Description

Rape, My Beloved Country: a carefully woven tragi-comedy and quasi-didactic, allegorical satire that uses the entertaining genre of fiction to expose the contradictions and chronic conflicts in my country and among the federating ethnicities that people it.
A compelling banquet of delicately flavored juxtaposing dishes whose aroma elicits a pitiful drama of human vices which my country and my countrymen have corruptly weaponized into an explosive mixture that uses the prejudices of tribe, religion, hunger, anger, corruption, nepotism, greed, and avarice to re-energize my strong case for the ascendancy of tolerance, multi-culturalism, interfaith and inter-ethnic peace and coexistence in a transparent democracy where my people can again sing our anthem with pride.
Akpan and Aisha couldn’t have been more different than black and white; Efik and Fulani; Christian and Muslim; antagonist and a protagonist who commence their journies in fierce combat, fencing each other in an epic duel which by curtains-call sees both of them not burned down into the dungeons of defeat, but incandescent in the glow of frenzy fulfillment in a union at the nuptial altar of love.
It presents General Adbul Mohammed – the retired three-star general and powerful Chief of Staff to Mr. President; a man widely dreaded as the undisputed capo who heads the cabal that calls the shots from the Presidency and to whom everybody bows in fear and awe; a man of immense wealth who wields enormous powers and is widely reputed to be ruthlessly lethal to the same measure that he is unmatchably kind. An ardent Muslim but who in contradiction with his brother Dawo the widely revered, ultra-conservative. radicalized Islamic cleric finally defrocks himself from the toga of ethnic and religious intolerance to embrace and win a mortal combat where one brother ascends into the peace of glory while the other descends into the gully of murder and suicide.
The Author chronicles his story which embroils you in the contradictions of the divisive chasms of religion and ethnicities while escorting you from the minarets of Mecca’s al-Masjid al-Haram Great Mosue to Southmpton’s medieval St. Michael’s Cathedral with its 11th Centure Norman-era relics, and from the golden domes of Abuja Central Mosque to a leisure mid-morning walk down the canal to behold Coventry’s Great Cathedral in its magnificent grandeur.
He juxtaposes an entertaining story of love and passion, romance and beauty in a land where both his country and countrymen are deeply sated in corruption, insecurity, and intolerance in depraved democracy of rigged elections and stolen ballot boxes. A land where both the leaders and the led stand falsely erect with impunity and indignity as they violate the virginity of our silent trust, rupture the fragile hymen of our treasury, and with crime and corruption rape the groaning lands of our beloved country. A land plagued by a pillorying political class “a pliant judiciary which protects the criminal and enshrines the crime, while the huge corpse of a country with milling maggots preying endlessly on its wretched hulk fester the decomposition of our common soul” as they rape my beloved country.
But undeterred, unrelated, and with optimism, his story speaks in the silent thunder of hope for a new order, where many will again proudly sing our pledge and no longer mistake our anthem for a dirge and applaud with pride and patriotism when our flag is raised.
Michal U. Iloeje is primarily a scientist by training and practice and he holds a distinguished Chair of Emeritus Professor of Animal Genetics at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria. In addition, he is an Artist and Poet and a renowned author of several books as listed in the beginning pages of this book. He is married, has five children, and five grandchildren, and lives in Enugu, Nigeria.

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