The Road to the Country
By Chigozie Obioma
For the first time in nearly an hour, Kunle rises from the cane chair and looks at his wristwatch, then at the small bush outside. The rain, which had started shortly before he sat to write, has stopped now. On the soft earth closer to the window, a small bird totters, a writhing red worm clasped in its beak. He feels again the presence, the unusual sense of something, a thing alive yet invisible, watching him. He glances up, then around himself. But there is no one.
He picks up the papers and begins to go through the “story” he has just written. At once he is surprised by how many of the details about the accident have remained in his mind, even after all these years. It was only this morning that he’d walked into the auditorium near the Law Building and heard a lecturer speak about writing to free oneself. He’d rushed home, picked up a pen and the foolscap notebook. And now, pieces of his childhood—blown in from remote corners of the past—are gathered in these few sheets of foolscap paper.
As he rereads, the details rise before his eyes in vivid colors: Nkechi, standing beside him, nine years old just like him. She wears on her face the beauty of youth; her hair is permed and ribboned, and her skin shiny with pomade.
“Darling, let us send Tunde outside, oh?” she says, leaning into his left ear. “Let him not disturb us.”
“Oh, okay,” he says.
Nkechi whispers something else to him, and abruptly he turns towards the door as Tunde, only six then, comes in swinging. Tunde tells them he wants stew, and rice, and goat meat. Kunle listens to his brother’s chatter with half his mind as Nkechi steps closer, cups her hand around his ear, and says, “Darling, send him away—o? Mmhuu . . . Send him away so that he will not disturb us again.”
Kunle leads his brother out of the kitchen, to the front door. They go out to the yard, partly grassy, partly dirt. He picks up a small green football from the dirt and kicks it over the fence.
“It is a goal! It is a goal!” Tunde yells and runs out of the compound after the ball.
Quickly, Kunle rushes back into the house and locks the door. He is clasping his hands around Nkechi in embrace when they hear Tunde’s scream.
This moment was hard for Kunle to write—four lines on the foolscap sheet here were erased and rewritten, in some places twice over. But what he allowed himself to put down in the end is that he is confused, dazed. He runs out the front door in the direction of the scream and meets instead a small crowd of people. Tunde is lying on the ground beside an Oldsmobile whose fender has been damaged, doors flung wide open, and from whose rear a whiff of smoke is rising. Tunde’s face is covered in blood, his hands thrown far apart. “Tunde! Tunde!” Kunle cries, rushing forward towards his brother. He finds himself being pulled back by stronger hands as he kicks and flails, crying his brother’s name.
Kunle puts the book down presently and rises as if new blood has entered his body, stirring every limb with its fresh, hot life. What should he do with this writing? For a long while he stands there with these thoughts, until he hears a knock on the door. He looks about at his room and then, quickly, he dumps the half-eaten bowl of garri into the bucket under the table and tosses a dirty shirt behind the bed, leaving only a library book on the bed.
Uncle Idowu’s belligerent voice follows the persistent knocking:
“Kunle, have you gone deaf?”
At once, Kunle fumbles with the lock, opens the door.
“Alagba?” Uncle Idowu says. “What is the problem?”
“Am sorry, sa. I was asleep. I was—”
“Eheh—by this time?” Uncle Idowu says, closing the door. He gazes at the clothes hanging on a blue rope along the wall.
“I’m sorry, sa.”
Excerpt from “The Road to the Country” copyright © 2024 by Chigozie Obioma. Published by Penguin Books.
About the book: At first the vision is grainy but slowly it clears, and there appears the figure of a man.
When a country is plunged into civil war, two brothers on either side of it are divided. They will try to find their way back to each other. Kunle's search for his sibling Tunde becomes a journey of atonement which sees him conscripted into the army to fight a war he hardly understands. Once there, he will forge friendships to last a lifetime, and he will meet a woman who will change his world forever. But will he find his brother?
The story of a young man seeking redemption in a nation on fire, Chigozie Obioma's novel is an odyssey of brotherhood, love and unimaginable courage set during the Biafran War. Intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling, inspired and emotionally powerful novel, The Road to the Country is a masterpiece.
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Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His two previous novels, The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities, were both finalists for the Booker Prize. His novels have won the inaugural FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and have been nominated for many others. Together, they have been translated into thirty languages. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and divides his time between the United States and Nigeria.
You can read our interview with Chigozie Obioma here
