I am Chuma Nwokolo, writer, advocate. If you like poetry, you should read my Memories of Stone. If you are into fiction, try my Diaries of a Dead African or The Ghost of Sani Abacha.
If you don’t read much, beyond blogs and stuff, you’ll probably love my Extinction of Menai, Diary of a Witch-Doctor’s Writer-in-Residence, and a dozen other novels of that ilk, because they’re not yet published.
Welcome to my blog.
Kindle version of The Ghost of Sani Abacha. (Free on 26th July – see FREEBIES above)
A harassed servant plots his grim revenge (A History of Human Servitude)… Sheri puts a potential boyfriend to the test (Man Rating)… Phiri contends for his civil service career (The Fall of Phiri Bombai)…and a politician in his finest hour finds himself possessed by a begoggled demon (The Ghost of Sani Abacha)…26 stories of life and love in the aftermath of autocracy, delivered with wit and insight by one of Africa’s most incisive writers.
Kindle version of Diaries of a Dead African
Diaries of a Dead African is a novel comprising the three journals of an embattled farmer, Meme Jumai, and his two sons, Abel (failed writer) and Calama (aspiring conman). Meme Jumai quietly struggles to continue his dignified existence in his small African town of Ikerre-Oti. His wife’s desertion – and her self-imposed divorce settlement – conspires with a particularly bad harvest to bring him to a life crisis. His two sons have abandoned him and he is compelled to conquer his pride and test the robustness of his human relationships, with tragicomic consequences. Meme is obsessed with the fear of dying the death of a lizard: “a death without heritage, lying three or four days in…bed before [being] discovered, and even then, thrown away with hissing, with neither outcry nor mourning.” But as his crisis looms nearer, his options for avoiding his greatest fear becomes more and more limited…Following his father’s lynching, Calama returns home to Ikerre-Oti. His own downward spiral into want is stupendously truncated by the timely success of a con practised on the rich American, Billy Barber. His life becomes a fairy-tale, worlds apart from the nightmare that was his father’s life.
But when “the greatest secret in the Jumai household” outs, nothing, it seems, can keep his life on its happy rails. Abel had built his life on the simple ethic of fleeing discomfort and confrontation. With his father dying at 50 and his younger brother at 25, he has every incentive to stay on the run. Yet, he is heir to Calama’s illicit fortune and on the threshold of achieving his own publishing ambitions. How to outlive father and brother – without fleeing the very opportunities he had craved all his life…
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
I am exactly 2 pages short of finishing The Ghost of Sani Abacha. I slowed down my reading in the way a child noticing he’s almost at the bottom of his bottle of fanta slows down with the gulping, eyeing the remaining liquid with sad eyes.
I thoroughly enjoyed every story in this book with such relish that had me laughing out loud in the bus not once, not twice, but virtually every night on that long commute through a trickling Nyanya traffic for the past week. When I wasn’t laughing at Watersiders, who are now as good as my neighbors, I was smiling like a goat who had just eaten a washing soap at the author’s witty and masterful expressions. I haven’t read an author as fine in a long time. I felt a sort of co-ownership of a lot of the stories because of how relatable they are. Your writing Mr. Nwokolo lends a certain legitimacy to my existence as a young African/Nigerian in a way only that sort thing can.
Today is my birthday, and the birth date of a new alter ego – Phiri Bombai.
Bravo Mr. Nwokolo!
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I’m glad you enjoyed the book 👍😃
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Sounds interesting. I’ve only ever read about Africa from a white person’s perspective, but it would certainly be an education to read something from a black African’s viewpoint. Chuma, your books are a little on the pricey side for me (indie still waiting to go viral!), but I’ll try one and see how I get on. 🙂
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