The Other Insider is audacious. Largely well written, racy and enjoyable if read in one sweep from the beginning to the end.
The book is like a delicious, multi-course meal which must be taken at a stretch, in succession, hot and fresh.
Author, Lizi Ashimole tackles some strong themes here. Her storytelling acumen is masterly and belies her status as a debutante of sort.
But she seems to try to do too much though in tying too many ends and threads together. Too many themes and subplots, too many characters, too many epochs all clash to make The Other Insider a nigh chronological crisis.
It is this sequencing issue which requires that you must read the book straight, even though broken in three parts, in order to connect the various historical eras seamlessly and enjoy the numerous juicy stories embedded under each duvet.
The book explores the osu caste system in Igboland which has continued to niggle the race till date, though it’s as good as vanquished today.
You would get richly tutored about the osu in an exhilarating way if you didn’t know. The origin, the rituals and its almost unending deleterious effects on the Igbo society.
The osu phenom is the long twine in this book that ties together several other sub-themes like Igbo-Hausa-Fulani marital relationship with its inherent taboos, as well as Christian-Muslim tangoes.
You will find osu’s dalliance with an emerging Christianity especially the Roman Catholic sect and the disruption that was to be Pentecostalism.
The Other Insider is a beautiful mesh of many stories. But it may have succeeded better as three major books or ten great short stories. (The author may well want to give a shot at the short story genre).
There’s no lead character in the book as each epoch covered in each of the three segments has its own hero-ine.
Agatha, a youth corps member serving in the north (Kaduna) of Nigeria is the lead persona in the first part (which represents modern day). She got emotionally entangled with a Hausa-Fulani fellow corps member who’s a medical doctor.
To twist an old quote, “Ain’t nothing you can tell two young people who are in love.” They are not interested in osu, not in Mohammed or Jesus or even their fathers or mothers. Not even the risk of paying the ultimate prize would deter Agatha and Umar.
Swashbuckling Umar trails Agatha to her father’s homestead in Imo State unannounced. As if Providence set him up for harm, it is the last of the community outcasts Umar finds to lead him straight into the lair of his lover’s father.
Dr. Umar met a man bearing multi-layered traumas: a distant osu stigma, fresh scars of an uncivil war, and an incipient mind-bending Pentecostalism. He met a man deeply disabled psychologically by his very society.
They say there is no fury like a woman rejected. Well, how about daring the fury of a traumatized Igbo man in today’s Nigeria?
Part one of The Other Insider ends with Umar in a pool of his blood, shot at close range by his lover’s father.
The book shows an especial audacity in discussing the ethnic snafus between Igbo and Hausa-Fulani.
Final Notes:
As noted earlier, this book should have and can still be converted to a couple of books or numerous short stories.
For instance, the bloody denouement of the first part could well transmute into a dream by Agatha which will unleash afresh tingling, even spine-chilling love-marital story that could run for hundreds of pages of billowing multi-ethnic, cross-religion crescendos.
I don’t know whether successful, modern Igbo-Hausa-Fulani marriages have been x-rayed in any novel. This could be one.
Page 58 has ‘mandatary’ instead of mandatory. Pages 128 and 129 have ‘staunch’ instead of stanch and wreck instead of wreak, respectively. On 146 is a proofreading blimp. There’s also cliches like “stomach infrastructure” and “my neck of the wood”, p.13.
Otherwise, The Other Insider is a good job. Good story, good reading experience, great themes, exciting characters. A compact 194-page package that will serve senior secondary school students well.
*Osuji was editor at the Guardian, Thisday, etc.
