Review of my book

In a world rapidly overtaken by technology in all its awesome forms, what role does superstition play in people’s lives? Does living in the city with its many glitters, sophisticated and urbane airs diminish the power of superstition in determining how people live their lives? These are some of the intriguing questions Oyindamola Affinnih’s new novel Two Gone... Still Counting tries to unravel
AMANI'S young and settled world in the city of London takes a turn for the worse when she overhears her parents agonising over her fate and how to undergo the most gruesome rite ever to straighten it before she is ripe enough for marriage. Her parents are Yoruba and Muslims; they all live in London. But they fear the worse for their daughter’s future and prospects for a successful marriage on account of a superstitious belief among the Yoruba of an incident that happened to her at infancy.

As an infant strapped to her mother’s back as African mothers are wont to do, she had slipped and fallen done. For the Yoruba, that is a taboo that brings the worse fate for the girlchild; it has the capability to ruin the men that would attempt to marry her. Indeed, if the abomination is not appeased and the poor girl set free from its clutches, the men the girl in question will marry will die to the eighth one. The only way to propitiate the powers that hold court over the abomination is for the mother to walk through a marketplace in full session naked as an act of contrition in carelessness.

It is such dire situation Amani’s parents find themselves, particularly her mother, who believes; her father not quite so. At Amani’s mother’s instigation and out of a mother’s concern for her daughters’ prospect for a successful marriage, father and mother, together with their two children Amani and Areef, their son, set out for Nigeria in what turns out the worse ordeal ever a family encounters.

They arrive their palacial home in Ikoyi and still agonise over how a sophisticated woman that shuttles between London and Lagos will subject herself to such primitive act of propitiation to save a daughter from a fate the mother brought on.
With the husband not quite in support, the moment to commit herself to the act of appeasement becomes delayed.
But something happens to thwart the calculation of their trip from London to Lagos. On their way to a friend’s party, husband and wife are cut down in a possible case of mistaken identity. This leaves poor Amani and her younger brother Areef in bitter grief. It also sets them up for the most gruesome ordeal that leaves them stranded in the next few years.

Their father’s brother Uncle Kolade turns out a monster and terrorises the living daylight out of the bereaved children. He takes possession of their father’s house and sends them to the boy’s quarters, seizes their passports and mets out the worse punishment to them. But Amani is smart to have taken possession of her father’s documents to his vast assets; it’s for this brazen act of denying him the documents to the brother’s properties that Uncle Kolade would punish them relentlessly.

Eventually, Amani and Areef find themselves some reprieve from the pain their uncle subjects them. Areef goes back to London to school, and Amani had to do most to get herself a life in Lagos as Uncle Kolade had defaced her passport.
Now, with her mother not being able to carry out the sacrifece of walking through a market naked to free her from the supposed curse under which she is placed, what becomes the fate of Amani and her prospect for marriage? Will she live under that curse forever?
Can the fate that befall the two men that cross her path be considered mere a fulfillment of the superstition or mere coincidence? This certainly seems arguable the way she treats the subject.

Nevertheless, this is the fate under which a young woman struggles as she tries to grapple with a harsh environment. Affinnih makes a strong case against the cruelty of relations, who deny bereaved children and their mothers a chance for a decent life in most parts of Africa, where the deceased’s property are shared among the extended family members at the expense of the nuclear family.

Affinnih’s Two Gone... Still Counting is most revelatory and explorative of a superstitios belief, the sort most Africans are still subjected in spite of their urbanity. Indeed, it’s an intriguing novel that exposes city dwellers for what they are: The are no different from their rural folks. Uncle Kolade’s behaviour is most evil. However, Affinnih dwells too much on their ordeal at the hands of Uncle Kolade to task the faculty of her readers. Their ordeal takes a third part of the novel. And, when it comes to unravelling her fate and her relationship with the two men she encounters, she seems to have run out of steam.

Nevertheless, Two Gone... Still Counting is superb narrative that will leave the reader breathless in its range and exploration of materials ordinarily taken for granted. It’s certainly makes for a joyful reading, and it shows Affinnih as a writer of promise.