TwoCents | Evil Comes Partly by Chance

I recently read I Do Not Come to You by Chance, a novel by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, and I was particularly captivated by the tragic hero's journey. The story is set in Southeastern Nigeria, focusing on the lives of a modest family. Most specifically, it is Kingsley’s story. The dysfunction of Nigerian society never leaves the spotlight in this book—it shares the stage with the main character and the other individuals constructed within. The poverty, poor health care facilities, and limited employment opportunities despite formal education shape all the characters in different ways. The prologue begins by exalting Western formal education—how it saved Kingsley's father, Paulinus. He rescues Augustina with promises of university education and marriage. Ironically, while Paulinus upholds education as a virtue, its reputation declines throughout the book, paralleling Kingsley’s own descent into moral ambiguity. Kingsley begins as a hero; the story is recounted in his words. Kingsley Ibe is, by all accounts, a diligent, brilliant young man. His creed is built around his belief in education and his love for his long-time girlfriend, Ola. In the opening chapters, he tells us how he is struggling to get his dream engineering job; he naively recounts how Ola has recently become hostile. According to his father, a good education and the dream engineering job was the path to a respectable life, away from selling pepper in the Nkwoegwu market. The hero doesn’t put much stock in religion either—he scorns the dubious churches even as he struggles. As soon as he got the job, he believed, all would be well. His resolve is tested when his father falls fatally ill. Paulinus is cleared to return home from a prolonged hospital stay following a stroke and coma; unfortunately, after significant investment from Kingsley’s maternal uncle Boniface—a popular fraudster known as Cash Daddy—he dies. Here the hero’s story begins. Like many young boys, the protagonist identifies strongly with his father. For many boys, the death of a father is a significant moment in defining their values and sense of self. Although Kingsley appears fully formed and set in his moral virtues, he falters and shifts as soon as his father dies. After initially parroting his father’s words concerning education and even storming out of his uncle’s house at the offer of a seat at his fraudulent side, there is a significant moment where his psychology is irreversibly changed. It is important to note that immediately after Boniface tells Kingsley to drop his job search and start with fraud, the next chapter opens with his father’s death. That night before his passing, Kingsley dreams of his father asking him: “Kingsley, do you want to be useful in this world? Do you want to make me and your mummy proud? Do you want people to know you and respect you wherever you go?” Again, the emphasis from Kingsley’s father is on the status this straight and narrow path, through education to engineering practice, can confer on him. His father detested Cash Daddy, but symbolically it is Cash Daddy who steps in to take care of his medical bills and then assumes the role of father figure in Kingsley’s life as soon as he dies. Boniface represents the extreme end of corruption—a benchmark of how depraved one can become in the world of 419 fraud. Because Cash Daddy is present, we can empathize with Kingsley for good portions of the book—we can imagine there is hope for his soul because, at least, he is not Boniface. His uncle is a well-accomplished thief mentoring other thieves; even as he does so, he sees no wrongdoing in his actions—he never has. The protagonist, on the other hand, experiences friction at many turns; he thinks of those he is defrauding, considering when "too far" is "far enough," but as the story progresses, he eventually adopts his new father’s justifications among others. His family needs the money, he says; it will get him Ola back, he thinks. All through the book, we walk slowly with Opara Kingsley to the death of his morality. By the time Boniface dies, he has taken his fraudulence to new heights—even fooling his family (his mother in particular) about the legitimacy of his business. As mentioned earlier, the dysfunction of the country he lives in is continuously apparent. It is by chance that we arrive at the families we do and form the basic ideologies we then test in life; the environment we have to test them in is another layer of chance we have no control over. The hero-turned-villain starts on the path his father envisioned in a more functional Nigeria—earning good grades, applying for jobs, and initially refusing fraud. But ultimately, it is chance and circumstance that challenge his morals profoundly. His father is terminally ill, his country has failed him, the woman he loves has left him because he is poor; he wonders how his family will get by, and so he acquiesces, taking the slow descent into villainy.

Other insights from Joshua Omoijiade