Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back as J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) — is still going strong. Joining it on the rails is what might be called the documentary approach, in which great stretches of past, post- colonial time are populated by characters who, whatever their individual quirks, are above all representative of the historical currents flowing around them.
Measuring Time, the follow-up to Helon Habila’s award-winning Waiting for an Angel, falls squarely into this final category. Dense, compendious and solemn, it is essentially a recapitulation of 30 years or so of Nigerian history seen from the vantage point of a single, fractured family. Mamo and LaMamo are twin brothers, the one laid semi-permanently low by sickle-cell anaemia, the other tougher and less intelligent, but united by a hatred of their philandering father Lamang, whom they hold responsible for their mother’s early death. The first entry in Mamo’s imaginary diary runs, HATE THY FATHER, MAKE HIM PAY. To this end, scorpions are introduced — unsuccessfully — into his shoes and beneath his pillow. Come teendom, inspired by the return of mysterious, shell-shocked Uncle Haruna, the boys hatch another scheme: to run away to war. Leaving the house at dawn in torrential rain, they get as far as an abandoned abbatoir before Mamo succumbs to fever: LaMamo and cousin Asabar are forced to leave him behind. Thereafter the action alternates between Mamo’s low-key existence in Keti, his desultory university career, relationship with a woman named Zara and teaching job at his Uncle Iliya’s school, and LaMamo’s despatches from the various parts of the pan-African tribal conflict in which he happens to have fetched up.
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