The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa, a novel by Stephen Buoro, deftly navigates the tension between what informs desire and the instinct to shirk it. The novel aims to highlight the complexities of living in a country like Nigeria through the perspective of a malleable teenager full of promise.
It’s one thing to understand the corrosiveness of whiteness, it’s another thing to resist it. Stephen Buoro’s debut novel, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa, charts the coming of age tale of Andrew Aziza, nicknamed ‘Andy Africa’ by one of his teachers. Andy is a Nigerian teenager with a fetish for blonde, white girls and a preoccupation with global Western culture and literature, growing up in the turbulent Muslim majority region of Kontagora, Rivers State where riots, violence, intercommunal strife, and death are the order of the day.
Narrated in the first person, the novel deftly navigates the tension between what informs desire and the instinct to shirk it. Andy loves white girls, ‘I’ll marry a white girl, a blonde,’ he says in the opening paragraph, but is adamant for the reader to not see his preference as self-loathing. ‘A fifteen-year-old African genius poet altar boy who loves blondes is not a criminal, not a racist, not a sell-out,’ he declares...
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