Braving into the unknown: Review of Orlando Dokubo’s DEAN’s PRIZE By Anaele Ihuoma

Title: Dean’s Prize .

Publisher: Kraftgriots, Ibadan. 

Publication Year: 2020; 252 pages

Reviewer: ANAELE IHUOMA

Where does the world of students’ life with its wide array of permissibles intersect with the real life as we know it, where the notion of responsibility can, by itself, act as  a restraint on social behaviour? If they knew it, the effervescent students  that walk the pages of Orlando Dokubo’s second novel, Dean’s Prize, would manage to graduate from this cult-ridden university  even if with grades procured on a platter of ‘runs’, the laundered Nigerian lexicon  that makes sleaze look good.

The story, really, is not about dean’s prize, it is rather the price of recklessness, a recklessness that first touts itself as freedom, as power, yet a recklessness that results from the larger society’s criminal neglect of her youth.  Horatio, the studious, third year Zoology major who gets caught up in the campus cult debacle is not necessarily a natural candidate for the ill-fate that befalls him. Neither is Ada, whose love for this honcho of a ladies’ man brooks no rivalry, and who suffers collateral damage deeper than the one cut down by rival guns in a battle she managed to allow herself to be kept in the dark about, even as she wined and frolicked with cult warriors.

The story starts, innocuously enough, with students trying to find their space within the relics of a university tottering from one strike to another, and making the most of their newfound freedom  juggling the competing demands of academic and amorous engagements.  Enter Horatio and his mostly feisty room mates who regale in their slangs-laden studentspeak, drawing battle lines with adversaries from paramour rivals to university administrators and those of the larger society who seem to be  sadistically indifferent to the students’ economic hardship.    While the students are devising means such as skipping meals to cope with the challenging economic environment, the government increases school fees, leading to violent protests and a crackdown on real and police-framed participants, and to school closures. It is a scenario that many Nigerians will easily relate to.

The story is set in Nigeria’s federal capital on the eve of the 21^st century. You get to know this because  24-hour television programming sounded revolutionary and non-availability of mobile phones played a significant role in tragidizing the events. The cult scenes are reminiscent of some of the scenes in Eghosa  Imasuen’s Fine Boys, set in Benin City in the more tumultuous 1980’s cult-infested university life.  Indeed, certain segments of Deans Prize are too scary to be recommended for the faint-hearted – the cult initiation episode and the hospital scene where Ada is fazed watching the moment-by-moment life-to-death passage of her boyfriend Horatio from cult-inflicted bullet wounds, a scenario that would have played out differently had the doctors shown more regard for their Hippocratic Oath than  a life-ignoring  police requirement that patients with bullet wounds obtain police reports before they could be treated.  Indeed there are sustained moments in the story when you thought it was an apologia for cults and cultism; the conversations that rationalize cult membership say so, but then the denouement of the story provides a counter, indeed,  stronger argument since action, here, the narrative arc, speaks louder than words.

The dialogue provides a see-saw scenario. Much of it is dominated by elevated slangs. Entire conversations could befuddle a non-initiate.   A taste:

”Ol’ boy, how was the paper?”

“Boy, I no fit dissolve the paper”

“Wetin happen?”

“Ekpemo faked me.”

The language moves from such student tatter (  .. ‘ You don trample her ozone layer finish, dey deny’),  to mundane prattle, but also, occasionally, to that indefinable quality that underlies good fiction where words impart imperceptibly, where  the narration flows as if drawn by a smooth conveyor belt carapace of narrative slices undistracted  by the consciousness words and expressions.

Still, anyone looking for a perfect book will have to wait until Dokubo writes the next one. Whether it is the fault of the much vilified  printers devil or lack of enough editorial alertness,  the 259 pages of Dean’s Prize are not spared typographical or editorial inelegancies that afflict recent Nigerian works, for instance there is  one preposition too many in some segments  (‘washed the soap off of his body’), even as students sign ‘undertaken’ of good behaviour in another. You also have ‘salmajiri’ and ‘taxi cap’, among other lexical faux pas. Save for the advocacy language associated with students demonstrations, the novel’s social commentary is commendably couched as a seeming afterthought rather than direct agitation or social sermonizing; the lumping of demonstrating students with hardened criminals  comes off as a sub-story in itself. This way the novel ensures that die-hard critics who are   averse to  agenda pushing would have no arsenals to push their own no-agenda agenda.

While the novel generally paints a vast landscape of social, economic and political anomy in the campus and in the larger society, there is no lack of the solitary good individual unsoiled by the general malaise, as in the case of a man knocked down by Horatio’s father’s car who refuses to accept money to treat himself in hospital, only thankful God that he is alive.

The story revolves around five significant characters: Horatio, the easy-going student successfully wooed into a netherworld of confraternities and dark conflicts, his girlfriend Ada who secures her man from the schemings of other self-flaunting female students, Emma and Kelvin, Horatio’s course mates who would turn out, implausibly, to be confra dons, and Laide the reserved one. Theirs is a story with enough juice for students’ joie de vivre. Okon, Emma and Kelvin tell interminable stories of their own lives and those of others. A glimpse of what happens when Horatio meets Laide after the long school closures puts this in dramatic perspective: ’Laide!’, Horatio screamed. They met each other midway. They caught themselves in the air’.

Dokubo shows himself as master of the minutiae. He makes a story out of the non-story. The mundane act of drinking water can become a four-part itinerary (i) lifting the cup off the table (ii) taking it to the lips (iii) gulping and (iv) returning an empty cup, with each step sometimes leaving a trail of bold and imaginative language, although this often tends to also belabour the tale and lengthen what could well be a shorter story. By ending on a delicate balance of death and a new life, Deans Prize presents an allegory, in spite of itself, of   the indeterminate and complex continuum of death and life. It is a must-read at least for the nation’s education planners.

• ANAELE IHUOMA is the author of Imminent River