Episode 2
A conversation with Sylva Nze, author of "Believers and Hustlers". This episode was organised by Georges Gambadatoun and host by our guest host Patrick Odimnfe.
In the second episode, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo’s Believers and Hustlers (Parrésia, 2021), which won the 2022 Chinua Achebe Prize for Literature, takes listeners into the enterprise of Pentecostalism that pervades the city. Ifedigbo calls his novel an “important Lagos story. I might not have even thought of it in that sense until the book was published, as I began to get comments from readers who said ‘this is an aspect not too many have written about, especially in fiction’.” He goes on to say, “But yet it is such an important part of our lives. Every Sunday from 8 am till evening, what we are involved in has to do with church. Young people, especially in this city, are quite religious – you can now define what that religiosity means and how it impacts their lives every other day, between that Sunday and the next Sunday.”
Ifedigbo calls into question issues of poverty and the divide in social class, where the poor and middleclass climbers are sold hope by enterprising men of God and pastors who are just milking their victims, like Lagos itself which promises the Nigerian dream. Nevertheless, the people declare their faith in phrases like “E go better” and “It is well”; that such “a declaration in faith is what the church sells.”