Review: Of ghosts and women

Even skittish readers may want to try this collection, lest they miss out on a great moment in African speculative fiction.

Jacqueline Nyathi

You look like your grandmother, or are possibly possessed by her. Trouble is, your grandmother did terrible things and then you start to do pretty bad things too, as a pimple erupts on your face for the first time in your life.

So much literature is set in Lagos you’ve been to that legendary place. Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots is the latest collection of short stories to tackle Lagos; and, like others, it teems with large city life, and also the supernatural.

There’s the night market, that wonderfully spooky urban legend, here called the dusk market, that you don’t see unless invited. Salewa, a struggling seller of ogogoro, or moonshine, apparently has been invited, and she wants to escape to it forever when it appears around her. When it disappears, she spends all of her time trying to find it again.

On Alhaji Williams Street, death ominously stalks homes. One boy after another dies, and the protagonist, the only boy of the family in Number 24, watches the fever creep towards him from next door.

There are excellent stories in this collection. Contributions and The Hollow are feminist tales. The former on the common Yoruba practice of esusu and the latter on a house that protects women. In Birdwoman, an unhappy woman turns into a bird, but people misunderstand her right to the end.

Aguda, who will already be known to many African readers (for example, for the intensely creepy Things Boys Do, from The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021), is an excellent writer, if somewhat cautious. It is in more daring stories like The Dusk Market and Masquerade Season that Aguda’s talent really shines. Still, this collection is very much worth picking up, that even if you haven’t, you can feel like and will please readers