, the search dog, the tadpole, the roosters, the egrets and other players take a life of their own in the multi-layered allegory.

Mr Agwu is the Eagle, the displinarian who evokes the aura of a suspended cane, poised to descend anytime on his children. His rational path for his children, however, comes to nothing as fate has the last laugh.

Ikenna becomes the Python after his metamorphosis, “mercurial hot-tempered… constantly on the prowl.” His sense of vulnerability, as the prophecy hovers over him, makes him dangerous to himself and to others. He is out to hurt everyone, even those who love him the most.

Mother is the Falconer, the doting protector of her offspring. She is “the one who stood on the hills and watched trying to stave whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children.”

Her protective custody, however, is shattered in the ensuing drama. Like the falconer in W.B Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” her pleas cease to register caution to her children. She becomes the fowl of Simon Chimbetu’s “Ura Utete,” watching helplessly while ill fate marks her children for its own.

Distrust rips the brothers apart. The two older brothers die miserably. The surviving fishermen, Benjamin and Obembe, avenge their death by killing the madman, the harbinger of evil, with their fishing hooks.

The violence which pervades the book after the fateful encounter speaks to Nigeria’s successive crises and destabilising military interventions, a tragedy known across much of the third world. The situational morality of post-colonial politics is up for deliberation. What counts more, the sanctity of human life and the pursuit of a political imperative at all costs?

We have seen more than we can bear of brother turning on brother, particularly in Africa, but the prize of fratricide has remained elusive. There is no closure in the cyclic drama of violence and betrayal.

Benjamin and Obembe’s killing of the madman is another interesting twist of allegory. The murder is calculated to bring resolution to the embattled family but the new chapter never comes. Suffering only escalates and innocence becomes irretrievable.  Mrs Agu relapses to her mental illness while the Eagle loses his fatherly poise once again. The episode calls to mind the turbulence in terror-riven trouble spots where tribes and creeds coalesce one against another and shed blood in convictions deemed to justify their means.

Obioma’s novel may well be calling us to tolerance in a world where injustice and pure hate drives trigger-happy ideologues to arms, oblivious to better recourses to resolution. What is imagined to be retribution, in the lethal frame of mind Wole Soyinka calls “I am Right, You are Dead,” only perpetuates the suffering.

“Has Marxism triumphed since the killing of Leon Trotsky? What nature of an environment enabled the stabbing of a creative mind, Naguib Mahfouz?” Soyinka queries in “The Climate of Fear: The Quest of Dignity in a Dehumanized World”

“What kind of morality of a liberation struggle deceives a fourteen-year-old child into becoming a walking bomb?” he queries.

Obioma’s turbulent allegory presses the same question for the public square. Evidently, violence breeds more violence. Instead of abating itself, violence only retreats into the inside and the latter catastrophe can only be worse.