FYAHMIX

Habila's well-crafted novel captures both the sense of mental unbalance of living under a dictatorship and the sacrifices, personal and public, that must be offered to chip away at its ferociously blank face.Lady Gregory's Toothbrush By Colm T?n (PICADOR £7.99) T?n's affectionate portrait of Lady Gregory reinstates the importance of her contribution to the theatre and culture surrounding the emergence of Irish independence, often eclipsed by fellow-luminaries such as Yeats or Synge. Abacha notoriously hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa for protesting at the desecration of his oil-rich homeland - but the Lagos outside Lomba's editor's office is stalled with traffic queuing at empty petrol stations. Lomba's dissident editor, showing him the "gewgaws of slavery" in a coastal museum, explains the mouth chains that were used to silence slaves: "Every oppressor knows that where one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there'll be a revolt." Habila's novel fuels that fire, adding further unhysterical but alarming words to the cacophony of criticism levelled internationally at Nigeria's craven junta.

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In an afterword, Habila explains his desire to convey the stifling atmosphere of hatred and fear caused by the depredations of General Sani Abacha, whose brutal five-year regime in the 1990s outstripped the blatant embezzlements and human rights abuses of all the previous military juntas put together. Lomba is talked into covering the demo by his editor but, before it occurs, the journal's offices are torched and a warrant issued for the editor's arrest.These unchronological chapters, the feeling of drift in the first half of this book, and Lomba's rather stilted, passionless demeanour, gradually cement into a compressed core of determination to be counted, to resist oppression. The longest chapter, "Kela", again opens with desultory detail, then escalates into a homegrown demonstration that ignites the violence which flares through the latter third of this novel. Both the riots, and Bola's swift mauling by security thugs, persuade Lomba to drop his studies and drift away.

Waiting For an Angel begins placidly with Lomba, a poet and journalist, biding his time as an untried political prisoner. Curiously unbitter, Lomba floats through prison routines until a cell search reveals his stash of poetry. The Governor, in a cringing overture of affability, restores to Lomba his precious pen and paper but has him write proxy poems for him to give to his chubby fianc? This darkly comic vignette feels like the opening of a collection of poignant but calm short stories.Tension begins to increase in the third chapter. Lomba's clubbable university room-mate Bola responds to the extinction of his parents in a car crash by publicly ranting anti-government slogans aped from the ongoing student riots. Camelot glittered, but behind the scenes it could be a tawdry place.One recalls a Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams in 1813, agreeing "that there is a natural aristocracy among men The grounds of this are virtue and talents...

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents." This book, in my view, puts John Kennedy somewhere in between.. The man who advocated freedom, advancement, and even non-alignment for Third World peoples could refer to an Italian-American attorney as "that goddamn guinea". The honeymooning bridegroom who wired his parents that "Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart" could go cruising with several young women while Jackie was struggling with an impending miscarriage. It was the result, instead, of the violent and non-violent explosion from below...

"Almost everywhere here you find assertions and contradictions about Kennedy's policies, impact and character. That is not to ignore John Kenneth Galbraith's point, that Kennedy and his VP "were not the true source of the great movement to civil rights. Had Congress - particularly Southern Democrats - not tied his hands on this and other domestic issues, and had the President lived, it is likely that his administration's achievements, on civil rights, health care, child welfare, would have been remarkable. (Despite a public warning to Moscow that the US would act against the Communist drive towards the Mekong, Kennedy decided instead to negotiate for the de facto partition of Laos.) The second loss of prestige was over the Bay of Pigs, and the third was over Khrushchev's erection of the Berlin Wall without any serious US reaction.Kennedy and his vice-President and successor Lyndon Johnson will be remembered positively for their efforts to dilute racism, or at least its worst effects. These problems were added to by what were perceived to be three foreign policy reverses during his first six months in office One was over Laos.