If there is one thing to note in Nigeria’s transition into the twenty-first century, it is that Nigeria went into the century with change: first from military to civilian rule. But more than that, Nigeria seemed determined to maintain that civilian rule, at all costs. Politicians have also come and gone promising change but ending up leaving the country more devastated than they found it. Nothing has really changed, both on the surface and at a deeper level. The old problems persist: corruption, tribalism, nepotism, and violence. Deeper into the century, the country’s adult problems continue to deepen, the political and economic uncertainties that have defined the last ten years. The citizens are experiencing the attendant upheavals too. The shocking rise in fuel prices, food prices, and other goods. Then there is violence, both sectarian and gender-based, and the curiously state-sanctioned violence against gay people—all these are captured in the fiction of the last decade and a half.  

Eghosa Imasuen’s Fine Boys (2011) is a treatise on the senselessness of violence in Nigeria’s universities, an issue that remains of paramount concern in contemporary Nigeria today. Our protagonist here is the teenage Ewean. Ewean’s attainment of maturity amidst violence—violence becomes his education, an abrupt education that thrusts him in the middle of the uproarious political activism that attended Abacha’s totalitarian regime in the 1990s. A maturity in such an environment would have created a character similar to the character of Gen X Nigerians who had emerged from that long night of tyranny that marked the last years of the last century before this new century came. These Nigerians are surely ones buoyed by an oversized sense of hope in the return to democracy. Looking back now inventory, has Nigeria of today lived up to its expectations 25 years ago?  

As Ewean negotiates his development amidst cultism on campus, the melody of Nigeria’s familiar problem plays before us: strike actions, corruption, followed by protests. Ewean’s generation also seems to be that of Kambili in Purple Hibiscus. Unsurprisingly, their growth, the moment of their maturity, their awakening, comes with the literal and symbolic attainment of freedom from a stifling home and the stifling political environment of the 1990s, just before the new millennium.  

Another novel that deals with another kind of violence reminiscent of not just the 1990s Nigeria in which it is set, but violence that has become overwhelmingly magnified in twenty-first-century Nigeria, is Jowhor Ile’s And After Many Days (2016). It is a book in which one feels palpably even in the prose the uneasiness of the Abacha’s reign of terror, in the twilight years of military regimes in Nigeria. This is first and foremost the story of the disappearance of Paul, Ajie’s brother, and the inability to find exactly whether it is a death or kidnapping or other kind of loss. Here also, because of this, the characters cannot even process their feelings towards this loss, whether to grieve or wait endlessly for Paul’s return that will never come. One immediately recalls Hisham Matar’s Anatomy of a Disappearance, the clandestine kidnapping and liquidating activities of the erstwhile regime in Matar’s Libya, thinly veiled in that novel, is not dissimilar to Ile’s Nigeria in 1995 when Ajie’s brother, Paul, disappears. For anyone conversant with Nigerian history, 1995 is a significant year in Nigeria. It was the year of the assassination of the Ogoni Nine, including famous author and activist, Saro-Wiwa, which sparked an international outcry; it became clear to the rest of the world that Nigeria was in the iron grip of a ruthless dictator. Ile’s fictional story carefully captures this real-world tension. 

Ile’s And After Many Days is essentially the coming-of-age story of Ajie, the youngest son of a family in Port Harcourt, who grew up quickly after his elder brother Paul’s sudden disappearance. This kind of abrupt thrust into the maturity of adulthood is, without doubt, the reality of people growing up under repressive regimes where sudden disappearances are the order of the day. As Ajie retells the story of his coming of age, he simultaneously scrutinizes everything in those formative years to try to find a clue. And here again, the familiar problems come up: student violence (see Fine Boys), oil scarcity and protests, and police brutality.  

These problems continue to recur and each new generation is forced to confront the problems like a sore wound that never heals, and out of it, fashion out their own maturity. To negotiate Nigeria’s problems is an education; to grow up in the country is to become unwittingly thrust into the politics of existence, an existence in which one must make quick adult decisions regardless of one’s age. And again, the main education is in the process of growth rather than in the moment of growth.  

No bildungsroman novel in twenty-first-century Nigeria illustrates this better than Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings (2024), which tackles a different kind of violence that forces the ‘process’ of growth in the hero, Obiefuna, a gay boy growing up in early 2000s Nigeria. The pivot here clearly chats about a new concern in Nigeria (but of course, this violence is as old as the country itself): that of violence against LGBTQ people, who were in 2014 outlawed by the Nigerian government. With Obiefuna’s coming-of-age, Ibeh makes us deeply feel the humanity inherent in all human beings. Obiefuna’s education is a sentimental one in his journey towards psychological maturity. There is a lot of introspection and spontaneity, but somehow, by that same alchemy that occurs in a young person’s mind when their immediate environment seems rigged against them, Obiefuna grows up fast, the epiphany hits him gradually but he soon realizes his place in the world, with the love and support of his mother, about whom he concludes that ‘nowhere else in the world would ever feel like home to him. Obiefuna’s maturity is found in his almost stubborn insistence on acknowledging love wherever he sees it, regardless of the larger society, in choosing to acknowledge little blessings.