Review: A blistering run through a morally corrupt but likeable man’s life

Ask any male of my generation (40-something-ish) what the best TV series he’s ever watched was, and I bet the vast majority of them would answer The Sopranos.

Like many other TV shows in its vaunted stratum, The Sopranos — broadcast from 1999 to 2007 — succeeded because it was a soap opera/family drama cunningly disguised as something else.

For example: Breaking Bad leans heavily on the ersatz father-son relationship between Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. Both Friends and The Big Bang Theory, the two biggest limited-run sitcoms of the last 40 years, had a group of friends that functioned as a family.

Game of Thrones is the ultimate struggle between warring families. And The Sopranos gives us a group of red-blooded, relatable relatives who just so happen to occasionally murder each other for money.

The family drama of The Sopranos is mostly related to us from the point of view of Tony Soprano, an up-and-coming enforcer whose mafia career is on the verge of a huge upswing at the beginning of the show.

While many of the other characters’ perspectives are explored in six seasons, Tony is very much our North Star. The show starts when his professional life begins to explode with success, and ends (spoiler alert, although you should really know this since the last episode aired 17 years ago) when Tony is betrayed and murdered.

The appeal of Tony Soprano is that he is a relatable family man who just happens to have an unusual job.

Between all the murdering and extorting, Tony tries to cling desperately to his failing marriage; foster a relationship with a son who is becoming increasingly distant; nurture what is arguably his most important relationship, his doting give-and-take with his daughter who is clearly his favourite; and reconcile past emotions with his rapidly ageing mother.

All while juggling conflict with his uncle, his “nephew” and rival families, while attending therapy for increasingly worsening mental health. If he were an accountant instead of a hitman, we wouldn’t find him remarkable at all.

But because of Tony’s humanity, we love and identify with him, despite the fact that he is a reprehensible human being. The show takes great pains to remind us that we are rooting for someone who is, without a shadow of a doubt, a selfish and evil person. But because “selfish and evil” does not translate to “free from internal complexity”, and because the show spins on this axis, it is compelling beyond the usual “fuhgetaboutit” mafia tropes.

I mention all of this because prolific Nigerian novelist Onyeka Nwelue’s short and sharp outing The Nigerian Mafia: Johannesburg relies on a similar protagonist.

Former Nollywood star Uche is a man who, to paraphrase his own words, decided to take more than life was willing to give him. This leads him down a path to organised crime, and after a deal in São Paulo goes sideways, Uche crosses the Atlantic and lands in South Africa, ready to exploit any criminal enterprise that is willing to use him.

Making use of the extensive network of expat Nigerians in Johannesburg, Uche soon finds work as hired muscle with occasional forays into assassination. But Uche desires more, not only financially but in terms of personal fulfilment.

But when xenophobic riots cost him his only chance at a legitimate business, Uche is forced to lean on drug-dealing connections to attempt to recover the large sum of money that he lost. When this goes badly, he is forced to flee Joburg for his life.

Despite the title of the book, the second and arguably more interesting half of it takes place in Cape Town. In our nation’s first city, Uche finds love, more trouble, and begins running with the biggest Nigerian drug lord in the country.

The book is as short and sharp as the stabbing blade that Uche keeps on his person for protection. Clocking in at just under 150 pages, it is novella-length, and briskly paced throughout. The hits, fortuitous and otherwise, don’t stop coming for Uche, and it is with breathless urgency that we are carried through the events of a short span of his life.

An awful lot of deus ex machina seems to land in Uche’s favour, and while this initially annoyed me, I eventually realised that this was likely the author’s way of saying that the devil takes care of his own.

Make no mistake, Uche is the devil’s own. Though the book is told from his point of view, there is no mistaking that we are listening to a selfish and evil man relate his story.

Uche does little moralising — he knows what he is — but justifies his actions by saying that he is doing what he must do to survive. While this does little for him as an upstanding member of society, it does go a long way to generating pathos for the character: Uche is bad, yes, but he’s bad because he has to be.

Uche exists in a bad world that forces him to do bad things, he’ll tell you, but little respect is paid to the people who still try to do good things in the face of similar circumstances. They are weak lambs being led to the slaughter; he is the lion who feasts on their carcasses.

It is hard to root for the lion if you are the lamb. But this book finds a way to make you do it.

All in all, The Nigerian Mafia: Johannesburg is a blistering run through a morally corrupt yet interesting man’s attempt to find a new life in a new country. An interesting, if extremely short, read.

The Nigerian Mafia: Johannesburg is published by Jacana Media.