In the prologue of Akin Adesokan’s sophomore novel, South Side, a reader is likely quick to ask: What exactly is going on here? Especially with the alliterative opener “Short, short-sighted, and short-tempered, the mastermind settled in with an attitude of self-importance” that expands into a repulsive caricature of an African despot “with blood literally in his hands.” The perceptive reader will recognise the historical allusion that unfolds in this prologue as the assassination of figures like Patrice Lumumba in Congo or Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau. Thus, from early on, the author situates the narrative in a literary culture that mourns the betrayal of anti-colonial ideals, exposing the grotesque realities of neo-colonial power where enlightened leadership is supplanted by brute force, while at the same time critiques Western journalism on Africa.
This incident alone – a coup in which an elite politician, Sir Koroma Fouta, is murdered in the chaos following – is not merely a background or sociological filler in the novel but demonstrates how such political disruption affects individual lives contributing to displacement, especially for the unanchored diasporic Africans. Abel Dankor, the narrator, is one such individual. For him, this singular event further complicates his dislocation and quickly spirals into a persistent disquiet. When receives the news, Abel is a writer at a residency in a Western country carrying the hope that his revered mentor, Sir Koroma Fouta, a celebrated poet, will help him secure the citizenship of a country, Mande – a fictional West African country he has lived the longest. But just as the path to belonging begins to unfold, the chaos following the military coup reported in a newsletter thrust into his hand in the prologue leaves him adrift once more – stateless, with no country to really call his own or home.
This is a peculiar problem besetting more than four million people worldwide, according to a UNHCR estimate. These are people who are not recognized as a citizen by any state under its laws, or have any means of identification attached to a country, and in effect, results in the denial of their basic rights inherent in the UN protocols, including access to education, healthcare, employment, and freedom of movement. The consequences of statelessness are actually profound, perpetuating cycles of marginalization and vulnerability. This is why efforts to combat statelessness include international frameworks like the UNHCR’s #IBelong Campaign, launched in 2014 to end statelessness by 2024, which ironically has not achieved that purpose.
As the narrative progresses, it draws us into a murky emotional landscape. While processing his uncertainty, Abel encounters Valeria, a woman with a mysterious past, and a tentative friendship appears to be taking shape before her sudden departure to attend to personal matters leaves a void. Yet it also stirs in Abel the deeper question: should he resume his pursuit of a permanent residence in Mande or surrender to the unexpected bond growing between him and Valeria? Valeria becomes a mirror, not just for his yearning, but for the haunting question of where, or with whom, true belonging might lie. While Valerie’s full story, when we eventually find out, turns out to be a major asset of this novel and one likely to make a reader doff their hat to Adesokan. The suspenseful manner the author treats Valeria’s past from the first to the third part of the novel is the stuff great fiction is made of.
Still in search of an anchor, Abel gets involved with some women. During a residency at an artists’ resort in Italy, he becomes entangled in a passionate affair with Flavia, the director of the resort, who also happens to be married. Despite her husband’s looming presence, his ‘omnipresence’ proves powerless to stop the escalating intensity between Flavia and Abel. Their connection deepens beyond fleeting desire, growing into something so consuming that Flavia begins speaking of divorce, determined to break free in order to be with Abel without restraint. Their romance, between a younger Black man and a white woman in the 1950s, raises eyebrows. When they walk through town, children stare and adults point. To Flavia, those who oppose them are nothing more than racists and fascists who know no better. But to Abel, the pointed fingers are an omen. The romantic end, when it comes, arrives quietly, almost mercifully, in the words: “If you love him, let him go.”
After Flavia comes Jeanne, who jilts him via a long, deliberate letter that spares no softness, accusing him of unforgivable vanity pierce and offering only hollow nods to her dream of an Africa freed from the chains of superstition. Her absence leaves a silence he does not name. Into that space, not long after his return to Mande, steps Jilo, a medical doctor with a quiet, exacting gaze, once promised in childhood to the traditional healer who had wrestled her from death’s grasp when she was a newborn – a reminder of the uneasy braid between science and tradition, and of the bargains parents strike when might and helplessness share the same ground.
In Mande, the spectre of politics is never far away. Yacouba, Abel’s childhood friend, adds a layer of complexity to not only Abel’s conflicted decisions but also Mande’s troubled history with his emergence as a key political figure. For Abel, these questions arise: Should loyalty to a shared past shape his choices about the future? Or, is ambition enough reason to return home or is home now an idea too fractured to reclaim? Beneath these questions lies the deeper ache of statelessness, a condition that haunts many Africans who cannot lay claim to any citizenship of a country, because of border shift, war, etc. Yet this is no uniquely African problem; from Gaza to the displaced millions of Ukraine, the dislocation of identity and belonging is an unquiet crisis of our global age.
In this novel, the author’s status as a professor of comparative literature is on full throttle. Lovers of classic literature, particularly French, British, and Caribbean, will find in this novel rich intertextualities worth exploring. Within its pages, we encounter Molière, the towering figure of French drama; François Rabelais, Renaissance satirist and philosopher; Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, visionaries of speculative fiction; and C.L.R. James, the brilliant Caribbean polymath whose thought spans literature, politics, sport, and history. These influences are not merely ornamental, they are woven into the intellectual and emotional fabric of Abel’s journey, illuminating the ideas that shape him. Abel’s story, told in the first-person narrative that is grafted with an intellectual heft of the characters you will find in the fiction of say, Wole Soyinka or Abdulrazaq Gurnah, has contemplative, retrospective and prospective qualities to it.
Adesokan writes with the confidence of a maestro, guiding every word and scene with precision, each moment rising and falling in the perfect rhythm of a language. Simply put, he is a master of the English language. His narrative voice is warm, erudite and steady pulling you into a setting so vivid you can almost live in it. Though Italy, England, Denmark and the United States drift through the pages of this novel, it is Mande, the fictional West African country he has created, that lingers bearing semblance with any of its real-world counterparts. It breathes in the dust of its crowded streets, where police can halt a funeral for want of a permit, where tempers flare and fists fly as easily as greetings, where the old fevers of ethnicity never quite sleep. It is a land where virtue, vice, and all that lies between walk the same roads, neither outpacing nor outlasting the other.
Finally, Adesokan has delivered a novel that does not simply tell a story; it performs the highest work of a great literature.
***Olukorede S. Yishau is the author of two novels: In The Name of Our Father and After The End; a collection of short stories: Vaults of Secrets; and a travel book: United Countries of America and Other Travel Tales. He is concluding work on his third novel. He lives in Houston, Texas
