A preview By Cletus Akwaya, Ph.D.

Prof. Iyorwuese Hagher does not take his pen to issues lightly. The former High Commissioner to Canada, Ambassador to Mexico, former Minister and Senator is a high profile writer.

He is among the less than one percent of writers in the world to debut a novel after seventy one, having made a name for himself as academic, prolific playwright and writer on leadership themes.

That he returned to his first love ( writing) after his abortive presidential bid is understandable.

         The story of the novel is narrated through the odd obsessive omniscient eye of God; Professor Martin Bent, a ruthless District Officer in the British Colonial administration who had regretted the genocide and culturecide of the British imperialism in the Sofalian colony in the colonial period. The whole novel, the writer tells us; in the prologue, is Bent’s legacy bequeathed to him,  as inheritance memoir, by the remorseful late professor.

This breakaway, breathtaking opening of the novel ushers the reader into the epical saga of the clash of civilization theme of the novel. It is the clash between the civilization of the British Upper Class versus Azenga egalitarianism. Lord Payne the leading poster child imperialist was the leading proponent of the Empire’s right to ruthlessly save the native savage tribes from themselves by forcing them to become civilized or eliminating them.

         The novel opens with the recall of Lord Payne for his genocidal impulses, having wiped out the city of Kidina in the company of the Caliph of Sobikathanu Hadj Omar Hafiz Aatif, and now was on the verge of moving to wipe out the Azenga tribe which had earlier defeated the British Army under his command. The British Colonial Office and the Parliament were aghast at his conduct,

 “ The Colonial Office, and the Parliament, accused Payne of being blood thirsty and war-mongering and against British character and taste for decency and Pax Britannica”.

Payne was adamant and showed no remorse at all and was even more determined to go back to London and win a new mandate to come and finish the job of wiping out the Azenga tribe as retribution for their having defeated a British military expedition and killing six Sandhurst trained officers with their poisoned arrows. 

         The Azenga were quite prepared militarily to stave off any attackers and were ready to face the enemy. When Lord Payne returns to Sofalia several years later having combined with his wife, Lady Liliana Payne to mount a successful propaganda, it was to a higher office as Governor general of Sofalia. He was now more powerful, and regarded as Founder of the new country: the British Sofalia, having amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates.

He was even more resolved to destroy the Azenga civilization without putting a single British military boot on Azenga soil. He went after their war making structure by attacking their elders, the council of gerontocrats. A battle Royale ensued and the rest of the novel is the narration of this war of civilizations and how it affected both the Azenga and the British Empire. 

         The novel is structured in non-lineal twenty four chapters. It starts with a prologue and ends with an epilogue. In  between these;  the novel is populated with a wealth of characters that are symbolic and complex.

Each character represents a peculiar world view on the race question, national question, ethnicity question and helps the reader to delve into the mind of the Empire and the colonized. The battle against the Azenga and the use of the Lynch Method, to create a dependent slave colony three hundred years after the British granted independence to Sofalia is surreal. It is culturecide in its deep meaning.

         As the novel progresses, the Azenga are increasingly aware of the menace and danger posed by the British Imperialist. But they  are even more horrified that the British Indirect rule had somehow created chiefs out of the most unworthy scum “ the drum chiefs” who betrayed the tribe and this led to several suicides of Azenga elders who chose to die rather than be humiliated by British injustice.

         Through the characterization of Payne and his wife, Hagher paints a picture of unalloyed ambition and blithe disregard for other cultures and other lives. Hagher is saying that this attitude allows the growth of corruption as the individual has the right to seek his own survival by any means possible.

The novel forces the reader to question the nature of British imperialism, after it is observed up close, away from the glitter of propaganda. What emerges is to question the buzz concepts of authority, duty and even Pax Britannica as sham decors to a more sordid preoccupation of Empire as greed, corruption, brigandage and the wiping out of non- western civilizations.

         The conquest could not have been brought out at a more auspicious time when there is an overwhelming outcry in Nigeria (Sofalia?) at the mounting insecurity and cries by ethnic separatist groups denouncing the Lugardian amalgamation.

There is need for a national conversation on identity politics, national culture, tribal bigotry, national cohesion, and security within national borders. By making these the nodal issues of his novel, Hagher’s Conquest of Azenga is an important contribution to the canons of literally fiction that explores European Imperialism. The allegorical fiction is full of hard facts about Africa’s colonial legacy. It is universally compelling.

         Hagher’s debut novel is brave and extraordinary. His narrative prose is lucid, tantalizing and the reader is constantly titillated. The author unflinchingly wars against external and internal imperialist forces and is in command with his characters, that his playwright skills allow him populate his novel, to express his disgust with imperialism which merely debases humanity.

The characters in the Conquest of Azenga are all defeated souls that lose their dignity, their morality, their sense of shame and even their lives. Everybody in Sofalia is conquered. Hagher’s tone is allegorical, picaresque, satiric and irreverent.

Finally, it is necessary to conclude that I. Harry Hagher has established himself a multi-talented cross-border genre maestro of fiction in the struggle for the establishment of humanism and social justice. His novel posits a unique literary style that combines the epic with the episodic and literal reality with magical reality. Let the reader decide.

Akwaya, Publisher /Editor-in-Chief, DAILY ASSET Newspaper is a Journalist, Political Scientist and Student of Literature.