‘…Nigeria was created as a company to benefit its founders and shareholders in Britain. Independence extended shares to a limited number of us, but every other Nigerian was expected to work for the company…’

(p.124 of Indigene by Sefi Atta, 2025, Interlink Books)

Once upon a time, if I were to make a shortlist of my favourite writers, Sefi Atta’s name would feature prominently. Whilst not as celebrated as other Nigerian contemporaries, that’s not a reflection of her craft. The still very Eurocentric/Western world of literature only makes so much room for racialised authors.

I admired Atta’s preternatural gift for voice and characterisation, inhabiting spoilt Lagosian madams, gender-fluid Muslim hustlers in Northern Nigeria and immigrants in the Diaspora desperate to assimilate, all with the same credibility. I would devour anything Atta wrote and even fangirl-ed her at a literary event at the British Museum many moons ago. However, at some point after her third novel A Bit of Difference, I fell out of the loop. Whilst it’s not Atta’s greatest offering, it didn’t signal such a shift in quality that I should turn my back on her work. 

I recently decided to make amends by beginning with Atta’s most recent publication, 2025’s Indigene, composed of a novella and three short stories. The vignettes take place in Nigeria and amongst its Diaspora in the UK and US; all geographical locations in which Atta has lived at various periods. The titular novella resumes a few decades after Atta’s debut, Everything Good Will Come, left off. It’s 2020. Now a senior partner in her father’s law firm, Enitan is on the cusp of turning 60 as the COVID-19 pandemic rumbles imminently in the background. Enitan is a thoroughly ‘modern’ Nigerian boomer, although she would reject these generational markers, instead opting for the even more nebulous distinctions of ‘Radio’, ‘TV’ and ‘Internet’ generations – the latter apparently conflating everybody from Gen-X to Gen-Z. 

Enitan’s now 20-something Afropean daughter, Yimika divides her time between Lagos and London. She addresses her mother with an insolence that does not sound realistic for a Nigerian of any age, in any context. After divorcing the sullen Niyi, father of Yimika, Enitan refuses to tie the knot with her equally jaded and divorced significant other, Ladi – much to the disappointment of her also shacked-up elderly father. Enitan’s forays into activism are long behind her and she doesn’t appear to miss them. Her way of giving back to society is by visiting women prisoners through her initiative, Indigene; so called after those serving lengthy sentences. 

The problem is that Enitan doesn’t know if she wants to continue. With opportunists crowding the CSO market – those whom Enitan waggishly nicknames Ladies-who-Launch – and criminal law not being her domain, she wonders if she is making a difference. Indigene therefore finds Enitan seeking the counsel of anybody who will listen; family, lover, friends and ambiguous acquaintances. Amongst them is her mismatched best friend, Sheri – now a successful catering entrepreneur and winding up Nigerian feminists by tweeting favourably about her polygamous set-up. From the vantage point of the mid-2020s, the protagonists of Indigene seem blissfully naïve as the threat of a global health crisis looms. Yet the issues ailing the nation of Nigeria – the same age as Enitan – pre-exist the pandemic and will outlast it.

Indigene thus serves as a social, political and economic inventory of the country. Atta has toned down a lot of the habitual cynicism of earlier novels such as the otherwise superlative Swallow (adapted to screen for Netflix). She has more patience for Nigeria’s sizeable (culturally) Christian population. Nevertheless, there’s a bleakness to Indigene that is hard to escape. 

Enitan’s own political views are frustratingly amorphous. The fight for gender equality is unhelpfully set in opposition to that of better wealth redistribution. Enitan and her milieu dismiss self-professed Nigerian feminists as privileged chancers. ‘If they truly cared about equality for women, they should be willing to give up some of the advantages they enjoy to women who don’t’, Enitan quips without elaborating on how that would work nor proposing a fleshed-out vision of her own. 

Progressive taxation and better enforcement of said policies? A long overdue socialist revolution, Naija style? Hardly. Enitan is more critical of the online gender warriors than elites like her friend Busola, who has more affinity with her fellow wealthy grifters and/or right-wing demagogues in the West than her suffering compatriots. Enitan dismisses the indigenous socialism of her disenchanted activist friend, Grace (albeit based on an idealised version of pre-colonial Africa). ‘Every institution with a socialist bent fails the general public’. No examples are forthcoming. Oh so lightweight, oh so Kemi Badenoch. If only Nigeria had ever had bona fide socialist institutions.

There’s a begrudging realism to an ageing Enitan. Whatever inchoate resistance she had in her 20s and 30s when we first met her, has given way to middle-aged and middle class complacency. She enjoys the benefits of being the former boss’ daughter and having the means for her own child to be educated overseas.

Unlike Atta’s brilliantly heterogeneous short story collection, News from Home, her latest suffers from  class homogeny. The voices of struggling Nigerians, at ‘home’ or in the Diaspora are several times removed. The remaining stories are all from the perspective of the (relatively) comfortable. Perhaps that’s the point. 

In Unsuitable Ties, caterer Yemisi and her investment banker husband, Akin hover at the edges of a Nigerian milieu which has amassed obscene wealth through crooked means, and yet behave as if it’s their birthright. Yemisi and hubby have their reservations about the conspicuous consumption and dishonesty but are too complicit to put up a real fight. 

Atlanta-based, Grace Oladimeji is a high-flying accountant with a shopping addiction that saps her generous income (Debt). She reflects on the cultural distinctions between being Nigerian-American and from the homeland, as well as her sometimes tense relationship with her immigrant mother. The unnamed matriarch is caught between the Nigeria she claims to be well-rid off, and the economic comfort of a country in which she’s so apparently ill-at-ease that she’s addicted to prescription drugs. 

In Housekeeping, A&E doctor, Abiodun – or ‘Dr Abi’ to her non-African colleagues – is negotiating cultural differences in the US South, with all the incremental compromises she and fellow migrants from the Motherland make to mitigate their particular perceived alterity. Atta skilfully uses the loose ‘day-in-the-life’ narrative structure for some show-not-tell social commentary, such as how other racialised groups subtly engage in anti-Black racism, especially when that ‘blackness’ is less familiar.

Atta has retained her gift for conjuring a colourful cast of thousands. A well-crafted sequel is always welcome. Enitan and Sheri’s narratives were too compelling not to be revisited. Indigene is not a bad introduction to Atta’s work for the uninitiated. Yet there’s a flatness to the collection that is atypical of Atta’s earlier offerings. (I blame her years in the US, something that appears to have a dulling effect on a number of Black writers who cross the Atlantic). 

Then again, I’ve not observed her literary evolution at close quarters for a long time. I’m off to work my way back from Indigene, to find out what I’ve missed.

A slightly longer version of this review also appears on the blog I Was Just Thinking…