A Magical Journey! | A Review of Nnedi Okorafor’s Kabu Kabu
| by Wole Talabi
Nnedi-okorafor-kabu-kabu-review
Kabu Kabu is a pidgin term for those dodgy taxis operating
cheaply in many parts of Nigeria. And as
the book jacket says, they generally get you where you need to be, one way or
the other. A fitting name then for Nnedi Okorafor’s first short story
collection, as it takes you on a magical journey of twenty-one stories and
leaves you, at its end, where you need to be.
But where is that exactly?
Drawing from her own rich dual heritage, Okorafor offers an
array of fantasy and science fiction based on dual identities, African folklore
and mythology, the place and vulnerability of women in traditional cultures,
and the politics of being Nigerian.
Some of the stories are obviously excised pieces of larger
stories set in larger worlds. They are little tasters, small chops, to get you
ready for Okorafor’s novels. I guess this is intentional and in some places,
they work very well such as in the excellent ‘The Winds of Harmattan’.
Some of the stories are wonderful stand-alones that cut
right into the established speculative fiction genre and unapologetically jam
pure, unadulterated Africanness into them.
The collection opens with the somewhat unexpected ‘The
Magical Negro’”which isn’t much of a story but is what I would call a literary
dirty slap – a trope attack, reminding you exactly where this collection wants
to take you.
The next story, ‘Kabu Kabu’ is a novella co-written with
Allan Dean Foster in which a woman heading from Chicago to her village for her
sister’s wedding enters a Kabu Kabu. Before long, the driver starts talking
trash and picking up other passengers – normal Kabu Kabu wahala. The issue is
these other passengers are masquerades, vampires, spirits, ojuju and much more.
Her trip becomes a bizarre, awkward journey that I think plays as a metaphor
for how a Nigerian in diaspora might feel returning to a place where spirits
are as real as an iPhone5 – a common theme in Nnedi’s work.
Another common theme in the book is the place of women in
African society. The women in ‘Kabu Kabu’ are often restricted in traditional,
patriarchal cultures which they frequently subvert (‘The Palm Tree Bandit’ sees
a woman secretly tapping palm trees) or actively resist (In ‘How Inyang Got Her
Wings’, the eponymous Inyang , a windseeker from Nnedi’s larger body of work,
is forced to flee her home because of a series of complexities regarding her
puberty and society.)
Unsurprisingly, my favorite stories in the collection are
the ones that lean more toward science fiction than fantasy. This is a personal
preference; I love science fiction for its power of projection – of taking
technology and extrapolating it, as well as examining its effect on people.
This is done expertly by Okorafor in ‘The Popular Mechanic’, and ‘Spider The
Artist’. My two favourite stories in the book. They both deal with the impact
of the oil industry on locals living in the Niger Delta.
I also immensely enjoyed the past-life love story “Asunder”,
the strange of Niger Delta militants “Icon,” the magically realistic political
thriller “Bakasi Man,” the post-apocalyptic ‘Tumaki” and the almost obligatory,
Nigerian-author civil war story ‘Biafra’, which are all stories with endless
merits, written in Okorafor’s trademark tight prose – short sentences, smooth
exposition and powerful imagery.
If there is anything to complain about in the collection, it
is that Okorafor largely neglects the very rich mythologies of other tribes in
Nigeria. (Although, there is a small nod to the Yoruba Orishas in ‘Tumak,“the
portable device used in this post-apocalyptic world is called an e-legba as
reference to Elegba, an Orisha psychopomp with many manifestations). It’s a
very minor complaint, but I believe it is a valid one.
There are also some typographical errors which distracted
from the reading experience. For writers, typos are a necessary evil and we
trust in editors and proof-readers to deliver us from them, so one cannot
really blame Okorafor for this.
I’ve been talking about the stories that make up the journey
of this book, but now, I suppose I should go back to Kabu Kabu as a whole and
where it’s supposed to take you.
Octavia Butler, one of the most influential African-American
female science fiction writers was once asked, “What then is central to what
you want to say about race?” Butler’s response was, “Do I want to say something
central about race? Aside from, ‘Hey we’re here!’?”
And that is where I believe Okorafor’s ‘Kabu Kabu’ takes you
with her skillful balance of characters, plot, setting, and themes, not in
terms of race as with Butler, but in terms of identity and gender and African
stories. It lets you know that speculative fiction is not the exclusive realm
of the white man – the oyibo. It lets you know that Nigerians, Africans, and
women are here. They have fantastic stories to tell, they imagine wonderful and
strange futures. It says, “We are here”, that you don’t need to be a man to
embark on the hero’s journey, that even a Nigerian mechanic can become a
cyborg, and that a young African girl can go on an epic quest to discover her
purpose in the skies. It takes you to a place that says that African dreams and
fantasies and futures are valid. And that, I think, makes it a journey worth
taking.
About the Author:
portrait-oluwole-talabiWole Talabi is an engineer, writer
and editor with a fondness science fiction and fantasy whose stories have
appeared in the Kalahari Review. He lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He
recently edited the These Words Expose Us anthology (2014) to which he also
contributed the story A Certain Sort of Warm Magic.
