Without Extremeties
When Babatunde and his friends gather in Mama T's famous peppersoup joint, they tell gist, jokes and stories to make sense of a world gone mad.
Price
£7.99
Author(s)
Dayo Okunlola
ISBN number
9780948833427
Pages
156
Price
£7.99
Classification
Fiction, Short Stories
Country setting
Nigeria
United Kingdom
Publication date
01 Sep 1991

These stories, as pungent and peppery as Mama T's soup, satirise the 'oppressocracy' of contemporary Nigeria in a bubbling mixture of pidgin and standard English, using forms as diverse as science fiction and the folk-tale. Corruption, overweening power and privilege, military copus and food shortages - these lunatic times are enough to drive a suffering people to despair, but Okunlola's characters refuse to see themselves as victims and the stories celebrate their ingenuity and resistance. So when a drunken Babatunde, an idiosyncratic speller at the best of times, is roped in to carve an inscription on a monument to be unveiled by a visiting world bank delegation, he somehow manages to get in the last word... 

'... these satirical pieces vividly bring to life conditions in contemporary Nigeria.' - Trinidad Sunday Guardian.

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