(typewriter dings) (typewriter rattles) - Hi, I'm Stephen Buoro, and this is The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa.

- This is your debut novel, which is, I have to say, I'm struck by how beautiful the writing is and the story.

Tell us what the story is about and introduce Andy.

And I'm gonna read him in your words, "A 15-year-old, African, genius, "poet, altar boy who loves blonds."

(Stephen chuckles) Tell me about Andy.

- Yeah, yeah, so, Andy, Andy is a 15-year-old boy.

He lives in northern Nigeria with his mother.

That is where I actually grew up.

I grew up in a town called Kontagora, and that is where my novel is set.

So Andy has a complicated relationship with his mother.

She's poor, she's uneducated, But Andy has a unique secret.

And his secret is his obsession with blonds, and all, with whiteness, the west, and American culture and all that.

And, so, in a nutshell, the novel is how Andy juggles, the feelings of shame he feels towards his mother due to how poor and uneducated she is.

And how his experience becomes intensified and all, how, when his life is suddenly destabilized by communal violence, by religious riots in Northern Nigeria.

(gentle music) - So Andy, of course, being obsessed with blonds, manages to find the one blond in his town.

She comes to town.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Tell us a little bit about Eileen.

- Yes, so, Eileen, Eileen is a blond British girl and, she's the niece of the missionary priest of Andy's parish priest.

So, she comes to Nigeria, I mean, for the summer and then.

And then, and then Andy meets her at a party that's a, that the church, because she's, that the church throws for her, anyway.

And so, then they meet and that is where the relationship begins for him and all.

- And he's completely obsessed with her.

- Yeah, and he's completely- - But she's obsessed with him as well.

- Yeah, yeah, and it's so, both of them, I just, they are in this stage of their lives where they are still processing so many things.

I mean, being a teenager, I mean being a human being in the very first place.

- [J.T.]

Right.

- And in terms of Andy, Andy processing, like, the complications of his community of Nigeria.

Like legacies of years of slavery and colonialism in Nigeria.

So, all these things cause a crisis of self within him, and a craving for otherness, you know.

And then, Eileen is like the fire, or whatever, or the match flame that inflames everything in the novel.

(gentle music) - [J.T.]

What is HXVX?

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- The curse of Africa?

- Yeah, so, so, my narrator, Andy, he's a very creative young person even though he's navigating many things like issues of colonialism in Nigeria, and with sex, and just coming of age in general.

So, Andy, in the novel, Andy attempts to creates like a mathematical formula, with which he can use to describe, understand, and perhaps solve the problems plaguing his country, and his continent in general.

So, Andy, comes up with the idea, the idea of HXVX.

So and so many problems that Andy attempts to describe and solve include the legacies of slavery and colonialism, the dictatorship in Nigeria, the collapse of our governments, the kleptocracy, plutocracy, you know, since independence and all.

So, and these problems are incredibly huge.

And it sometimes seemed to come from like a, like an evil super force, perhaps like a super villain, in fact, or, an evil god or something.

And so Andy borrows the idea of the name of God in Hebrew in the Old Testament, YHWH.

So, he borrows that idea and to give a name and a face to all these problems which are so huge and so impossible to conceive and to put in our minds together at the same time and so that is the idea of HXVX.

So, Andy realizes that the problems plaguing his country and all the continent are planetary in size, are astronomical, and perhaps must require such solutions, astronomical solutions.

What is, in a way, a quiet pessimistic way of, looking at, looking at contemporary Nigeria.

But, yeah, but, in a way, the formula gives Andy like hope or gives him like something to hold to grasp on and to- - [J.T.]

Sure, sure, it's some.

- Yeah.

- Well, it's a wonderful way for him to internalize and then become a writer because he has to, you know, he's writing poetry.

And his aunt actually takes one of his poems and puts it into a contest and he wins it.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- And he's just like, "How could this happen to me?

"This is incredible!"

I mean, the 15-year-old reaction to that is just priceless.

- Yeah, so, like, I wrote a lot of poetry when I was around Andy's age, you know, and I found poetry hugely therapeutic for me and, I found poetry as a way of like, airing my emotions, my angst, my anger, of the anger of being a teenager anyway and come to terms with the turmoil around me.

So, I hope, hopefully, like a, like readers or many young readers who get to read the book, I mean, might take up those kind of those disciplines like poetry and, I mean, we are all poets.

We all respond to language, and we all love language.

So, yeah.

(gentle music) - Love your background story and how you were teaching.

And now you've gotten the Booker Prize Award.

- Scholarship.

- Scholarship.

- Yeah.

- And you were able to then switch from teaching math to actually being a writer.

You always wanted to be a writer though, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

Since when I was like 10 years old and all, yeah.

I mean, first, I didn't grow up in a house with books at all because my, I mean my parents, I mean working, we were working class and we we only had like the Bible and a couple religious texts in my house.

When I transferred to missionary school, that I first had access to a library.

Anyway so, I read a book.

I can't even remember the name of the book now.

And it's just, just made me to just come alive, you know?

Like, I mean to.

I could just see the world, I could just immerse, I just felt immersed in the world, in the fictional world that I was reading about, the characters, the emotions, the smells.

I mean, the feelings there, and it's, it just sparked so many things within me and I felt, "oh!"

that perhaps I should actually pursue this.

I should become a writer.

A few months after my father died, and I was sitting outside my house and had a pencil with me and a notebook.

So, I remember I suddenly found myself writing a story.

And, I was writing a story about a war in the animal kingdom.

How the fish were ostracized were, forced to, forced away from land made to move into water and to adapt there, and, suddenly I found that I had so much power.

For example, I could create trees with eyes, with hair, trees that spoke.

And, like, I had so much agency, you know.

And it felt as though I was doing something spiritual, something illegal at some time, you know, anyway.

So, anyway, I wrote a story, and I showed it to a schoolmate of mine and he read it, and he didn't believe that I was the one who wrote the story.

He thought perhaps I had copied it from somewhere or something and that was like a huge motivation for me to write.

It made me realize that perhaps I could actually do this that if this guy couldn't believe that I wrote this and, and in a way, every piece of writing that I have gone on to write has been a way of not just convincing myself, but like, convincing the guy, wherever he is in the world, that, oh, actually I can actually do this.

(gentle music) - [J.T.]

This is a love story.

- [Stephen] Yeah, it's a love story.

- [J.T.]

It's a love story.

- [Stephen] Yeah, yeah.

- We haven't even talked about his mom.

I mean, oh my gosh.

- Yeah.

So, like, in in a way, like the novel, I see the novel as a love story in three ways.

A love story between, like, a mother and son because Andy has a very complicated relationship with his mother.

He hugely loves her, but at the same time, he's hugely ashamed of her.

I mean, she's poor, she's uneducated, she's black.

She mispronounces English words, and all that, and so that's, so many things about her that he rejects and all.

So and, it's also a love, a love story between Andy and Eileen the blonde British girl that he falls in love with.

And in a way, too I think, it's a complicated love story about the relationship between Nigeria, and perhaps the African continent as a whole, and with the west and all with the colonizers and all.

So, it's just complications all around, you know, yeah.

- You did a wonderful job.

- Oh, thank you.

- Congratulations.

It's a really great book.

- Oh, thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you.

- Stephen, it's been delightful talking to you.

Thank you for being here.

- Yeah, thank you for having me.

It's delightful talking to you, too, yeah.

- And thank you for watching A Word On Words.

I'm J.T.

Ellison, keep reading.

(bell dings) - [Stephen] Nigerians are some of the happiest people in the world, which is very funny because of the bad things that happen.

Or, we think we are the happiest people in the world, which really we not are, we're just wearing masks to shield all the turmoil within ourselves you know.

(mellow music)