Ebulue

This rather peculiar book is ostensibly a biography of the author's father, but reads almost like an implausibly-extended after-dinner speech at an 80th birthday party, or a privately-printed family history pamphlet that accidentally found its way to a wider market. It was clearly written with love, but it's not at all clear who its intended audience is, other than those who knew its subject personally. It seems at times that this audience may have been envisaged to include people outside Igbo society, but explanations aimed at such people are patchy and incomplete; for example, the section in chapter 12 on titles explains that “Agba Nze” means “Nze to be”, but the term “Nze” is left a mystery.

The narrative consists of a succession of vaguely-explained facts, with very little structure or analysis, and there's a lot of listing of names with no indication of who will be important later in the story. There's plenty of irrelevant detail (the maiden names and villages of people who are mentioned once and then never appear again), while details that would have had wider interest (the specifics of the food people were eating, what the protagonists actually thought about Biafran independence, why one attempt at solving a dispute worked when many others had failed, ways of finding a balance between traditional practices and newly-adopted Christianity) are mostly glossed over.

Every so often there are scenes that give glimpses into Igbo culture, but these end up more frustrating than informative, as they quickly move back into repeated praise of the author's father. It's all the more frustrating since the author frequently stresses how important his father considered Igbo culture to be — not just in terms of its preservation, but also examining it in the light of new ideas of equality between all sections of the community.

I've marked this as challenging because of the writing style, not because of the subject matter (which is pretty innocuous aside from a few descriptions of abusive parenting).