A REVIEW OF WAITING FOR AN ANGEL BY HELON HABILA
In Helon Habila’s first novel, Waiting for an Angel, he offers a first-hand account, as Lomba, of life in Nigeria under the military rule of the 1990s. Lomba is a dynamic character who evolves from an apolitical school dropout to a journalist and aspiring novelist and is arrested while covering a demonstration by residents of Poverty Street.
The book starts where Lomba’s days end — in jail, as one of the political prisoners taken by Gen. Sani Abacha — and ends at the climactic events that warrant his arrest. In exchange for a better life in jail, he is coerced into writing love poems which the prison superintendent uses to woo his lover. Habila paints a vivid description of the superintendent, which can be interpreted as an analogy with the country’s totalitarian: “Man in his basic, rudimentary state, easily moved by powerful emotions like love, lust, anger, greed, and fear
but totally dumb to the finer, acquired emotions like pity, mercy, humour, and justice”.
Lomba’s days are plagued by losses: his roommate goes mad after discovering the death of his parents and sister; he drops out of university in Lagos, following riots and the incessant closure of schools; his girlfriend is married off to a rich elderly man who foots the bills of her mother’s cancer treatment.
Half of the book is narrated by Kela, a student of Mr. Joshua who evades arrest for leading the demonstration on Poverty Street. More than a mere geographical location, ‘Poverty Street’ embodies the life of the masses during Abacha’s corrupt regime. Helon Habila offers an extraordinary description of Poverty Street: “one of the many decrepit, disease-ridden quarters that dotted the city of Lagos like ringworm on a beggar’s body”
Habila also offers insights into the parallelism between military dictatorship and slave trade by divulging a conversation between Lomba and James at the slave museum in Badagry: “You see, every oppressor knows that whenever one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there’ll be revolt. That is our work, the media: To refuse to be silenced, to encourage legitimate criticism wherever we find it”.
Another one of the many dialogues in the novel that sheds light on the suppression of free speech and free press in General Abacha’s oppressive regime ensued between Lomba and Mahaila, a fellow attendee at a poem reading: “Have you ever been arrested?”
He shakes his head. “Almost. Today”. “You really must try to get arrested — that’s the quickest way to make it as a poet. You’ll have no problem with visas after that, you might even get an international award”.
Although not a historical document, Waiting for an Angel makes mention of non-fictional events — the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the parcel bomb sent to Dele Giwa, the murder of Kudirat Abiola, and the imprisonment and death of her husband Chief MKO Abiola — although not in chronological order.
Overall, the characters in the book could be viewed in the light of waiting for a messianic angel to save them from their present state or waiting for an angel of death to take them to life beyond.
Kenechukwu Okwunze
400L, MBBS.
