It is thrilling to be immersed in Oculi’s world of bountiful proverbs and thick descriptions of things and activities. Banana Man confirms the adage in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that in Africa, “proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.” Oculi was, surely, a master of proverbs. May he enjoy the company of the ancestors.
Published in 2019, Banana Man is the last novel of Okello Oculi, the Ugandan literary scholar who spent most of his life in Nigeria and passed away on 26th July. He gave me a copy of the book when we met, sadly, for the last time in Abuja in December 2024. He, surely, didn’t expect me to simply adorn my bookshelf with it. He wanted me to read it and expose its ideas to a wide readership. I try to do this in this review.
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Banana Man is a penetrating literary critique of the oppression of African people during colonial rule. It interrogates the denigration of African customs and the failure of modernisation to deliver development and freedom. In its simple but brutally effective message, the colonial encounter did not only stifle the growth of traditional knowledge systems and institutions; its modernist project, embraced by African rulers, also failed to address basic human needs and aspirations.
The story is told in a format that eschews the conventional style of a novel. In other words, it does not have a plot and cast of characters with defined names. It does, however, have an introduction and conclusion, but it proceeds without a clear structure, as events are narrated in a non-linear manner. In Banana Man, the story is recounted through reflections by two characters without names and the voice of the author.
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A rural, down-to-earth and wise woman recalls her alienation from the new life of her clever son, whose education is scuttled by his teacher, acting on the instructions of government. The teacher falsely accuses him of sexual harassment. This is a cruel tactic to enrol him in the military because of his height and physical strength. In her quiet moments, the mother painfully contemplates the joyful rituals and productive communal activities his son would have been engaged in if he was not pushed into the military.
She is not impressed by the new knowledge her son espouses when he visits home. In one of those visits, he chastises her for cooking with firewood, which, he claims, ruins her eyes and contributes to environmental degradation. She denounces his forewarnings as empty talk. They’re lacking, she asserts, in practical relevance:
“I’m tired of people who think their heads are hot with clever talk but their hands are blind cold and lazy: producing nothing for us to see and use and eat…Why does he not use the big boots on his feet to kick wind into my cooking fire? My suffering in silence has his laziness, producing only vanity…If he is worried about my eyes, he should also talk about building one billion houses with roofs that respect my sleep.”
She ends her disappointment by imagining the life she envisages for her son:
“I want my son to come back to our ways of walking through dew, thorns and rain to serve cattle and sheep and goats with caring patience in service to smiles of a community when they hear moos of mother cows calling to their calves”.
The Military as Brute Force
She associates the image of “big boots”, which appears multiple times in the narrative, with unrestrained power and idiocy. Criticising the military drills of his son, which involve punching sandbags like a brutish boxer, she opines:
“No matter how many rains of sweat fell from his body, he would win no certificates for getting jobs outside military barracks. Planting seeds of the future with fists and sweat fighting against a silent bag filled with sand was like throwing pebbles into a lake where the stones do not sprout and grow.”
Colonialism impacted African societies through four key institutions: the military, which recruited a few Africans to kill and subdue all Africans; the church, which delegitimised African religions and imposed Western belief systems and culture as the only path to a good life; trading companies, which exploited mineral resources and agricultural products to stimulate industrial development in Europe; and the bureaucracy, which subordinated traditional authority systems and transformed colonialism into a natural order or hegemonic system.
It is intriguing that Oculi chooses to interrogate colonialism through the prism of the military. This may be for two reasons. First, the military was the foundational apparatus of the colonial project: local populations first had to be subdued before bureaucracies could be built, exploitative trading systems created, and local belief systems changed. Second, colonialism revealed its savagery and lack of respect for the African life most potently in the military institution. Oculi himself had a life-threatening encounter with the Ugandan military under Idi Amin when he was a young graduate and worked as an assistant lecturer at Makerere University in the early 1970s. Before 1990, about 40 per cent of African countries were ruled by military despots, who placed no premium on development.
The novel is set in Uganda and Kenya, where Africans fought a bitter war to win back their land in what was called the Mau Mau anti-colonial war. The son, an Ugandan, is posted to Kenya to fight the Mau Mau soldiers. He behaves professionally but is ambivalent about the objectives of his officers. He recounts the officers’ love of rugby — a physically demanding ball game that involves hard tackles and collisions — which often results in head and neck injuries. He sees the game, which he is encouraged to play, as a mock war against the Mau Mau. His officers try to indoctrinate him with lies about the barbarism of the Mau Mau fighters.
His colonial officers preach that the democracy and freedom advocated by the Mau Mau is a disease that needs to be eradicated. Those advocating it are too young to govern: “Government can’t be done by babies innocent of appetites of power.” But the atrocities of the military force are glaring. The son admires the will power of the Mau Mau fighters. He hears stories from his officers about the military’s use of “sharp objects to cut bellies of pregnant women open and calling on babies inside them to greet them and laugh the way happy babies do.” Such cruelty is perpetuated “to teach (the locals) the punishment for singing Mau Mau songs about Uhuru” (or independence).
However, the son’s life in the military does not destroy his love for education. He occasionally sneaks into the officers’ room to read about reports on African freedom fighters, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Ben Bella and Patrice Lumumba. Such education whets his appetite for power as the colonial project is exhausted. Oculi does not explain how the son transitions from military service to presidential power, although there are a few stories about rallies and mobilisation. Installed as president of the new country, the son is torn between the rhetoric of people-centred development and governing without constraints — in his words, generating “appetites” in order to build a cult of followers or unquestioned “loyalty.” He starts with a laudable education camp for women and the nationalisation of foreign enterprises to boost national development.
But he cannot resist the pull of appetite and loyalty, or corruption and despotism. He rides a big car or “Presidential Elephant” and organises a bizarre dinner for his ministers and permanent secretaries with instructions that their wives should dress in the costumes of their ethnic groups. He humiliates his young and educated Finance Minister by going after his wife and sending him into exile as an ambassador. And he revels in the idea that it is time for the new rulers to imitate the high tastes of the colonialists and enjoy the country’s geography and riches.
Stunning Imagery and Wonders of the Banana Plant
Oculi’s use of imagery in discussing objects, issues and events is mesmerising. It livens his narrative and connects the reader to his complex mind. He demonstrates great mastery of the natural world. The reader is encouraged to savour the events and surroundings he describes with all their senses of sight, sound, smell, and taste. Wise sayings or proverbs and creative metaphors and similes radiate through the breath of the novel. Natural objects are personified or given remarkable human agency. Reading Banana Man is to be immersed in a poetic world. It is breathtakingly beautiful poetry offered in the paragraph form of a novel.
Trees, animals, rivers, the sun, soil, wind, rocks and rain are infused with countless proverbs or short stories to tell the story of Africa’s transition from idyllic customs or traditional life to a modern life that is oppressive, unproductive and corrupt. The narrative evokes and celebrates memories of the simplicity and happiness of rural life, when humans interacted with nature without destructive technology, Western knowledge systems and oppressive governance practices.
At the centre of Oculi’s creative use of imagery is the banana plant. Banana proverbs, metaphors and similes appear about 35 times in the narrative. The book starts with the imagery of the banana plant’s high fertility, “with wet stems that give birth all year round to a row of bananas.” And ends with an image of a new banana flowering after an old woman delivers justice to the despotic president.
Oculi is at his best when he talks about the abilities and uses of bananas and weaves maxims, metaphors and similes around them. The banana is Uganda’s staple food. It is peeled, boiled and pounded into a meal and emerges as “matoke” in Kenya and ‘’amato-o-ke” in Uganda. As the biggest consumers of bananas in the world, the average Ugandan it is reckoned to eat one kilogramme of bananas a day.
I wrote an article about the wonders of the banana plant in Nigeria’s PREMIUM TIMES and Uganda’s New Vision after visiting a banana fibre factory in Kampala in 2023. The stem of the banana contains fibre that can be processed to make carpets, bags, hair extensions, clothes, sanitary pads, shoes, and various other household items and crafts. Banana roots can also be processed to make gum. The plant also contains liquid that can be used as fertiliser; and after fibre has been extracted from the stem, the remaining 85 per cent of the stem can be converted into biomass energy. Finally, the green banana leaves can be used as plates, table decor, pots for cooking stews, bowls for steamed rice, and cones to fill with different kinds of food.
Growing up in Uganda, it is not surprising that Oculi is fascinated by the endless uses and remarkable adaptability and resilience of the banana plant. He celebrates the wonders of the plant and urges Africans to understand how it organises its life. When the mother challenges her estranged son to build a billion houses with roofs that will respect her sleep, it is the image of the banana that she evokes to remind her son that “bananas cover their fruits from falling spears of rain.” Oculi admonishes Africans to learn the enduring secrets of the banana:
“….the banana plant knows that the future of its clan does not lie in the bunch of fruits that birds and man feed on. It lies in the roots hidden under soils that sprout as samplings after her stem as a mother no longer drinks water and eats salt from roots.”
Justice
Banana Man is not a thriller. However, Oculi creates moments of suspense in drawing the curtain down on his intriguing tale. He first imagines that the reviled president will face a formal tribunal of 38 judges. However, on the day of the trial he delivers a completely different format for administering justice. The language he deploys to commence the judicial process is simple, terse, and foreboding:
“I arrived. There was no gate; no row of judges with gazes as wide as oceans and mats of grassland on rolling land. A cloud dark as a cumulous cloud of bees rushed around me, forming a blanket as tall as my height…..As I struggled to catch a look, the crowd turned from a swarm of bees to rolling eyeballs; the buzz became cries and curses.”
A litany of the president’s crimes bellows out from the crowd, demanding justice. The judge is an old woman “with wrinkles as large as rows of green banana fruits.” Two short dogs shot out from her two big toes, charged and plunged their teeth into the president’s feet, “drawing riverlets of bleeding.” The old woman reminds him of his horrifying crimes and indifference to the plight and traditions of his people She delivers her verdict and punishment — not death, but a rebirth or cleansing of his soul:
“You must return to take baths with mud the way elephants do. Learn from our elephants to protect yourself from false winds; to guard yourself from fake ‘fresh airs’ being blown at your earlobes.”
The president must also learn to see sin as collective, not private, punishment. He should go back and fight the water hyacinth plants that block sunlight or fresh ideas from entering the minds of the people. When he has accomplished these tasks, “dogs will not drill for blood in his toes.” A new banana flowers as the old woman smiles and says goodbye; and butterflies show “galleries of beauty on their wings to cheer and rouse songs of love in communities.”
It is thrilling to be immersed in Oculi’s world of bountiful proverbs and thick descriptions of things and activities. Banana Man confirms the adage in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that in Africa, “proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.” Oculi was, surely, a master of proverbs. May he enjoy the company of the ancestors.
Yusuf Bangura writes from Nyon, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]
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