“The Road Does Not End (Noirledge, 2024),” written by Olubunmi Familoni, was winner of the Nigeria Literature Prize 2024, sponsored by the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas. The work is a prose fiction. It is a 13-chapter children’s literature which discusses child labour, the menace of street children and indicts society’s lack of moral will to deal with the issue of street urchins. The story starts as the boy returns from school to meet people in their house. But both his father and mother are not home.
Immediately he enters, he is shoved into the kitchen away from the sombre faces and silent murmurs. Upon inquiry, he is told that his parents traveled.
Essentially, Rilwan Ayangbade ends up an orphan, and ends up in the house of Aunty Biliki.
The book shows in great detail the travails and ordeals children face when their parents die and they have to be taken in by family. Of particular reference is the transactional conversations that take place when deciding who should take care of the child in the absence of his parents (P5-6). You read that even those who benefited from the goodwill of the parents will try to avoid taking the child into their own homes.
But reluctantly and grudgingly, Aunty Biliki agrees to take the boy. She takes him to her one-room house. And she visits her frustration on the boy, giving him too little food or none at all. As if in a dreamland, Rilwan is told that he has to join Aunty Biliki in her trade: hawking of drinks and water. In his first morning, she tells him that he has to work to earn his next meal. The work is to hawk sachet water. That means school has stopped.
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Beyond that as his ordeal in the custody of Aunty Biliki continues, Rilwan finds solace in the company of fellow street hawker, Moshood, who becomes for Rilwan a friend, brother, and father.
In the work, we read about the horrible things that happen to street hawkers – children and adults. Told from the eyes of Rilwan, the author deploys the first person narrative technique for maximum effect in this work. We read how area boys exploit the hawkers, charging illegal taxes before they are allowed to sell. The work also exposes the stark reality of child labour in society, especially how families and relatives exploit orphaned children, denying them education and care. This menace of street children is also an indictment on the government for its mouthing of free education, of mopping up of out-of-school children, and failure of implementation of laws and regulations around the problem of street children.
In the work, the resilience and never-give-up spirit of Rilwan shines through. We see his determination to go to school and to become rich, even though these ambitions always seem unachievable with each turn. He decides to go to school – at all costs, no matter what. He walks into a school and but is soon found out. He walks into another, and he is thrown out.
Yet, he keeps on trudging down the road. Here the role of Saka Pepper looks providential.
In the course of his travails, Rilwan is met at critical junctures. First, Saka buys off Rilwan’s consignment of sachet water and gives him extra money for feeding. Soon after, Saka rescues him from being flogged for attempting to steal a wallet at a party. Then Saka later introduces Rilwan to Alhaji Danku, the acclaimed musician. Together, Saka Pepper and Alhaji Danku make his dream of getting an education come true. They are also instrumental to his break into stardom as a Fuji music world.
Soon Rilwan hears that the government has banned street hawking and set up a task force to arrest street hawkers. He and other street hawkers scamper for safety as the task force storms the streets. He runs for his life and runs into Moshood again. But he has decided not to go back to Aunty Biliki anymore. He and Moshood decide to change from hawking to begging which Moshood says is a more lucrative profession. With nowhere to sleep, Rilwan ends up sleeping on the street, and at the mercy of street urchins who strip him of the little money in his pocket.
It is instructive that the nonchalant attitude of both government and society towards children has made things quite tough on the street. Rilwan and Moshood find ready accomplices in their new occupation: begging. Saheed introduces them to Kongo Ewa, a bully and leader of the beggars who calls it “collecting of donations” and he only charges them tithes of their daily collections.
In this book, the author treats the nagging issue of out-of-school children who turn out to be street urchins. We read about the exploitation of children by their fellows on the streets. The case of Kongo, a big street boy who oppresses and exploits others, collecting tithe of all their collections is particularly indicative of bad parenting and inept governance.
Later in the book, Saka Pepper and Rilwan meet again. Saheed has introduced another job to Rilwan: stealing. But their first outing at a birthday party turns out awry. Rilwan gets caught at the point of taking a wallet lying on a table. He is apprehended by security men but is rescued by Pepper. That is the turning point in the life of Rilwan.
Pepper is the manager of a music band led by Alhaji Danku. He allows Rilwan to be his apprentice and later promises to fund Rilwan’s education after which he can become a musician. Rilwan is elated.
The book also plays on the Yoruba cultural persuasion of speaking about death in hushed tones and society’s idea that death of parents should not be mentioned to children.
The book is also a potent testimony of the author’s skillful deployment of the stream of consciousness technique in letting the reader into the mind of the protagonist, Rilwan, drawing the reader into vicariously feeling the pains, the trauma and eventual triumph of Rilwan.
The author also uses the road as a metaphor for the unending, cyclical nature of life. In the work, every turn of Rilwan the protagonist, seems to signify another beginning, and another spell of tortuous uncertainty. In addition, the work, The Road Does Not End plays up the metaphysical. In the work, we read about the place of dreams in showing the course of life, as seen in how the protagonist is able to apprehend the composition of the song that opened the door to his Fuji music stardom, among other instances.
In this 147-page work, Familoni gives us a first-hand experience of what goes down on the streets across our nation, especially in the southwest with his very nuanced narration of the layers’ plots. He particularly has a rich understanding of the unending supremacy battles of the various characters that dot the Nigerian Fuji music firmament. And this is powerfully fused into his presentation of the Rilwan Ayangbade story in this work. Little wonder that the book, The Road Does Not End won the 2024 Nigeria Prize for Literature. It is a well-written work with lots of twists.
. Olatunbosun is a broadcast journalist, fact checker and book reviewer at Splash FM 105.5, Ibadan. He can be reached via 08023517565 (SMS and WhatsApp only) and email, [email protected].
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