At the centre of Elnathan John’s insightful debut novel about religious extremism in Nigeria is its eponymous protagonist, Dantala, whose name translates as Born on a Tuesday. Dantala is sent away by his father to attend Qur’anic school. He falls in with a group of street boys; when they are hired by a political party to burn the headquarters of an opposition party, the police get involved and Dantala must flee to save his life. He ends up in Sokoto State, where an imam called Sheikh Jamal takes him under his wing. Here he finds some stability and becomes friends with Jibril, who teaches him English, a language that “sounds soft and easy like one does not need to open one’s mouth a lot or use a lot of air or energy” – unlike Arabic, where “one uses everything, the neck, the jaws, the tongue”.
Dantala’s world is not soft and easy. Horrific things happen: prepubescent boys kill and commit atrocities for political ideologies they do not understand, and mothers depend on alms to feed their children. Hypocrisy abounds; corruption is rife; young men are drawn to religious extremism, there is tension between Shia and the Sunni Muslims, but also redemption in language and style. John writes with an understated elegance and we discover humour and wisdom in the most unexpected of places. When Dantala is involved in a car accident, for example, he goes to a chemist where the owner “is short and his eyeballs look like they are about to fall out … I can’t stop looking at his huge nose, which seems to be divided into three parts. He must be breathing in a lot of air.”
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