I Do Not Come To You By Chance By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
I read this book voraciously. It's sad and funny at the same time, and the character of Kingsley, the narrator voice, shows depth, darkness and light, reflection and action. He reminds me a little of the godfather played by Al Pacino. 'Yes, I deal in crime, but I'm doing it for the good of others'. I think what this book brought home to me is the relativity of all our lives and values in the face of utmost poverty. Who can judge without being judged? Who can be sure of what is right and what is wrong in a survival situation? Yes, these people make money by scamming foreigners. Despicable. But then quite a few people in the West fall for it. The 419ers are good. They have perfected the art of taking advantage of goodwill, greediness and caring spirits in the West (Kingsley calls caring for others a weakness in the West) they know how to press the right buttons to achieve their goals. A classic collision of European and African mind sets. A very good read, and certainly one that helps bear in mind how vulnerable we all are. On both sides of the equation. It is also a great snapshot of Nigeria. I Do Not Come To You By Chance Section 419
Section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, which addresses fraud schemes, including Internet scams, forms the backdrop of this lively and entertaining first novel I do not Come to you by Chance (2009) by a young Nigerian woman, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. Besides offering a good story, Nwaubani's novel helped me understand a culture I know little about. The book moves quickly, is well organized, and has good character development. The author writes with considerable skill. She tells her story in the first-person voice of the chief character, a young man named Kingsley. Writing convincingly in the voice of the other gender is a formidable task, especially for a new novelist.
Kingsley is a young man of great intellectual promise who received his degree in chemical engineering. His father, Paulinus, and his mother, Augustina, both received masters degrees in Britain but were unable to rise economically. Early in Kingsley's life, his father impresses upon him that education is the only way of putting one's potentials to maximum use, that you could say that a human being is not in his correct senses until he is educated. Unfortunately, at age 25, Kingsley is not able to get a job in the profession for which he has been trained. He lives at home and, to his chagrin, is financially dependent upon his parents.
The novel is in two well-connected parts. In the first part, Kingsley describes his early life, his parents' marginal economic status, in spite of their education, and his own education. Kingsley had fallen in love with a student named Ola who jilts him due, apparently, to his lack of economic prospects. There is a telling scene of Kingsley's relationship to his mother's brother, Boniface, who enlists the young boy in his scheme to seduce girls. Boniface has little interest in education but is obviously a youngster on the make with no scruples. The first part of the novel closes with the illness and death of Kingsley's father, with a focus on the character of the Nigerian health system. The much-despised Boniface comes to the assistance of the family. He has grown fantastically wealthy, through uncertain means, and is known as Cash Daddy. He takes a liking to Kingsley and, to his mother's consternation, brings him into his business, which is the setting for the remainder of the novel.
The book describes the world of Section 419 Internet scams, which Kingsley masters quickly. He becomes remarkably adroit at writing email letters to people with money to spare in the United States, Europe, and Middle East and bilking them expensively and repeatedly using fraudulent but seemingly plausible business schemes. Cash Daddy's business provides the organization an support for the elaborate frauds. At first, Kingsley has qualms of conscience but they are predominantly squelched as he lives high and takes care of his family. He still cannot develop a love relationship to replace Ola and he is dependent on the services of prostitutes. Kingley's' mother spurns him and the dirty money.
The book describes the fraud schemes in detail and the marks or mugus who are their victims. Kingsley has two chief mugus, named Winterbottom and Hooverson, who become his cash cows. Kingsley becomes dependent and fond of his uncle, Cash Daddy, for all his crookedness. As the book develops, Cash Daddy runs for high office in Nigeria's struggling democracy, which offers Nwaubani the further opportunity to develop the problems of her country.
The story is told with lightness and humor. The author develops her characters and shows the contrast between wealthy nations and struggling nations such as Nigeria without becoming polemical. She portrays Nigeria and its poverty and political corruption while showing as well her love for her country. This is an effective and good first novel. It reminded me yet again of how reading opens doors to other places and people.
Robin Friedman I Do Not Come To You By Chance It takes talent to make sympathetic characters of adults who fleece others for a living. Nwaubani does it with skill and a strong sense of humor.
She makes no effort to “pretty up” Nigeria – as she's said herself in interviews, she's neither worried about Westerners who think everything Nigerian is 419 (ie, fraud) nor worried about the Nigerians obsessed with changing the impressions of the West. It's a brave stance – and perhaps a touch callous, since expat Nigerians deal daily with the negative impressions, and Nwaubani, living in Nigeria, presumably doesn't have to (I suppose this is the full disclosure point – I'm a Nigerian living in the USA). But this stance also frees her to tell the raw, entertaining story she wanted to tell, without hand-wringing or watering down her characters. Kingsley, Cash Daddy, and the other 419ers are villains to their victims, heroes to those they help, irredeemably tainted to their more honest acquaintances – and altogether very human in their struggles. I Do Not Come To You By Chance This is one of those books that takes a grim situation and turns it into a fun and entertaining story: the background is poverty and corruption in Nigeria, but the book is the polar opposite of, say, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which deals with similar themes; this one is quick and easy to read, exciting, and very nearly uplifting.
Kingsley is the oldest son of a family that values education above all else, but he's been unemployed for two years after graduating with a degree in chemical engineering. His parents are well-educated and rigidly ethical, but struggling to make ends meet; his father is ill and his girlfriend impatient for a husband who can provide some financial security. When things go badly wrong, Kingsley turns to his estranged uncle, Cash Daddy, who's made a fortune by scamming foreigners online. Cash Daddy soon offers him a job, and the second half of the book follows Kingsley through his adventures as a scam artist.
I had a great time reading this--it was one of those books that made me look forward to getting home and finding out what would happen next, and once I'd started, no other books were allowed to get in the way! It is well-paced and entertaining throughout, and although the email scams first appear later than I'd expected, that first half is important to setting up the characters and their situations. Most people have some curiosity about the secret world of criminal activity (and even if we haven't thought specifically about online scammers before, we've all gotten those emails and wondered who would be dumb enough to reply), and this book certainly feeds that. At the same time, it's a good piece of world fiction, painting a picture of a society in crisis and how people respond.
The tone is fairly light, although the subject matter is not--and this works well, resulting in a book that deals with serious issues without taking itself too seriously. Kingsley's voice is fresh and often humorous; some have taken the odd figures of speech as bad writing, but I enjoyed them (and I'm told this is representative of how people talk in Nigeria). For instance: I rummaged through my shirts. Most of them were dead, and had been for a very long time. Kingsley is also given to hyperbole: He gave me a tentative estimate. The amount nearly shattered my eardrums. While it's not great literature, the language does a good job of creating and sustaining a voice and is very readable.
As for the characterization, it's fairly broad-brush, although certainly adequate. Kingsley's personal transformation makes him an interesting protagonist, but the most colorful figure is certainly Cash Daddy: corrupt and unscrupulous, but generous with his family, staff, and community, he's loud, crude, and larger-than-life. His justifications for his actions and occasional self-deception are especially entertaining. The secondary cast is more one-note, but sufficient for their roles. And the ending leaves the reader with plenty of think about.
Other reviewers have commented that this book seems tailor-made for a non-African audience, there seems to be some truth to this. For instance, when Kingsley's father suffers a stroke, he and his family are shocked and appalled to find out that no hospital will treat him without an advance deposit, and that they're expected to provide all medical supplies. For an American or European reader, this is shocking, but wouldn't people who've lived in Nigeria all their lives know how their own medical system works? But the book never seems dumbed-down or exploitative; I can't speak to how Nigerian readers might like it, but since the author is Nigerian and I'm not, I'm inclined to trust her portrayal of the country.
Overall, a very fun book with the potential to appeal to a wide audience. While I wouldn't expect to see it taught in a comparative literature class, I would recommend it to those who enjoy world fiction and those looking to branch out in their reading. I Do Not Come To You By Chance At times hilarious, at times sad, mostly satirical, always vividly told... a very good read with food for thought on the Nigerian 419 scheme. The author gets under the skin of the 419 scheme, so to say, and explores how good people can get caught in the net of the schemers of this exploitative system. Nwaubani follows the struggle of one individual to free himself. He stands for many and any effort to succeed as a smaller keg in the system is difficult and dangerous. The author shines a stark light on Nigerian social struggles. I Do Not Come To You By Chance
This was exactly the type of world lit book I enjoy reading. It is set in Nigeria and written by a Nigerian, so it felt like I was reading the story from within, from that perspective. It disobeyed all the rules of how to write about Africa, set out in that tongue-in-cheek Granta article several years ago ( http://www.granta.com/Archive/92/How-... by Binyavanga Wainaina.
The story centres around a likeable fellow from an honest and hard-working family who highly value education. Despite getting his engineering degree, he can't get a job, and he eventually falls into the 419 scamming industry, working for his highly successful uncle.
It is fascinating to learn more about that scam, and how it is perceived in Nigerian society, but the book is really about how the young man balances the expectations and beliefs of his family with his own desires. It gave a sense of what life is like for some people there. It was often light-hearted and funny.
There were many possible explanations for the atrocious traffic in Lagos—population explosion, insufficient mass transit, tokunbo vehicles going kaput, potholes in the roads, undisciplined drivers, random police checkpoints, and fuel queues. But in Cash Daddy’s opinion, the go-slow started whenever the devil and his wives were on their way to the market. I think he was right.
A highly enjoyable and well-written book, recommended. I Do Not Come To You By Chance Having removed the splinters from my eyes, I can finally review this tree-destroying book with its wooden characters and torpid prose. Yes, I was disappointed in this first novel in terms of its inarticulate thematic development, stereotypical portrayals, and stultifying language.
I had hoped that a satire on the notorious Nigerian 419 Internet financial scams would be insightful or at least amusing. (The Washington Post had referred to it as original and heartfelt and the Christian Science Monitor had described it as a sly twist on an old morality tale.) Although not expecting the masterful style and themes of literary giant Chinua Achebe, I was anticipating writing worthy of Achebe's near contemporary, Cyprian Ekwensi, a popular Igbo novelist who could have competed in the Nigerian Book of the Month club (had one existed). Unfortunately, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is not the voice of a new eastern Nigerian literary renaissance. She speaks in a flat and discordant prose and her metaphoric images are uninspired. Moreover, her characters are just plain annoying, unsympathetic, and hardly human at all. Kingsley, the hero (perhaps anti-hero) is an automaton who lacks a backbone (except in one misguided effort) and has little understanding of himself, his family, his culture, or his nation. His scheming uncle, Boniface (aka Cash Daddy), who leads Kingsley into a life of crime, debauchery, and ill-gotten wealth is a cross between Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and the real life Marcus Garvey. If you throw in the behavior of the Kingfisher (from Amos and Andy), you have Boniface, a stereotypical African conniving buffoon of comic book dimensions. From Boniface, Kingsley learns that the only power to change anything that needs changing is the power of cash. This profound wisdom seems to be the novel's predominant moral.
Besides Boniface and Kingsley, there are an array of insubstantial characters including sanctimonious cardboard figures like Kingsley's bookish and high-minded parents and his various peevish and selfish siblings. We even have television characters like the outspoken and devout Aunt Dimma, who seems to be replicating the role of Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son (complete with the mandatory amens). There are also Boniface's fellow schemers with clever names (like World Bank) who are never more than caricatures.
Perhaps, most sadly, Nigeria itself is little more than a vague theatrical prop for this story. Except for the few obligatory scenes of poverty, some vague allusions to historical events or political figures, and the presence of a handful of untranslated Igbo words, Nigeria is rarely present in this book. We have no sense of the vibrancy of eastern Nigerian cities, social customs, or culture. We learn only that the region's politics and politicians are corrupt. However, even the 419 scams are poorly presented with little humor or insight into the greedy con men (and women) or their bumbling victims.
Nwaubani offers us a dreary and longwinded tale told in stilted language with few insights into the human condition or, for that matter, contemporary Nigerian corruption. I Do Not Come To You By Chance A gleeful and often hilarious carnival of cliché parades through these pages. Airline food is tasteless, parents are conservative, white women are patronising, school is where one learns 'the white man's wisdom', British people all have brown, misaligned teeth. About halfway through I realised I was reading a truly brilliant piece of satire, and it just got better and better (and more mercilessly irreverent) as it went along.
When Augustina is permitted to return to school for 'five more years of the white man's wisdom' she is delighted. The contrasts in this scene disrupt both the Liberal framing that assumes education needs to be given to African people by White saviours, and the underlying assumption, often replicated by more radical thinkers, that such people are naively receptive and cannot read whiteness or critically engage with its texts (including myths like the White saviour and colonial educational materials). Augustina enters the colonial relationship of further education more or less agentically, and although its effect on her fate is dubious, Nwaubani thereby highlights the complex mesh of intentions and influences at work in Nigerian lives.
Dismissing stereotypes is arguably what this book does best, often by playing them out to the furthest edges of absurdity, sometimes incorporated into a mere offhand remark “When I was a child, we had watched a documentary about an East African tribe who spoke with clicks and gurgles instead of real words” (Africa ain't a country, folks). Nwaubani is similarly brutal and ingenious in her criticism of Igbo patriarchy, having protagonist Kingsley describe his Aunty Dimma as 'a terrible wife' (although 'a lovely person' in every other way) because she is an independent woman, wearing trousers, buying herself a car and other aberrations. This relentless jesting with racism and sexism as its butts often reveals the histories of oppressive tropes. It's wonderful to see shoddy white behaviour and misperceptions from a Nigerian perspective. Nwaubani generously allows the white reader a belly-laugh at our own expense, sweetening the self-interrogation that will hopefully follow.
Several characters are pure archetypes. Uncle Boniface/Cash Daddy is involved in government corruption, uneducated but effectively supporting his academic relatives, with bleached women attending him, and a total lack of social grace – Nwaubani graphically portrays him continuing business negotiations while ahem using the bathroom facilities (and then proceeding to eat without washing his hands). Kingsley's father, Paulinus is colonised to the point of thinking everything English superior to everything Nigerian. When he has a stroke, his family are astonished that he starts speaking Igbo, a language they've never heard him use. Some of his attitudes have clearly rubbed off on Kingsley and Augustina, but at least Kingsley regards skin-bleaching with disapproval. For much of the novel, he seems a bit of a mugu. He completely loses his head over money, with no sense of proportion or the pride and integrity his mother values. However, Nwaubani allows him a degree of character development and self awareness, taking the book beyond farcical comedy to greater depths.
The theme of 419 scams is used ingeniously and critically. It's easy enough to point out that these tricks work on people's greed, and sometimes on the desire to 'help Africa' which Kingsley sees as the 'weakness' of caring, but structurally this caring is exploitative, an emotional extraction that functions on multiple levels in the globalised neocolonial economy. It's true that Cash Daddy et al have excessive faith in the social safety net of the UK and no doubt the US too. The welfare state in the UK has been undergoing a demolition since its inception, varying in speed and priorities but rarely in direction. There's plenty of real grinding poverty here, with increasing numbers of people dependent on food banks, including members of the working poor. The characters are amusingly ignorant about other countries too, for example they mention Iranians speaking 'Arabic' (Nwaubani nudges in a corrective hint) and 'beheading' convicts. However, Iranians are not good mugus. Since they aren't white, they are too smart to be scammed.
Going further, Nwaubani shows that men like Uncle Boniface/Cash Daddy cannot be seen simply as a blight on society: 'it depends which part of the elephant you can feel', Kingsley offers. The 419-ers take care of huge networks of relations, extending such kinship bonds to 'one old woman in your village'. They fund schools, fix roads, pay medical bills, and generally take the place of the absent neocolonial state, by pulling back a proportion of the resources stolen from Africa by coloniser states. It's not unreasonable to see them in the role of Robin Hood. When Kingsley buys Cash Daddy a small gift, and through many other instances, Nwaubani touchingly reveals the genuine love that people have for him. As well as delighting me constantly with zany turns of phrase and keeping me turning those pages to discover the next twist in the thrilling plot, this novel challenged and changed my perspectives. I Do Not Come To You By Chance The Nigerian Scam - a view from the inside. Fiction. Or is it?
An alternately amusing and serious book on the Nigerian scam of emails that promise you millions of dollars if only you help the poor man/widow/cancer victim get the money out of the country. But this is written from the point of view of a well-educated but relatively poor Nigerian lad who has responsibilities to support his family. It's a very light read, quite well written and with a cast of some very colourful and more-or-less-believable characters. Although its light fiction, because of the vast cultural differences, it left me with plenty to reflect on.
What is a person to do when he cannot get work, any work, let alone work commensurate with his qualifications and his family must eat and there is no welfare state? He must either condemn his family to a very low level of existence that might include begging, he might indebt himself to loan sharks and eventually end up begging, he might steal or - given the opportunity - scam individuals living far away in the first world countries of immense riches. And if the right people are paid-off, up to and including politicians, there is no danger of any punishment, so why not? He is as contemptuous of his marks as we are of them - people whose greed is equal to their wealth and stupidity - and really deserve no sympathy. If we ever hear of anyone falling victim to one of those email scams we laugh and think 'what an idiot' and so does he.
However, our hero never failed to have doubts about the morals of what he did but at the end when he appears to have repented (now he's very rich) comes a surprise that had me saying streuuups sucking my teeth. And laughing.
_____________
An opportunity to get rich.
I am Barr. Richard Spencer residing in Accra-Ghana,a personal attorney to late Mr.Robert ,a nationality of your country who died in tragic motor accident by running into a stationery Trailer without warning sign on December 26 , 2006.
I have contacted you to assist in repatriating his fund valued at USD$45,200,000.00 left behind by my late client before it gets confiscated or declared unserviceable by the Security Finance Firm where this huge amount were deposited.
Reply to my private email address for more details: richrdspencer1790@gmail.com
Anyone want to write to him :-D ? I Do Not Come To You By Chance This was such a great romp of a satire. I had never heard of the author and need to find out if she has written anything since this one because I must read more of her work! I Do Not Come To You By Chance
Kingsley is fresh out of university, eager to find an engineering job so he can support his family and marry the girl of his dreams. Kingsley has always believed that education is everything, but when a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns that education may be the language of success, but money does the talking. I Do Not Come To You By Chance