Reading Labo Yari’s Climate of Corruption

The main quibble I have with Labo Yari’s style is with his occasional use of archaic or obscure English. Using “milksop” for a term like dan daudu, which could have been translated better by just leaving in Hausa and giving a brief gloss, or using “ragout” for what could have been translated more simply as […]

The main quibble I have with Labo Yari’s style is with his occasional use of archaic or obscure English. Using “milksop” for a term like dan daudu, which could have been translated better by just leaving in Hausa and giving a brief gloss, or using “ragout” for what could have been translated more simply as “soup” or “stew” distances Hausa-speakers and sounds awkward to me as a native English speaker. I had only the vaguest idea of what these English words meant, and when I looked them up, they didn’t seem precisely appropriate for what they were describing. I prefer when writers leave some common words in the source language and give an initial explanatory gloss, or let the reader figure it out other ways. Chinua Achebe is a master at forcing his readers to understand Igbo terminology and is a good model to follow for anyone trying to write about Nigerian-language settings in English.  Nevertheless, once you get used to some of these language choices, Labo Yari’s stories are deep and haunting.

Climate of Corruption opens at the Kaduna train station, where a young man Sule has gone to bid goodbye to his parents, who are moving to Lagos. On the way there, he meets his friend Kallah, who is waiting on a prostitute to arrive from Kano. Sule’s chance meeting with Kallah is significant, as it signals the direction he is to take once he is out from under the eyes of his parents. Their exit from Kaduna gives him the liberty to try all the things his father warns him against while waiting for the train to leave: “Never drink alcohol; don’t visit gambling places. And never let me hear that you are running to tarts’ houses I know this is the fashion of your friends, well if you discard my teachings, Allah would never be inclined to thee.” Sule hurries from this advice to the house of the prostitute Maimuna. His parents’ absence creates a moral vacuum: he takes up drinking, smoking, gambling, and lying to those who grant him loans about contracts his office will award them. Sinking further and further into what he later calls an “abyss,” a traumatic event shocks him out of this lifestyle. Like the biblical prodigal son, he decides to reform himself and go back to his parents.  If the novel were to end here, it would be an interesting portrayal of the bariki lifestyle of the north with a typical didactic message; however, there is more drama to come.  Unlike the prodigal son, it is not Sule who has moved but his parents, and he must join them in their new home.

Leaving Kaduna and going south opens Sule’s eyes to a larger portrait of Nigeria.  On the train ride, he has conversations with traders based in Ibadan and Shagamu about scientific progress around the world: fast trains, planes, and the recent news about Americans walking on the moon. This interlude seems  to promise Sule exciting opportunities in the capital city. But instead Sule’s first experience of Lagos is a “strong odour of human excrement” and gridlocked traffic. Like the first meeting with Kallah and his “prostitute” at the beginning of the Kaduna section, these first experiences of Lagos are to prove symbolic for what is to come in the rest of the novel.  The environmental differences between Kaduna and Lagos are the least of his problems. Here, outside of the north for the first time, he encounters people who judge him not because he has done wrong but because of where he comes from. “This is not your native place,” one of his neighbors tells him, when, in desperation on his first morning in Lagos, he tries to cut in the queue to the toilet. The same neighbor tells others on the queue. “These northern people can be crazy. He can chop one’s head off with a knife easily.” The wife of his father’s friend lists off a litany of stereotypes about the north:  “’University! Where?’ asked Mama Benji skeptically. ‘Are you serious? They are usually skeptical with anything that belongs to a white man. And they don’t care about the future, so they’ll never be ambitious to be doctors or engineers.’ […]“The people in the North marry very early. […] Don’t forget that the parents in Zaria never allowed their daughters to go to school.”

Sule is most devastated by his discovery of shocking secrets that make his life in Kaduna seem innocent by comparison. Everything that Lagosians portray as “modern” and “civilized” seems degenerate to him. Though Yari depicts Sule’s offence at being seen by Lagosians as an ignorant and violent “bushman” from the north, the novel is not without its own stereotypes of Lagos. While Kaduna is shown as corrupt, Lagos is depicted as the epitome of depravity, with almost no redeeming qualities.  Mobs gather to stone people for no reason. Almost everyone he meets seems to be involved in tangled sexual affairs. Of Ikoyi, the one beautiful place in Lagos Sule encounters, his cynical friend Fagbura tells him, “Let me tell you one thing, there are people living here who take their children daily to Ikoyi to kindergartens and schools. Not because there are no schools or kindergartens in this part of Lagos, no, simply because Ikoyi is synonymous with colonialism. So they want their children to colonise others when they grow up.” Like Fagbura, even like other characters from other Nigerian novels of this period  such as Achebe’s Obi or Soyinka’s “interpreters,” Sule begins to drift. Strongly held beliefs dissolve into Lagos humidity. Passion fades to indifference.

It is a deeply unsettling and disorienting novel. Even though Sule’s life in Kaduna seems innocent in contrast to what he finds in Lagos, the title Climate of Corruption is appropriate for the environment Sule experiences in both cities.  His lazy lifestyle of gambling and drinks and exhibitionism among the “tribe of drinkers” in Kaduna fades into the apathetic hedonism of Lagos. The corruption of the southwestern city that was at that time the capital of Nigeria is merely a magnification of the corruption of what was at one time the capitol of the northern region. The traffic in Lagos is metaphoric for the standstill the entire country has come to.

Ironically, the Kaduna prostitute Maimuna comes across as one of the sincerest and wisest characters in the novel. Though she has sunk into the lifestyle that she tells him is “the last hope of any woman,” her passion, love, and desire to move out of the brothel with him end up being some of Sule’s purest and happiest memories. When all moral direction is gone, it is her advice that haunts him. The most redemptive moment in the novel remains the transitory space of the train, between Kaduna and Lagos, when strangers share their food with co-passengers, pray together, and discuss the relationship of progress in the world to Allah’s plan. It is here that hope can be found, hovering between cities, in the movement of the train and dialogue with strangers.