Title of the Book: The Whirlwind
Author: Solomon Adedokun Edebor
Reviewer: Abayomi Awelewa
Publishers: Hephzibay & Associates
Year: 2020
Pages: 90
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 978 6002 512
Solomon Edebor’s The Whirlwind is a fresh breath on Nigerian drama. It is a twenty-four (24) movement play that re-echoes the truism: “The evil that men do lives after them.” It was all rosy, smooth and clandestine for a group of randy school boys, who take young university girls’ innocence forcefully, deploying dangerous tactics to keep them silent even in the face of persistent torture and extortion that eventually lead some of the victims to end their lives tragically through suicide. Every day for the thief but one day for the owner, so goes the adage. The day the group meets its waterloo, the leader has cornered a cousin of one of the group members and the plan to gang-rape her the way they do to other unsuspecting victims is underway until there is a resistance with a plea that chicken do not eat each other’s’ giblets. In the melee that follows, it is a free for all, with members of this notorious group sustaining various degrees of injury. Eventually, the bad boys are rounded up and made to face a disciplinary committee of the university and are promptly expelled. That is where the real story begins.
The Whirlwind ends on a note of hope but hovers all through between tragedy and comedy, as Biola, the protagonist, takes the centre-stage narrating the ugly effects of his life that land him on a wheel chair, paralysed for life. It all begins with the quintet of Biola, Geoffrey, Ibrahim, Obinna, and Pelumi, all undergraduates of a nondescript university, forming a sinister group that carries out a gang-rape of innocent fresh female students. The play records the modus operandi of the group, which is first securing the trust of their would-be victim through an act of chivalry, then becoming friends before luring the unsuspecting lady into the den of the quintet with the active connivance of the security personnel. Ijeoma is the only victim of the quintet the play presents, as she becomes the stereotype for all other victims of the evils The Whirlwind depicts. Biola meets Ijeoma, a fresh undergraduate, reporting to campus for the first time and helps ease her troubles, assisting with her luggage and finding her hostel. A friendship develops, as Ijeoma’s friends and roommates, Tejiri, Maimunat and Bidemi, egg her on to give in to Biola’s advances. Yielding to their advice results in the destruction of her life.
The group’s next sinister move is predictably on Daniella, one of the quintet’s, Pelumi’s, cousin, who is sent to the school, presumably from her parents’ base in the United States, as a punishment for an offence her father considers funny. Daniella describes her offence as “delinquent acts” (p. 28) for which she is sentenced to a year or more in the local university. Pelumi seeks the understanding of his gang, urging them to shelf the plan to run “P” (p. 30) on his cousin but he is turned down and ridiculed. A fight ensues, and in the free for all, the gang members sustain various degrees of injury, which land them in the hospital. The university conducts an investigation, subjects the group to a disciplinary committee, which finds them guilty of acts inconsistent with the oath to be law-abiding and responsible students, and thereby expels them.
To save themselves from embarrassment, Mr and Mrs Ibuowo, Biola’s parents, decide to send him to a school in a neighbouring country, Benin Republic. He succeeds there, bagging a degree and returning home to participate in the National Youth Service Scheme as a corps member. At the orientation camp, he meets Tega, whose beautiful young sister, Ella, recently secures admission to Browncleft University, in the city where Biola now works in his father’s company, IS & IB Plc, and employs Tega to also observe his mandatory one-year service at the same company. He helps Ella offsets her school fees and other expenses but uses the opportunity to lure her into his den and eventually rapes her. As a result of the ignominy, Ella commits suicide, leaving a note for her brother who gets enraged, and pursues Biola with the intention of causing him serious bodily harm or kill him in the process. Biola, trying to escape from Tega, runs into a moving vehicle which hits him badly. We later see Biola in the hospital, in the company of Nurse Paulina, who makes conscious attempts to draw him out of his despondency. As Paulina tries hard to convince Biola there is still hope for him, narrating how her own father rapes her repeatedly and how she is helped by a good Samaritan who saves her life as well as the NGO that helps her reconcile with her father, forgiving him for the evil he did to her.
The Whirlwind touches on a delicate subject of rape, sexual harassment of innocent university undergraduates, parental negligence, and retribution. All the culprits pay for their sins one way or another. The play is didactic. It reinforces the power of repentance and restitution. It highlights the prevailing menace of gender-based violence in Nigerian tertiary institutions and calls the attention of relevant authorities to this problem before it becomes intractable.
The Whirlwind does not pass without a few technical infelicities. Its reading shows a fast-paced action through the movements, a technicality that may be realized successfully when filming but quite impossible for the stage. This makes the reader to contemplate that the use of analepsis in the play means it is originally written for the screen. There are a few grammatical infelicities too. For example, “seeps” is used instead of “sips” on Page 34 while the expression, “It was as if I felt a loose on my chest,” (p. 59) casts doubt on the intention of the speaker. He ought to have used “loosening.” However, the few errors do not take anything away from the beauty that The Whirlwind is.
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Dr. Abayomi Awelewa is a lecturer in the Department of English, University of Lagos Nigeria. He can be reached through aoawelewa@unilag.edu.ng
