Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen: Family as a metaphor for the country?

The siblings Ikenna, Boja, Obembe and the narrator Benjamin defy their strict father (who believes that a coconut that falls into a cistern will need a good washing before it can be eaten. i.e.,  if you do wrong, you will have to be corrected) and go fishing at the dreadful river Omi-Ala. The river was once believed by the inhabitants of Akure, a town in Nigeria, as God and worshiped by them. However with the arrival of colonialists from Europe and introduction of Bible the adherents were prized from the river and people begin to see it as an evil place. They forsake it.

 The fishing adventure to the river turns tragic when the brothers encounter a madman Abulu ( `a leviathan’) who predicts that the eldest Ikenna will be murdered by one of his brothers, which divides them and results in  bloodshed in the household.

 The Fishermen is set in 1996, the year the federal republic of Nigeria came under military rule.

One of the things Ikenna destroys in a fit of rage towards his brothers is the M.K.O.calendar, (“ in that calendar was a strong hope for the future, for we’d believed we were children of hope ’93, M.K.O’s allies”) a prized possession for the siblings, a reminder of their meeting with Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the presidential aspirant of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1993. (He was widely regarded as the presumed winner of the election before the military leader Ibrahim Babangida annulled it)

Their father had prohibited them from going to the river because he reasons, “Just how could kids receiving Western education engage in such a barbaric endeavor?”  Instead he wants his children to be fishers of good dreams, who will not relent until they have caught the biggest catch. He wants them to be juggernauts, menacing, fishermen of the mind and go-getters. “Children who will dip their hands into rivers, seas, oceans of this life and become successful: doctors, pilots, professors, lawyers. ..”

The narrator recalls, “When I look back today, as I find myself doing more often now that I have sons of my own, I realize that it was during one of these trips to the river that our lives and our world changed. For it was here that time began to matter, at that river where we became fishermen.”

Obioma’s sweeping narrative keeps one hooked to the book.  This is the tale of a madman’s vision turning siblings against each other. With bloodshed and all, it is History, that plays itself out time and again. 

----------------------------------------------------------------ends