#BookReview: Burma Boy By Biyi Bandele
Emeka Nwakobi
Biyi Bandele takes us to the theatre of World War II and we are not just spectators, but we find ourselves as involved in this crazy war as the Chindits, the Kyaftins and Farabitis and Samanjas; every thread of emotion in our body is drawn into this war. It is not uncommon to find ones heart beating with so much fear, as though confronted by the same danger as that faced by those courageous soldiers, who gave their lives for a cause they do not even understand.
Volunteer soldiers crop in, from all over British administered Nigeria. They join the teeming population of Africans, volunteering to fight King George’s war. We meet Samanja Show a vibrant soldier in the campaign, Bloken, Damisa, Ali Banana (the thirteen year old who joins the war in a bid to escape his master, who he claimed was mistreating him), Guntu, Aluwong, Fash (who lost a leg in the cause of a mop up operation), Will, indeed a lengthy array of Nigerians cutting across different regions, caught-up by choice or sheer ignorance in the King’s war against the Japanese. Meaningless or not, ignorant or aware, more than likely; this war will claim their lives.
We are transported to the jungle in Burma, to White City, where human corpse swarming with flies and vultures, forms a barricade against barbwires and the stench of rotten human flesh, becomes a useful tool for navigation. One could literally see these men on the pages of this book, firing lethal weapons at one another, and getting sick from the stench oozing from thousands of dead men; aiming to take lives, yet fighting to keep theirs. Not even their amulets of protection could keep fear away from their minds, or even death from claiming whatever life it pleased, except Bloken’s.
The men are weary of the war, even their minds seem to be falling apart. Take Guntu for instance, who had begun to see the Japanese soldiers in his shadow. So strong was his hallucination, that he emptied his cartridge on a Japanese soldier who had possessed his shadow. But it is not this incidence, nor the death of Aluwong that sends ripples down the spine and leaves traces of involuntary tears in one’s eyes. It is the incidence that follows the ambush, which left everyone who had gone on that mission dead except Ali Banana, who was forced to kill the fatally injured Damisa by Damisa himself so as to avoid the brutality of the Japanese soldiers.
Ali Banana had slept in a hollow infested by leeches, he had failed to dig a trench that night and when he woke up the following morning, he was covered by the now fattened blood suckers. The natural thing to do was scrape off those leeches, but Ali Banana takes off his uniform completely, drop his backpack, indeed he freed himself of anything that would disrupt the activities of the leeches and marches on naked to the stronghold, feeding as he moves on the leeches who were equally feeding on him.
Bandele succeeds in bringing the horrors of that gruesome war to us with so much finesses, one keeps wondering if he was part of that war, if he witnessed firsthand those horrendous events. He expresses the emotions of each soldier we meet, as though at some point he became every one of them.
His choice of words, highly commendable, reveals the literacy level of the soldiers, who we get to know had little or no formal education. And at the end of this 212 pages story, one is left with a sense of incompleteness, a gnawing, that is an involuntary demand to know how it all ended; who survived, who got back home, not because we thirst for violence but because possessed by the same terror as those men, we want to see them return home and tell this story. One finds oneself saying it should be more, it should be longer, and it should have taken us to the end. The futility of war, goes without saying.
