A book review of ‘Rogues of the East’ by Ebri Kowaki - How Ikenna Okeh has cleared a new pathway for Nigerian crime fiction. Daring and imaginative Nigerian novelists have published crime novels every other year since 2010. Like dynamite going off underwater, it is creating a great splash. And that splash is what this review analyses.
Ikenna Okeh
Poem from 'A Harvest Of Verses'
If you are yet sprightly, But with fear saddled upon your heart; Bearing weightily on your self-will And encumbering your every step, Then stand before a mirror and look closely You will find that thou art no youth.
Poem by Ikenna Okeh
In all of the universes
And in Time’s lengthy verses
It’s told in more times than once
That help waits upon those ones,
Whose hearts are set upon noble causes;
Through such does Light direct its courses:
To cast life-giving rays to every end,
That hearts and minds may not fail to no end.
But as for those spirits lifted unto vanity,
Who have so lost the essence of their humanity,
To this lot is Salvation’s way lost
An epic African story of adventure told in narrative verse
This is a saga of an African tribe who lived a long time ago; a very long time before the coming of the first Europeans to their part of the world. It is a narrative verse which finely blends the elements of prose and poetry to tell a story that takes the reader over distant lands, to bear witness to the exploits of a people whom the reader would never otherwise get to see.