Sozaboy
by Ken Saro-Wiwa
A boy soldier invents a language to tell his war.
you want the Biafran war from the most unexpected angle — a child who joined up for entirely the wrong reasons
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Saro-Wiwa invented a language for this novel — "rotten English," a pidgin that sits between standard English and Nigerian vernacular — because no existing language was adequate for a story this particular. Mene joins the army to impress a girl. He has no idea what the war is about. He never finds out. A dispatch about war as experienced by someone who has no framework for understanding it, written by a man who was later executed by the Nigerian government for his environmental activism in the Niger Delta. The novel is his monument.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Nigeria • West Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Nigerian author
- Themes
- After Empire
