Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This classic account of bureaucratic tyranny resonates in any time and any place – which is to say, all times and all places – where people are abused by humans and institutions more powerful than them.
Your third choice is Franz Kafka’s The Trial.
I read this before going to Nigeria but moving there made me think about it a lot. The idea that the system always wins. What you see time and again in a country like Nigeria is that the way to prosper is to get round the system, or play the system, but to try and change it is a mammoth and mostly futile task. You have structures which could crush the most well-intentioned person and there’s this dark absurdity about how it all works. I remember a chapter where ‘K’ hears about the various options open to him in the trial he is facing for an undisclosed offence. ‘K’ can be fully acquitted, but that never happens, so he may be ‘ostensibly acquitted’, but with the possibility the charges could be reinstated in future, or the trial can be ‘indefinitely postponed’, which means the case is never formally stopped. There’s a sense of a system which always looms above you. The analogy isn’t exact, because even under Abacha Nigeria was such a large and messy place that it was hard for anyone to impose absolute, formal power but there’s a bleakly comic side to it that appealed to me. For my book I went out on a bus for a day and saw how they started with a stack of money from the fares and how it was depleted and depleted by all the bribes they had to pay. This guy was explaining to me how the money was halved, then quartered, then went down to an eighth. A packet of 33,000 naira had been reduced to 4,000. Then he paused, and added: ‘And then the police take half of that.’ The comic timing was so perfect, I just couldn’t help laughing, I started apologising, but other people then started joining in, and a great, sardonic laugh rippled around the room.
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In 2002 Michael Peel moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to become the Financial Times’s West Africa correspondent. His first book, A Swamp Full of Dollars, published by I B Tauris, is the story of how Nigeria was shaped by the oil that pumps through western cities. A mixture of reportage, oral history and investigative journalism, it exposes the unseen consequences of reckless resource extraction. It was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and has been nominated for the Orwell Prize. Peel returned to London in 2005 to become the newspaper’s legal correspondent, covering, amongst other topics, corporate corruption and financial crime.
