Praise for Fine Boys ‘Fine Boys is the first African novel I know that takes us deep into the world of the children of IMF: those post-Berlin wall Africans, like myself, who came of age in the days of The Conditionalities, those imposed tools and policies that made our countries feral; the days that turned good people into beasts, the days that witnessed the great implosion and scattering of the middle classes of a whole continent. Fine Boys takes us deep into the lives of the notorious gangs that took over universities all over Nigeria in the 1990s and early this century. We saw our universities collapse, and we struggled to educate ourselves through very harsh times. It is a beautifully written novel, heartfelt, deeply knowledgeable, funny, a love story, a tragedy; an important book, a book of our times; a book for all Africans everywhere.’ —Binyavanga Wainaina, author of One Day I Will Write about This Place ‘With Fine Boys, Eghosa Imasuen proves himself to be a keen observer of Nigerian urban life. He has written an unflinching and witty book, difficult to resist, impossible to ignore. He imbues his energetic prose and compelling characters with candour, grace, and pidgin inventiveness. A writer to watch.’ —A. Igoni Barrett, author of From Caves of Rotten Teeth ‘In Fine Boys, Imasuen writes fearlessly and beautifully of friend- ship, love, loss, and betrayal. It is thought-provoking, perfectly paced, uniformly delightful, compassionate, full of humour but also heart-breaking. Eghosa Imasuen has remarkable gifts.’ —Chika Unigwe, author of The Phoenix ‘In a society where memory is often repressed, Fine Boys is a robust reminder of a defining moment in our country’s life; with an unhurried yet teasing pace, Eghosa takes us back to a time of innocence and experience, fraternity and fragility and fickleness, of craziness; indeed, an authentic narrative of teenage high jinks and loss; serious and funny in turns, yet heartfelt on the whole.’ —Uche Peter Umez, author of The Runaway Hero With Fine Boys, Eghosa Imasuen reaffirms his position as a talented and gifted storyteller. The prose transitions effortlessly, telling a story about friendship, family and the Nigeria of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Fine Boys is a definite must read. —Jude Dibia, author of Blackbird and Unbridled Eghosa Imasuen’s Fine Boys brilliantly recreates early- to mid- 1990s Nigeria, one of the darkest periods in the history of a country not unfamiliar with dark ages. Just as in his (debut) alternate history novel, To Saint Patrick, Imasuen’s obsession with the finer details of Nigerian history shines through. He skilfully deploys a subtle comic tone to suck the reader into a Hobbesian campus world, where staying alive, not studying, is the university student’s ultimate ambition. Fine Boys is a gritty, sad, funny, this-house-has-fallen, stay-with-you-long-past-the- final-page novel. —Tolu Ogunlesi Eghosa Imasuen is indeed a very engaging storyteller. He has definitely upped the ante from his first novel, To Saint Patrick, which deigned to tell the alternate history of Nigeria. Imasuen and his editor, Molara Wood, deserve plaudits. Fine Boys tells the Nigerian story in an unapologetically Nigerian style that does not bend over backwards to dubious universalism. If the matter deserves to be called wahala, Imasuen calls it wahala without italics or roundabout explanatory notes. —Uzor Maxim Uzoatu I must applaud Imasuen for documenting an important era in a way no one has done in recent times. In the “Chair dance” I basked in the lush delicacy of a halcyon past, of teenage angst, fighting alienation. In Fine Boys, one comes across familiar themes present in African literature, but new and contemporary themes emerged also: Attempted suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, the new Christianity and the prodemocracy movement that swept much of Black Africa in the 90s. The novel was also in a way a detailed commentary on identity issues. —Ikhide Ikheloa If anything, Eghosa Imasuen has written the biography of our generation (and this, I suspect, was his intention all along). Writing in glorious, vivid, HD (and even complete with the nostalgic soundtrack of the time), he has exposed the foibles of a generation which, arguably, is one of the most scarred in post-war Nigeria. A generation which lost years of academic life to strikes [...] A generation that remained blind to the irony of bravely protesting against the tyranny of military dictatorship, while having no compunction about doing mindless violence to members of rival confras. A generation which cursed corrupt leaders and elders, but cheated in exams. A generation which, incredibly, deludes itself still, that it is better, nobler, than the rest. Fine Boys is not just our story – it’s our ode, diatribe, lamentation, and our what-the-hell-happened-to-us. —Chimeka Garricks, author of Tomorrow Died Yesterday Fine Boys is a book which every book lover—every Nigerian— should read. It expertly conveys the irony of the Nigerian experience. —YNaija FINE BOYS A NOVEL by EGHOSA IMASUEN Published in Nigeria by Kachifo Limited Under its Farafina imprint 253 Herbert Macaulay Way Yaba, Lagos Nigeria Tel: 0807 736 4217 Email: [email protected] www.kachifo.com Published as an eBook in 2011 First print edition 2012 Second print edition 2014 Revised edition 2018 Copyright © Eghosa Imasuen 2011 All rights reserved. The right of Eghosa Imasuen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright laws. A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Nigeria. ISBN: 978-978-55597-3-6 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Kachifo Limited. This special edition is published under arrangement with Narrative Landscape Press Limited. Cover design and layout: Akeem Ibrahim For Arorivho “Riscoe” Onyoh, friend and brother Year One January 1993 – March 1994 1 I remember something my father told me after I went with him on a visit to one oyibo oil executive. I was thirteen, in class three; I wore my Federal Government College Warri white-and- white and had been impressed by the white man’s office. He was Canadian, I think, and he had a pot belly that jiggled every time he laughed. The office had that smell of air-conditioned Big Men, like chocolate and tobacco, like cheap cigars. Not cigarettes, cheap big cigars that go out on their own if you do not puff on them. I told my father when we had left that the oyibo man’s office smelled of money. Daddy had already put the 505 in reverse. He stopped the car, shifted to neutral and looked at me. “Ewaen. Money doesn’t smell like that. Money smells like crap. You understand? Like unwashed armpits and crap. All of this,” he waved his hands at the large building in front of the car, “is all show.” I remember the clean version of what he said. My father used the f-word a lot. “You have to understand, Ewaen. You do not make money by standing around in clean suits making yanga. You must get dirty, and smelly. And on Friday, when your payslip is ready, crappy as it my look, you can have a bath, splash on some Old Spice, and then smell good. But be under no illusions, sonny. Money doesn’t smell good when it’s being made, when it’s really being made.” He had a point. I had smelled crude oil, and it smelled bad, like fermented excrement. I do not know why I remember this, 4 Eghosa Imasuen here at the start of this story of youth and lost innocence. What did I learn that day? That beneath facades was always the smell of dirt? That real life was not clean, not antiseptic? My father always had funny things to say; funny, rude things. Daddy had made his bones as an engineer with Scallop Oil in the early seventies. He was a Scallop-scholar, among the first in a set of exceptional chaps the oil company thought were brilliant enough to be trained as the earliest indigenous engineers for their Niger Delta operations. Daddy had told my brother and me about his training in England. The group had been taught ballroom dancing, etiquette and other oyibo mannerisms. The company wanted to mould these chaps into high-flyers; brilliant and well-behaved young men who would come back home to take control of their country’s destiny and protect the industry. The last half of this sentence were the actual words Daddy said the oyibo director used when he spoke to them after they graduated in ’69. And it seemed the oyibos believed it too. That is until Daddy, at the staff camp for the gas terminal in Forcados, broke a snooker stick on an oyibo man’s head for saying that “Black men lack the intellectual capacity to understand a gentleman’s game like billiards.” I once asked Daddy if he did. That is, if he understood billiards. He did not. But that was not the point, he said. He told us that in those days the only foreign engineers who agreed to work in the mosquito-infested swamps were ex-mercenaries and such. The goat who had made the comment was a semi- literate expatriate technician—the typical specimen: balding, not properly bathed, with dirt-encrusted fingernails that always scratched at an itchy crotch. Daddy, a London-trained engineer, was not going to take that nonsense from anyone.