Do Not Say It's Not Your Country

Do Not Say It's Not Your Country is filled with fascinating characters: a South African woman and her children crowding an iron shack in Blikkiesdorp; a Madagascan slum boy who gets a job as a cook in Antananarivo; a shy Sierra Leonean girl who falls in love with a sly fisherman; a wily Nigerian prophet whose tricks are exposed; a Kenyan couple back in their old ways after confirmation in church - and many more. With themes such as love and innocence, terrorism and slavery, this brilliant book takes you on a tour of Africa and beyond, to meet more of humanity in its beauty and its pain.

REVIEW:
Like an arrow darting across the sky, this collection of twelve short stories tells a tale of poverty in South Africa, filthiness in Madagascar, teenage love and deception in Freetown, to the vagaries of religion in Nigeria. It intoxicates us in Kenya, making dreams realized in Uganda. From the forbidden love in Abuja to a Senegalese ordeal in Libya. We make connections to music in Bamako, halting to meet exiled Zimbabweans in South Africa. With a spiritual experience in Benin City and the warmth of second chances in Brazil, these stories will brush you with different emotions, these words will hold you, they will pin you down, making you stay up. Do Not Say It's Not Your Country marinates you in the richness of different cultures, making your pores open to the shared narrative, the pain, poverty, joy, the vicissitudes of life as well as the wonder sprinkled in these stories.- Funmilola Ogunseye - Literary Pundit, Dasience.com

EXCERPT:
MY happiest memories of those early days in Blikkiesdorp are about my brother Jabulani fluttering about in our small tin-can house like a butterfly, scattering clothes and plates and things, singing 'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika', blowing a yellow vuvuzela and sticking posters of the FIFA World Cup on the corrugated walls of our house. He and Thabo, the last kid, had been the wildest in the family since we were evicted from Athlone and camped here. Jabulani was ten and tall already, with hair so big and fluffy and fine. Thabo was three and had hair as rough as a foot mat. Mama said the boys' brains had gone faulty for turning almost everything in the house into objects of football madness. Jabulani had written the words 'BAFANA BAFANA' in blue ink on all his shirts and on Thabo's. He had written the same words on the walls of our house, and Mama did not like that. Thabo, who had no vuvuzela of his own, made vuvuzela sounds with his mouth. Now he had begun to upset Mama the most because since we failed to give him a proper toy, he was always straying into other people's tin houses, looking for something funny. After we saw him playing with a used sanitary pad he picked from God-knows-where, Mama said Thabo would pick up a snake next.

BIO.:
Nnamdi Oguike is a Nigerian writer. He is a shortlist of the Miles Morland African Writing Scholarships 2019, selected as The Missing Slate's Author of the Month for March 2016 and was a finalist in the 2018 Africa Book Club Short Story Competition. More of his writings have been published in The Dalhousie Review, African Writer and Brittle Paper. He lives in Awka, Nigeria.