Reviewing Esomnofu Ebelenna’s Heinneken University

But to the book itself, which from its very title sets out to satirize the state of tertiary education in public Nigerian universities. The book opens with this sentence: “Heinneken University of Education, Ojoka, was the worst campus in Nigeria, where students brought umbrellas to class to protect themselves from the dilapidated ceilings, yet parents still jostled for their children’s places on the admission list.” And with that tone, the narrative unfolds and revolves around three principal characters: Nkemdilim Obi, Dr. Okoye Ezinwa, and Ifenna Nzekwu.

We meet Nkem, the brilliant student and poet who arrives from the United States, determined to attain a First Class degree and make his parents proud. He is wholly unprepared for the trials that will test both that dream and his relationship with the beautiful cowrie-haired pianist, Chioma Emenike. 

Then there is Dr. Okoye Ezinwa, a pot-bellied alcoholic and womaniser, who embodies the amoral archetype of the Nigerian academic who trades marks for money, sex, and other favours. It is almost an open secret within Heinneken University that the vivacious Rose Onuoha is Okoye's "side-chick," and news of his dalliances with female students bring constant anguish to his wife, Dorothy. But Rose is quite the character. She hates tertiary education of any kind. And yet she is more than an airhead, as she is scheming and mischievous. In a calculated move, she lets Nkem know that his beloved Chioma might have had an affair with Dr. Okoye. This betrayal shatters Nkem's life, propelling him toward revenge. 

The third wheel in this trinity is Ifenna Nzekwu, a painter and photographer who is also Nkem's roommate and closest friend. Ifenna's life is one of unrelenting chaos, from the turbulence of his sexuality to his involvement with Poverty Bye-bye Ministry, his uncle's vehicle for conning hapless people seeking religious succour. Ifenna is perhaps the most troubled of the three, having been abandoned by his parents as a child and subsequently abused by the very adults who should have protected him. His existence is in constant rebellion against society, norms, and expectation.

Reading Heinneken University, one quickly becomes aware that to Ebelenna, plot is decidedly secondary within the narrative architecture. The novel is sustained largely by the words, actions, and thoughts of its extensive coterie of secondary characters, who are not caricatures but figures almost identical to those one might encounter in the world outside the page. 

Threaded through the narrative is a piece of enduring lore from the community of Ojoka, a superstition as morbid as it is revealing. It is widely believed, though never quite substantiated, that a young girl was murdered by Ojoka youths so that the federal government under General Sani Abacha could acquire the land upon which Heinneken University was built. The girl, in a detail that feels too deliberate to be coincidental, shares a name with the novel's own protagonist: Nkemdilim. 

Since it is theorised that she was murdered and buried within the grounds of the campus, her death is held responsible for the curse that still afflicts the university, and characters across the narrative frequently invoke her fate as the original wound, the precise moment from which Heinneken University's woes and decline can be traced. Ebelenna does not confirm or deny the legend; he simply lets it breathe and fester within the story, which is perhaps the point. 

Read one way, the murdered girl functions as a shorthand for guilt and suppressed memory in the Nigerian consciousness, the kind of foundational sin that a community buries beneath concrete and ceremony, then spends generations haunted by. Read another way, and more damningly, she becomes a metaphor for how Nigerian youths have historically destroyed their own future and identity in order to strengthen and elevate the very leadership that exploits them. That both interpretations hold weight simultaneously is a testament to the kind of layered, morally serious fiction that Ebelenna, even in a debut, is clearly capable of.

Despite the gravity of its subject matter, Heinneken University is, throughout, laugh-out-loud funny. The novel possesses an encyclopedic scope and a fondness for esoteric references that may challenge the average reader, but it compensates handsomely with a crucial element: absurdity. It is this element that elevates the satire, enabling Ebelenna to lampoon the state of tertiary education in Nigeria to genuinely ludicrous heights. Comical and ironic situations are rendered in ways that elicit laughter, yet also prompt the knowing shake of the head that comes with recognising the realities being reflected. Because as much as the university should be a stronghold of intellectual advancement, its ivory tower status in Nigeria has been transformed into something resembling a jungle where anything goes. The quality of education in public universities is derailed, time and again, by bribery and corruption, ASUU strikes, mismanagement, sexual scandals, examination malpractice, cultism, tribalism, sheer ignorance, and neglect from the government.

Ebelenna shows us that while the corruption and rot portrayed can weaken institutions, equal attention must be paid to how dysfunction, over time, transforms the attitudes and mentality of people until what was once bizarre attains the credibility of culture and the comfort of acceptance. Some abnormalities, however, should not be normalised or tolerated.

In this way, Heinneken University is simultaneously an urgent work of satire and social criticism, and a manifesto for hope, for solutions that can stem the tide of negatives and inspire a reclamation of the soul of a nation and a people from darkness and decay. Although youths are part of the dysfunction, one cannot wholly blame them: if one is thrust into the jungle, why would they not run wild? Still, it is instructive that the novel's young people, Nkem being most prominent, are shown to possess a moral clarity that older adults demonstrably lack. They see through the pretense and call a spade a spade. It is this bravery and fearlessness that compels Nkem to deliver an impassioned speech at a public event, right in front of the Minister of Education, lamenting the state of the educational sector and declaring that "...the corpse of education is decomposing…"

When the novel asserts that “...the stupider someone is in this country, the more power the political parties will give them…”, or that “...many of our brightest colleagues are leaving Nigeria for better opportunities abroad…”, these lines illuminate inept politics and the japa-driven brain drain not merely as social grievances, but as twin symptoms of an impending collapse.

Beyond what it says, the novel deserves praise for how it says it. Ebelenna's stylised prose can offer beautifully stirring turns of phrase, delightful sentences, and a gorgeous labyrinthine rhythm that rewards patience. Notably, at the end of each chapter, there appears either a poem or a quote attributed to Nkem himself, a technique known as a fictional or intra-diegetic poem, whereby a literary work is presented as having been created by a character who exists within the world of the fiction. It is a sophisticated literary device, and one that Ebelenna wields with evident affection.

The sheer scope and depth of Ebelenna's literary ambitions is commendable, and one suspects that in subsequent works, Ebelenna might prove greater command over the form, making a compelling case, in the process, for literature that asks something of its reader's intellect, a quality that has become a fading virtue of contemporary fiction.

Heinneken University is a remarkable debut from a young writer worthy of watch. It is a work of urgent, potent satire and social criticism that should land in Nigerian universities, ruffle the feathers of those at the top, and pierce through the heart of what actually ails us, with the possibility of inspiring the change we desperately need as Nigerians, or, at the very least, a long-overdue rebirth.

Chidinma Ifekwe is a writer and post-graduate student of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages at the University of Uyo.