Proudly Nigerian

When his girlfriend throws him out during the pandemic, Bambi has to go to his Uncle’s house in lock-down Lagos. He arrives during a blackout, and is surprised to find his Aunty Bidemi sitting in a candlelit room with another woman. They both claim to be the mother of the baby boy, fast asleep in his crib.

At night Bambi is kept awake by the baby’s cries, and during the day he is disturbed by a cockerel that stalks the garden. There is sand in the rice. A blood stain appears on the wall. Someone scores tribal markings into the baby’s cheeks. Who is lying and who is telling the truth?

Toyosi’s fiancèe abruptly ends their engagement three months before the wedding. His heart is shattered; the person he thought would take a bullet for him was the one pulling the trigger. Having mourned a love lost and realizing he is now free from betrayal and ruthless manipulation, he slowly feels ready to re-enter the dating scene, but his search is complicated beyond his control.

After a couple of interesting encounters that lead no where, Toyosi, a British-Nigerian amateur writer by night, pens a hilarious, yet heartfelt memo anonymously to a fictitious bride-to-be to explain how difficult it has been to find her. The memo goes viral among single women all over the globe who are interested in identifying the romantic mystery man behind it. Though this makes up a tiny part of his story, like the rest of his story, he soon realises that life is full of unexpected twists and turns.

This compelling quest of one man’s search for love transports readers from a childhood in a western part of Nigeria, to a successful career in London on a journey that deals with sickle cell, and what we’re willing to sacrifice in the search for love.

Andrew Aziza is an unusually smart fifteen-year-old in Kontagora, Nigeria. He lives with his fiercely protective mother, Gloria, and fantasizes obsessively about white girls-especially blondes. When he’s not in church, at school, or hanging about town with his droogs wishing to become one of “Africa’s first superheroes,” he’s contemplating the larger questions with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who has feelings for him. Together they discuss mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed the Curse of Africa.

Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed Andy Africa soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on: Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man there claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzlingly unique literary voice. Crackling with energy, this tragicomic novel provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of growing up in a turbulent world.