Sun-Ra-Like

'A fifteen-year-old African genius poet altar boy who loves blondes is not a criminal, not a racist, not a sell-out.’ Perhaps not unlike other fifteen-year-old males, he is prone to bouts of solipsism and radical empathy, as absorbed by superhero fantasies of escape (and retribution) as he is by the semiotics of text messaging and sneakers. He is as unique as the next genius-poet altar boy – but also as generic, an utterly predictable mix of reticence and masturbatory self-aggrandisement. This is the wager of Stephen Buoro’s engaging début, and what renders its narrator-protagonist, Andy Aziza (a genius-poet altar boy who is also, it turns out, a genius mathematician), so memorable.

The novel opens with adolescent swagger. The scene is Kontagora in northern Nigeria, where Andy and his mother, Gloria – silent about his father’s identity – are members of the Christian minority. Gloria hails from Ososo, in Nigeria’s south, a town Andy has never visited, though he and his friends will make the journey by the end of the novel. These friends – ‘the Scadvengers’ – are Morocca, would-be rapper, and Slim, gay aspirant artist. There is also Fatima, a bright Hausa-Fulani classmate escaping a brutalising father in the home of their teacher Zahrah, who nourishes and exasperates in equal measure. Then there is the local British priest’s visiting platinum-blonde niece, Eileen, for whom our genius-poet altar boy falls madly in lust. While making their way to Eileen’s welcoming party, Andy recalls the friends’ youthful intoxication with superhero fantasies: