Title: Believers and Hustlers
Author: Sylva Nze Ifedigbo
Publisher: Iskanchi Press
Pages: 380
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ifenna Obumselu, a young journalist, is sent to cover the inauguration of ‘the biggest church in the world,’ with a seating capacity of 1,20,000 worshippers. This is Heaven’s Gate cathedral, the new global headquarters of Rivers of Joy Church in Lagos, Nigeria. The church is headed by Pastor Nicholas Adejuwon, the Daddy Founder, and his wife, Pastor Nkechi, also known as Mummy General.
When he steers away from the scripted question and asks about the death of a pastor while the church was under construction, Ifenna is fired from his job and becomes suspicious about Pastor Nick’s actions and motivations.
He decides to start an anonymous blog to expose some of the corruption he has encountered.
Will he succeed in exposing the corruption? And will his reporting make a difference?
The chapters alternate between the 3rd person past tense PoVs of Ifenna, Nick and Nkechi.
The narrative included a lot of words and expressions from Igbo and Yoruba. These added a lot of colour without taking away from our understanding of the story or our enjoyment of the writing. The only word I knew was wahala, which means trouble.
The similes were rooted in the culture.
Like ants to sugar.
The television shrieked, like freshly cut onions poured into hot groundnut oil.
Eyes like the red of hibiscus.
Like puffs of pepper spray.
The forlorn look on a character’s face is described as: like the chaff of an orange after all the juice had been squeezed out of it.
There were a lot of minor characters who are unrelated to the main plot, but help us understand the main characters better.
The Believers and Hustlers of the title refers to the prey and the predator. The book highlights the quirks that dot religious circles, the rampant corruption with people fooled by pastors into buying into a gospel of prosperity, with ordinary people being asked to pay for luxuries for the pastors and church leaders, who sell high-priced tickets to heaven. The racket that the healing sessions are, how they make money off the desperation of the gullible, the hypocrisy of trading in religious symbols while lacking true faith.
But religious corruption isn’t the only problem. Traffic police run their own racket, extorting money. The journalists get paid by the businesses they cover, the editors want their cut.
One interesting thing I learned was that Nigerian Christians cut cakes after counting down to the spelling of the name of Jesus and that Nigeria has a tradition of renaming cars they do not manufacture.
I particularly liked Ifenna’s writing, visible in his pieces for the newspaper and in his blog. The stories he writes are about the degradation of the human condition. There are versions of this in every country. His blog too is well written, the words chosen carefully for the impact they could achieve, the posts charged with passion and overflowing with sarcasm.
This was my first novel by a NIgerian author and I enjoyed it. The author adopts a teasing yet indulgent tone towards his characters, and towards the culture as a whole, their foibles and eccentricities, describing the easy manner in which people pick up foreign accents. The links between present day events and the flashbacks, very tricky to get right, were handled smoothly.
The ending was believable, rooted in reality, yet I found it disturbing and disappointing. I had hoped for a resolution that would resolve the problem the book began with, but I guess it can never be resolved. As long as there are believers in this world, there will be hustlers too.
I highly recommend this one.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)
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