"Ibarajo Road" is set in 1984 in Nigeria and is about a person “who kills and trades children”.
The main character is Charlie. He is from a wealthy white family in Nigeria. He attends a fee-paying school that “was custom built to specifications by a company in America to ensure quality.”
One weekend his parents are away so he organises for his mates to come round for a night out to the Crocodile Bar, a place that “can get very dangerous at night”, where he hopes to pick up some girls for him and his mates. But the night goes disastrously wrong as one of his friends gets slashed with a knife. This incident leads to him being expelled from school. However “there is one option, one way to avoid expulsion. If you can convince me that you have found a worthwhile way to spend your time, something that will reflect well on the school, then you will only be excluded for the rest of the academic year.”
And so begins his voluntary work in Ilakaye Refuge Centre, a refuge for lepers, drug addicts, the homeless, the crippled, abandoned babies, the mentally disturbed, those affected by AIDS, and so on.
Charlie becomes invested in his work and along the way learns more about the relationship between Joseph Obohense, the head manager of Ilakaye, and Michael Danlami, the priest who was a lawyer, who was a charity worker and who is primarily a seller of children. Danlami will also do everything to ruin Joseph and with the right bribes “the authorities are revoking Joseph’s lease. They are demanding that Ilakaye be handed over.”
It is left to Charlie and his friends Guppy and Yejide to ensure justice is done and that the child snatcher does not prevail.
This was a very good book that tugs at the heartstrings and inspires the reader to think about what they could do for those less fortunate than them.
Publication date: 2nd August 2012
(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)
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