Abimbola Lagunju

Abimbola Lagunju (born in 1960 in Ibadan) is a Nigerian author.He studied Medicine in St Petersburg, Russia (1979–1987). He returned to Nigeria in the middle of the economic crisis engendered by the World Bank/IMF Structural Adjustment Program imposed on Nigeria. It was a Nigeria quite different from what he had left in 1979. The Middle Class to which he now belonged was destitute. He would later write in The Children of Signatures (ISBN 0-595-76026-0):

My dream,

antithesis,

born on the horizon,

a little ball, that

swells with age,

rolling dark wall,

the ceiling of my world,

dashed on unimportant little rocks

even before I could get my feet wet.

The socio-economic melt-down of his country prompted his interest to shift from ideological idealisms of his student days to questioning the harsh political economy experiments visited on developing countries, particularly fragile sub-Saharan African countries by the Bretton Woods Institutions. He wrote in Verses from Under the Sands (ISBN 978-978-900-481-2)

If my hands were tied with the most obstinate roots,

I would struggle to de-fibre the cord,

I would twist and turn the sinews of bloodless hands,

keeping them alive with the power of hope of freedom,

when they shall be free to take clay

from distant streams or nearby rivers

and mould their destiny, my destiny.

But my hands are tied with invisible silk threads,

that cut into my flesh,

drawing strength from the warm current of my blood,

de-nerving my hands with each beat of my heart.

The apparent helplessness of the African States in the face of this assault also reflected in some of his writings. Again, in the Children of Signatures (ISBN 0-595-76026-0), he wrote:

We are the children of signatures,

sons and daughters of important pens,

wielded around independence negotiations,

debt conferences, poverty reduction workshops,

ceasefire agreements, structural readjustment initiatives

We are the orphans of lateral agreements,

bi-fathers with multi-mothers,

cooperations, agencies, international community,

regional associations, sub-regional conventions,

allied with non-allied

We are in exile,

at the edge of their documents,

squeezed between dotted lines,

stamped by those who christened us,

our fathers, who signed away our essence.

Will they ever hear the echo of our silence?

He left Nigeria for Portugal with his family in 1993, and after a brief stint of working and studying in Lisbon, he found a job as a Development Aid worker. This experience exposed him to the arduous and seemingly unending plight of extreme poverty of rural African peoples. In his novel Days of Illusions (ISBN 0-595-37605-3), he blames the local politicians who are directly responsible for the precarious existence of their citizens, and also the poor people for allowing themselves to be manipulated by the local politicians.

^[1] Lagunju's works include Cyclones of the Human Heart (ISBN 1-85756-478-2), The Shadow of Rainbow' (ISBN 1-904181-27-9), The Children of Signatures (ISBN 0-595-76026-0), The African in the Mirror (ISBN 0-595-34819-X), the Days of Illusions (ISBN 0-595-37605-3), Verses from Under the Sands" (ISBN 978-978-900-481-2) and On the African Bus (ISBN 978-978-900-400-3).

Abimbola Lagunju lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

References