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A Review Of Sanya Osha’s: An Underground Colony Of Summer Bees

November 30, 2012

An interesting turn in contemporary Nigerian writing is that Nigerian writers who have relocated to other nations are preoccupying themselves with the social realities of their adopted nations. Their imagination may be triggered by a sympathetic feeling as in the case of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sister Street; or by a traumatic feeling (when the writer’s life is affected) as in the case of Niyi Osundare’s City without People. Sanya Osha who has been living and working in South Africa, his adopted nation, joins the increasing voices of what many have come to see as Nigeria’s diasporic writing with his novel An Underground Colony of Summer Bees.

An interesting turn in contemporary Nigerian writing is that Nigerian writers who have relocated to other nations are preoccupying themselves with the social realities of their adopted nations. Their imagination may be triggered by a sympathetic feeling as in the case of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sister Street; or by a traumatic feeling (when the writer’s life is affected) as in the case of Niyi Osundare’s City without People. Sanya Osha who has been living and working in South Africa, his adopted nation, joins the increasing voices of what many have come to see as Nigeria’s diasporic writing with his novel An Underground Colony of Summer Bees.


    
Osha’s An Underground Colony is a story of street life, of struggle and survival, of passionate longing, and of waste. Osha gives us a vivid picture of a post-Apartheid South Africa with its ever-expanding “colony” (to use the author’s metaphor) of unemployed youths, fast becoming underdogs, languishing in streets. Crime and drug abuse become their means of survival, of living a life at a time. The novel traces the life of Jerome Akpanta who, even though the novel is silent about it, is a Nigerian migrant who seeks a good life in South Africa. He first settles in Johannesburg, but life becomes too rough, as he “had had to run from street thugs, different drug lords and their minions as well as policemen both corrupt and upright” (1). He prefers Durban which, in his estimation, is “calmer”.
    

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But Durban proves to be as tough as Johannesburg, although it offers him an avenue to turn himself into a drug lord. He gets the formula for making it: if, as a drug dealer, he houses prostitutes who along with their clients are drug addicts, he is sure to succeed. With his in-house minion, Teddy, he accomplishes the plan. Tina, Zanele, Babongile, and Cindy move in to live with him. Although their presence enhances his drug business, he has had to face the troubles that come with housing prostitutes. Either he or Teddy must provide a cover for the girls when they are out doing business because they are easily attacked by street imps and gangs. When Cindy greedily goes out for more business without Teddy “shadowing” her, she gets gang-raped; it is an anal penetration that gives her unspeakable pains. Zanele suffers worse molestation when she falls into the hands of a gang. One of the men “pissed into her face and over her hair” (175). Another man “who had burned her with a cigarette picked up an empty beer bottle and inserted it into her vagina” (176). Tina, perhaps the luckiest of the girls (even with Jerome), only suffers a police arrest, and Jerome promptly attends to it and gets her freed. In all, Jerome tries to be nice, to empathise with them. But the reader knows why he is nice; the girls are his machines which must work for him to keep getting money. He is even impatient with them when they are sluggish about going out to make money, or to bring clients, to buy his drugs. Babongile always confronts Jerome, insults him, and whips up racial and national sentiments: “You are a criminal and destroying the lives of South African women. I will get you deported. I will tell my brothers to kill you. You dog, you snake” (109).
    

Jerome survives it all, always the quintessential clever man, meandering his way, his business bringing him the kind of money he wants. Very ethically mindful of his business, he does not do drug, he overcomes the seductive moves of the girls, his machines. Tina wants him; he does not want her; he only wants her to bring money and clients to him. He succeeds. He opens a grocery shop, hires a girl to look after it. His big dreams will become realities, after all. He will gradually remove himself from the street life, drug life, and will establish a chain of businesses with branches all over West Africa. But the street life is one that must consume its own, and much as he does not want to admit it, Jerome is a product of the street. When he thinks he has had it all, that “he could move his life to another level” (202), the girls strike. They disappear with his drugs, and with the computers he has bought with all his savings to ship home to start a business. He is back to the beginning of his street life. When he meets one of them in a street and demands for his wealth, threatening her, she tells him: “You will kill who. You are just a foreigner. You are a criminal. If you don’t leave me alone, I will go to the cops” (204). Out of anger he beats her to a pulp. And he has to face the cost: either run out of Durban, out of South Africa, or go to jail.
    

The novel is blunt, eager to call a spade a spade. Scenes of crimes and of sex come with lucid and elaborate descriptions, a desire to show it as it is. It is also well researched, with all the slangs falling into their appropriate places. Osha is incapable of being unpoetic, and as such the novel itself can boast of being a long poem. Also characteristic of Osha, there is a sustained attempt to philosophise street life, some of it, heavy-handed, standing in the way of the narrative flow. Perhaps the overall importance of this novel is that it offers a window to glimpse at what many commentators on post-Apartheid South Africa have seen as the alarming rate of crimes in the society.         

Sule E. Egya
Department of English
IBB University, Lapai

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