‘Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer.’

The ‘dead’ are important to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road in a number of ways. His narrator Azuro is ‘Abiku’; the ‘spirit’ child of Yoruba mythology, predestined to an early death and...

Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991) captures the innocent perspective of a child caught in the turmoil of Nigeria's independence. Azaro, the young protagonist, grows up in an unnamed rural village in the midst of change [presumed to be Nigeria]....