About 'The Night of The Monster'

Hammadu Dangar was a real life bandit who lived in those innocent days of 1970’s Nigeria. I never really saw him, but his presence filled my childhood the way certain images and ideas do, because of their ability to trigger off the young imagination into a million places and possibilities. If I were to now separate what is fact about him and what is fantasy, I doubt if I would succeed. But I do recall the day he was killed, how the whole town had trooped to the gully to view his mutilated corpse, and how the people jubilated, and how Apollo’s name was suddenly on everyone’s lips as the man most instrumental in undoing Dangar. Apollo I knew very well, I had seen him, spoken with him, and perhaps even touched him. A most unlikely hero, he was a thin, consumptive looking man, perhaps a result of the copious amount of rotgut gin the soldiers consumed every night.

When did I decide to combine all these into a story? I can’t say exactly, stories build in you silently, creep up on you, and even after you have decided to write them, there still remains the manner in which to write them. At first I was uncomfortable about writing stories from my own life, my own childhood, even bringing my own mother into it (the seamstress who snatches up the clothe basket and her son like a mother hen under threat) – but then I read Isaac Babel and I knew exactly how to do it.

Babel was a Russian Jew whose stories about his family and childhood in Odessa are so beautifully done, the fact and the fiction so finely mixed, that fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact and at the end none really matter but this new organism that has an entirely independent life and is complete in itself. Isn’t that the ultimate achievement for a writer, to have your work merge so seamlessly with your life that you actually become what you write about, not in a narcissistic, self-serving way, but in a plain recollection of all that matters to you, the people, the places, the things you know best because you have seen them and touched them and talked to them? You can describe their colours effortlessly, their shapes, their predilections. When I wrote about the footpath I took to school with my friend Daniel I felt a lump rise in my throat; I saw the urine patches on the wall foundations, the broken bottles before the bar rooms, the drunks nursing their hangovers and getting set to get drunk again.