“Ali,” a new book by Ogbonna Nwokpoku, has been released by RoseDog Books.
Ogbonna Nwokpoku’s Ali is a fictional series which chronicles issues of relevant interests. As a developing story on African values of contemporary rare interests, Ali keeps your suspense through action packed events that lead successively to one another.
The story, set in agrarian African village in the post independent Nigeria, during the advent of western education, helps to understand the rate at which western education trickled down to the hinterlands of Africa and its cold reception.
Ali tells a story of Enyi, a local Councillor in a post colonial Nigeria who is forced to sacrifice his land inheritance to build a school for his village.
A theme that runs through the veins of the novel is one which is new in African fiction. The writer argues that the bane of African progress is in its family system. The African family system believes in quantity and not in quality. Monogamy is still frowned upon as an imperial culture and practically foreign. Even in the post colonial Africa, many people especially in the rural areas still cling to the old patriarchal polygamous family system. Owing to very low level of western education, civilisation is slow and therefore affects life in great many ways.
Enyi insists that his solution does not lie outside his house, not in religion or even in the community Council who has taken his land, but in himself. In his son. He tells his mother that having many children means more debt and unless he is sure he will pay them, he will not have more. He insists on monogamy and though it earned him scorn and strong retribution from his Umunna, he stands his ground. He believes in the fact that the poor quality of life prevalent in Africa can be remedied through family planning and total change in the family system.
As a problem that has bedevilled Africa for a long time and has contributed greatly to its underdevelopment, the author tackles it strongly through this fictional representation. He argues that not even on the ground of loneliness should couples give birth to more children that they can cater to.
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