Abdullahi Ismaila’s short story collection, A Harvest of Hatred, is a 98-page cornucopia of societal ills, rendered in varying shades of grey. There are no bright colours. The prognosis is grim.

Divided into two parts, the first part, “Sundry Tales” is a palpable allegory where the young protagonist, appropriately named Junior, sees his motherland in the shape of a wretched woman misshapen by abuse, gross and vulgar.

Originally a beauty with great prospects and blessed abundance, the Motherland was prodigal and her resources were soon laid to waste by a ”horde of libertines. She had spread her thighs as wide as its twin river courses to the white men and their black lackeys.” It is, quite simply, a tale of rape. A rape made worse by the very fact that some of the violators were blood relations, children and siblings of the victim.

It is not an easy read, tales of incest never are, and the violent sexual imagery aside, the fact that the victim frequently acquiesced, indeed blatantly encouraged the debauchery that degraded her, signals a form of mental illness, like psycho masochism. Afterwards, she lies there moaning and bemoaning her fate.

The story is about our relationship with this country, which is often difficult, sometimes plain crazy, always complicated and rarely easy to understand. Or explain.  The worse part is the shame. Nigeria is our dear motherland but we are almost always embarrassed by it, by the way, it rubs us up the wrong way and by our responses, our lack of charity or mercy.

Junior, who represents the youth of this country, is somewhat innocent, but he will not be for long. Already, Motherland has been making crude overtures, and soon he will succumb to the lure of corruption; the miasma is pervasive and unrelenting.  Part of the beauty of this story and indeed the entire collection is that it attempts to go beyond the evisceration of the problems to finding solutions to the circle of corruption, endemic poverty and hate that has attenuated our growth as a nation and as a people. It attempts, but it also fails.

In a number of the stories, we see a youth loosely under the tutelage of a more experienced person who tries to teach him how to avoid the pitfalls, how to read the danger signs. But almost always the teaching is limited by the teacher’s acute cynicism, and a depressing credo whose most ambitious lesson is: the society is hopeless but you may still save yourself.

In ‘Sundry Tales,’ the lessons echo Socrates and his Dialogues, questions elicit other questions and by such indirection, the acolyte tries to find his direction. It is an untidy process and there are no easy solutions, especially as sometimes the teacher is also the conscience.

At a point, Junior wondered, “Supposing there are people who expect me to be bad, to act unethically, to feel belonged, which is their favourable expectation of me. What do I do? Should I act in consonance with their expectations? Or will I disappoint them should I act to the contrary?” In sum, how do we resist the pull of corruption, the lure to ‘join’ them?

The solution, he learns, is first, religion; faith in God; and second, better role models; and finally, try to be the role model himself. In other words, save yourself and Motherland be damned.

In Part Two, the book continues in the same bleak vein with eight stories of varying darkness. The first two stories, The Frontier Island and The Swine Island’ are about places abandoned by civilization, where the people have regressed into some kind of anti-reason. They have made rapid progress, backwards.

Indeed, in ‘The Frontier Island,’ everything appears to work in reverse order. People,  even insects, walk backwards. Although much of this particular story happens in the dream (or rather a nightmare) of a harassed university History teacher, Aminu, it is nevertheless a frightening prospect. Sitting on his desk and contemplating his puny proposal for doctoral research on “The Backward Cultures: man in the 21st Century,” he nods off only to find himself in a dark, dank, place where the thinking is not only backwards, but the actions too.

Since Aminu has been reminiscing about campus life, riots and the sudden way peace is often shattered, it is no leap to see his dream as a continuation of the thoughts that have peopled his waking moments. Except that in the dream, they have become concrete, the personification of his fears, like a character in Kafka’s novels. His attempts to call attention to this horror are mostly ignored, no one can see anything wrong.

The Swine Island takes matters further, for in this case civilization has been reduced to an animal farm and the people are now pigs or piglets squirming under the leadership of two manipulative Big Boys.

These puppeteers have control over the lives of the piglets who like marionettes dance to the music of their masters. They eat, jabber and burn on the command of their overfed overlords. Ironically, their masters also have a master, Big Brother.

As an allegory in the manner of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Animal Farm, ‘Swine Island’ holds a mirror to the society we live in and shows how injustice, ignorance and lust for power make us forget our pristine past, instead of a present that is nothing if not worse.

Like Chinua Achebe, the writer implies that before the coming of Europeans Africans were poor and unclothed, true, but they were rich in peace and humanity, and united and fair to one another. “Although it is a dark and ghost-ridden zone populated by famine and wanton incursions, it was congenial.”

Now, things have fallen apart, for with colonization came the divide and rule and desolation. Worse still, independence has been in name only as the white man still pulls the strings and puppets here run around to do their bidding. While the people are kept constantly warring with each other, the Big Boys meet to share the spoils and hold elections to legitimize the thievery that keeps the people living on crumbs.

The rest of the stories, including the main story that gave the book its title, A Harvest of Hatred, are more about the travails of individuals than the fate of nations.  There is a lot here about hate and the things that spawn such jealousy and envy that people would use all manner of diabolical means to eliminate a presumed rival.

In A Harvest of Hatred, Mahmood is cursed with the uncle from hell, Ya-Suman, who is so twisted with hate that he will stop at nothing to destroy anyone in his path. His wrath is specially reserved for his younger brother, Ahmadu, Mahmood’s beloved father; a trusting, generous man whose star appears to be perpetually in the ascendancy.

By the standards of Etizhuru village, Ahmadu is rich; he has got a large farm, a bicycle, a car waiting on the wings, two daughters about to be married, their Ecolac boxes already bought, and a mother he took along for that year’s hajj, in Saudi Arabia. His worse sin however is his eagerness to regale his jealous brother with stories of his successes, the plans he has to become even more rich and respectable. When he announced that his car will soon arrive, Ya-Suman decided that his brother’s life is surfeit and he should forfeit it.  One day, Ahmadu set out for the farm on foot and felt a prick on his left leg. It was the beginning of the end as the leg swells and refuses to heal, defying treatment, defying even an accurate diagnosis.

A traditional medicine man that his friend Yahaya took him to only asked if the patient had any elder brother, and then sent him away, a hopeless case. Ahmadu died the day his car arrived and his parting words to his son were to be mindful of what he tells others, and to allow his actions to speak for him instead because there is much wickedness in the world.

The day young Mahmood sold the car and left the village, his uncle didn’t know. The child that persists in finding out what killed his father was going to die the same way, Ya-Suman was already wetting the knife. In Africa, young ambitious men leave the village to seek their fortune in the cities all the time, but sometimes it is mainly to escape the clutch of witches…

But even the city is not safe from such desperate wickedness as Sani finds out in another story, Death Sentence. As the brilliant firstborn of a woman in a polygamous home, his mother, Hajara, had tried to shield him from Ladidi, her husband’s first wife who visits marabouts to ensure Sani meets with misfortune. But Sani is getting a good education in the university and believes that his mother’s fears are unfounded since God is Almighty and will deliver us from evil.

Sani’s doom was designed by a classmate, Chuks, who couldn’t understand why the former continues to upstage him “however hard he tried.” He has a reputation to keep up after all and he was going to do so even if it means finding a way to infect Sani with HIV. He paid a campus beauty queen who was tested positive to seduce Sani and when his friend asked him how he did it he said, “there is nothing money cannot do.”

In his final year and on a holiday, Sani walked into an HIV testing centre and was shocked to find that his test result had the plus sign. His whole world crashed as he contemplates the long list of conspiracies that have brought him here – from a wicked stepmother to the politics of HIV/AIDS and the rumoured plan to wipe away homosexuals and members of the black race, to his poor mother and the detritus of his ambition to help her, and his plan to contribute to the process …” of helping humanity to rediscover its humanity.” He hanged himself on a ceiling fan and left people wondering why such a promising young man will kill himself, “just like that.”

There’s a similar sense of the inevitability of doom hanging over the Rainy clan in ‘The Jungle of Maraya’ a place where “no one could become anything of substance without mastering the art of running down others.” Incidentally, a frequent motif in the book is the vast gulf that separate people’s actions from their words or looks; as Shakespeare says, there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. Betrayal is rife.

In Tawfiq’s case, his wife is sure relatives don’t want her to conceive or her husband to succeed and the only way is to fight using the same black magic. So Fauziyya visits marabouts who confirm her fears, and soon she is pregnant with a child whose destiny, she is told, is to be famous. She will do anything to protect that dream even in the face of doubts by her children who think the woman is just being an ignoramus. Of course, as the writer has shown again and again, in the vicious battle between modernity and tradition, especially the practice of witchcraft, modernity always comes out second best. So her husband dies suddenly in a car crash, ending a promising career in the civil service, her two older sons become vagabonds, and she is left with this gifted child, Maraya, the chosen one, who embodies all her hopes and aspirations.

She was to discover, however, like Macbeth, that the words of sorcerers cannot be taken at their literal meaning. They had told her that her child’s name will ring a bell, that he would be well known, and she had thought they meant he will be successful.  But one day she woke up to see a strange mad goat tied to the stake, and three days after this billy was released into the bush her beloved son, Maraya, arrived home from the university, bleating and raving mad. The jungle has again destroyed another soul.  In no time, the story of this promising young man suddenly gone insane spreads like wildfire and Fauziyya found, too late, that infamy is also a form of fame.

In Backwoods Men, the life of another promising young man was cut short by ignorance, poverty and poor healthcare, in the ways of the jungle he lives in. Nuhu dies from malaria, which despite all advances in medicine, continues to be the biggest killer of our young in the continent.  Hassan watches as his bosom friend and classmate in Day Secondary School continues to emaciate and suffer for a whole year only to be buried in an unmarked grave. Someone grabbed him and said, “Nuhu, take heart. It is the will of God” and he looked up to find that it was Ibrahim’s father.

He remembers how even when the doctors have diagnosed malaria there was no money to treat the boy, as Ibrahim’s father, a mere messenger in the office with two wives and ten children could hardly afford the bill and so resorted to taking the boy to a cheap dispensary.

He remembers how Ibrahim’s mom Bushrah used to say that her son’s sickness is the handiwork of her enemies while feeding her boy concoctions. Now all that remains is his resolve to wage war against mosquitoes.

In Dahiru’s Alter Ego, we see the epitome of the corruption that plagues the land in the gross form of Baba Ali who is always lavishly turned out, red eyes notwithstanding. He represents the worst of us; egocentric, greedy, and viciously amoral.

The man’s oversized lifestyle fascinates Dahiru who dreams of having the same sort of flashy cars and women and hundreds of millions in his account. He has discovered his role model, his alter ego, as befits a society where wealth, especially ill-gotten wealth, is king.

There is no worse way to wealth than the route taken by Baba Ali. A former teacher who discovered very early that teaching could not make him wealthy however parsimonious he lived, Baba Ali joined politics and used a war that annihilated his people and laid desolate large swaths of his country, to prepare for his dream future. A prodigious hedonist, he set out to live recklessly, unfettered by thoughts of family or the fate of the children in the schools he superintends as commissioner for education.

The university student, Ya-Ibrahim who ranted that the man’s “impervious to the plight of the younger generation” fail to dissuade a captivated Dahiru who resolves, till the end, that “I want to be like him(Baba Ali).”

With such politicians, it is not surprising that the government of Kukuruku country, in the story, ‘Hell After Curfew’, was overthrown. The entire country was under lockdown, a curfew was imposed so that members of the civil society could not carry out protests. It was all reminiscent of the civil disobedience that followed the annulment of the June 12 presidential elections and the arrest and detentions of journalists and other leaders that followed.

There is also about it the circle of disappointment that attends every new change of government whereby the last government, bad as it was, is often better than the one that came after.  Those troubled years are seen through the eyes of Musbau, journalist, politician, and activist who spent time in the gulag for his efforts and lost part of his eyesight to boot.

The new government that came after the curfew, after the country was shut down as a pariah nation, proved to be such a gargantuan failure that Musbau missed prison with its three square meals.

A Harvest of Hatred is a book of unremitting misery with very little hope on the horizon. It reinforces the cynicism and despair that many young intellectuals feel about this country, the thought that things can only get worse.