‘Provocative’ Nigerian writer  to tour country

What you need to know:

  • Trained as a lawyer, Elnathan quit his job in 2012 to focus fully on writing and is amongst the most popular Nigeria writers with a huge online following and a well-read satire column in a weekly newspaper.
  • Elnathan is also known as the controversial writer who in 2013, dared get into a fight with the renown Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a fight that resurfaced in August 2016 when he met Chimamanda’s friend Binyavanga Wainaina in Berlin.
  • He has also written non-fiction pieces, most recently The Keepers of Secrets, a journalistic piece published in the 2016 Commonwealth anthology of creative non-fiction, Safe House.

Nigerian writer, satirist and lawyer Elnathan John will be coming to Nairobi on February 15 courtesy of the Magunga Bookstore, Prestige Bookshop and Goethe Institut. Elnathan is expected to attend a number of literary events among them the Goethe Institut’s Literary Crossroads, James Murua’s Cosmos Book Club, a book signing session at the Prestige Bookshop and a public lecture at a local university.

Speaking about Elnathan’s coming, Williams Magunga, the first Pan-African online bookstore owner said, ‘It will be such a treat to have Elnathan in Kenya for the first time and I am proud to be part of the people that made this happen. I think part of the process of improving African literature is to improve interaction between writers and readers.”

Trained as a lawyer, Elnathan quit his job in 2012 to focus fully on writing and is amongst the most popular Nigeria writers with a huge online following and a well-read satire column in a weekly newspaper.

Elnathan is also known as the controversial writer who in 2013, dared get into a fight with the renown Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a fight that resurfaced in August 2016 when he met Chimamanda’s friend Binyavanga Wainaina in Berlin.

PROLIFIC WRITER

He has been twice shortlisted for the prestigious Caine short story prize in 2013 for the story Bayan Layi and in 2015 for a story titled Flying. He has also written non-fiction pieces, most recently The Keepers of Secrets, a journalistic piece published in the 2016 Commonwealth anthology of creative non-fiction, Safe House.The Keepers of Secrets follows the lives of yan daudu or effeminate males living in a Muslim community in northern Nigeria. It examines their daily existence and how the Nigerian government’s passing of the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in 2014 affected their lives.

Yet it is Elnathan’s debut novel Born on a Tuesday, published by Cassava Republic, that has been creating a buzz around the African literary scene lately.  Set in the Muslim North, the book tells the coming-of-age tale of an almajiri named Ahmad Dantala.

After leaving home to attend Quranic school, the young Dantala whose name loosely translates to one born on a Tuesday, becomes part of a gang hired by politicians to cause electoral violence and bribe voters in Bayan Layi. Things get ugly and he is forced to flee and go back home to Dogon Icce but ends up in Sokoto where he finds a mentor Imam Sheikh Jamal. In the book, Dantala has to grapple with a myriad of issues ranging from Islamic fundamentalism to sectarian wars, hypocrisy, homosexuality and government brutality.

Elnathan does a good job examining the anatomy of religious wars and the psychology behind violent extremism. In his review of Born on a Tuesday, renown Nigerian Critic Ikhide Ikhoela says that the book is important because it joins a robust body of literary works now shaping an intellectual dichotomy between diaspora writing and writing from within the continent. 

Born in Kaduna to Christian parents, Elnathan sites his Muslim childhood friends and the almajiris he met in university as his inspiration for the book. In writing it, he combined his life experiences with extensive research on Islam, extremism and Political Islam in northern Nigeria.

The book was shortlisted for the rich Nigerian Prize for Literature, the $100,000 award.

Critics have asserted that Elnathan’s book is a product of deliberate efforts by writers from the Muslim north to address the matter of Northern Nigeria being left out of the country’s narratives. He joins writers like Hellon Habila, Richard Ali, E.E. Sule and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim in telling the story of the North.