Book Review: The Nigerian Mafia: Mumbai, Onyeka Nwelue
Book Review: The Nigerian Mafia: Mumbai, Onyeka Nwelue
Blog Tour September 11, 2023
This book is brilliantly conceived and executed, but it is not for everyone. It is essentially a first-person memoir of a Nigerian immigrant to India who becomes a drug dealer. The plot is gritty, the protagonist is in turns thoughtful and self-aggrandizing, and at least this reader was not always sure whether the narrator was reliable.
Uche Mbadiegwu went to India on a one-year visa to buy fabric to sell back in Nigeria. Or did he? He was a murderer. Or was he? All we are fairly certain of is that he is narrating this from his jail cell, awaiting sentencing for some crime, a sentence he expects to be harsh.
Mbadiegwu is almost completely amoral. He claims to never use drugs, but has no problem selling them. He claims he is not a pimp, but imports African women to India to be prostitutes. He talks about being a Nollywood star, about hoping to become a Bollywood star, about his business importing fabrics, about his relationship to his mother. Then in the next chapter, everything he said before is brought into question. Was he really in movies in Nigeria? Was his mother part of his teenage and adult life or not? Did he ever truly have a fabrics business? The only evidence we have for any of this is Mbadiegwu himself. He is also the source of the reasons we question any of these parts of his narrative.
Onyeka Nwelue has been a world traveler with long experience in both Lagos and Mumbai. I am deeply impressed with how the author uses the stream of consciousness memoir to impress upon readers just how thoroughly corrupt and yet still somewhat sympathetic Mbadiegwu is. At the end, I am not sure if he sane, if he is just an inveterate liar, if he is truly the caring boyfriend and boss that he makes himself out to be or if he is so self-absorbed that he rewrites “truth” to suit his own self image.
Perhaps the narrator says it best:
“You might point an accusing finger at me for being a drug dealer, but what was I to do? I did what I had to in order to survive….Look at me instead as a human being with dreams, with desires, aspirations, fears and doubts.”
Our thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things for our copy of The Nigerian Mafia: Mumbai, provided so we could give an honest review. The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives on this novel, check out the other bloggers on this tour.
Book Review: The Nigerian Mafia: Mumbai, Onyeka Nwelue