Narrative,time,and the archive in an African Second World War memoir: Isaac Fadoyebo’s A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck

Abstract

This article will argue that Isaac Fadoyebo’s memoir A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck deserves recognition as a work of life-writing and a unique literary account of an African soldier’s military service in Nigeria, Sierra Lone, India, and Burma. While previous discussions of Fadoyebo’s memoir have approached it either as historical source material or as a documentary proof of an otherwise lost history, this article will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s text must also be understood, in its own right, as a complex narrative. Critically, it will show how privileging historical experience in Fadoyebo’s text can marginalize its other qualities. In particular, it will draw attention to the spiritual, mystical, and philosophical dimensions of the memoir, and the discursive subjectivity associated with it. It will argue that this more abstract material is pivotal to our understanding of historical experience in the memoir. In doing so, it will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s memoir actively situates and archives experience by writing, both helping the reader to interpret this experience, and by allowing the reader to invest affectively in it.

This article urges us to draw on archival texts in order to augment the colonial library (see Desai, 2001; Mbembe 2002; Stoler 2009). It will consider the rare example of an African Second World War memoir, A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck (1999), written by the Nigerian soldier Isaac Fadoyebo. Fadoyebo’s detailed and engaging text has largely escaped critical attention. This is regrettable, as it offers a highly readable account of an African soldier’s travels in Asia and his remarkable time spent hidden behind enemy lines in the Burmese jungle. Fadoyebo’s memoir balances the detailed description of his military service, with more speculative and abstract discourse. This latter quality of his text has often been ignored, and its exteriority has instead been privileged as historical evidence. This article will focus on the more neglected aspect of his memoir, which is spiritual, speculative, and philosophical. It will suggest that this more subjective dimension of the memoir represents a valuable imaginative product in its own right, as a “dream[ed] collectivit[y] and form of participation in History” that appeals to the reader in the present (Dinshaw et al., 2007) and as a way of persuading the reader to affectively invest in the more factual, exterior experience contained elsewhere within its pages (see also Nealon, 2001; Muñoz 2009).

Our reading of Fadoyebo’s memoir connects to a rethinking of archivality more generally (see Newell, 2006; Barber, 2006). His narrative reflects a self-conscious and deliberate effort to preserve and disseminate its account of the past. Fadoyebo undertakes the work of archiving his experience both by writing his memoir, and by aiding its dissemination through a narrative style that privileges clarity and accessibility. The narrator positions his reader very clearly; he glosses and interprets the context of his home-life and military service that we, as (implicitly non-Yoruba, civilian) readers, might not understand. He repeatedly situates his personal experience within a broader historical narrative of the war. Above all, there is a distinct fashioning of “experience” within his memoir.

We will examine two of these strategies in more detail: first, we will address the way in which the narrator recommends his experience as exceptional, and elaborates himself as exceptional. Second, we will assess the subjective discourse that the narrator uses to mediate the “experience” relayed throughout the memoir. Both narrative strategies work to position a reader who is both aware of the exceptionality of the experience being conveyed (and needs help to situate it as historical), and to bind the reader in an intimate relationship with the subjective world of the narrator, one defined by retrospection. “Experience” as used within this article indicates verifiable “historical experience” (referring to those physical events and activities that are treated as historical evidence of factors exterior to the subject, such as military service, conflict), and this will be opposed to the subjective experience (referring particularly to the affective impact of the discursive and often spiritual or philosophical passages within the memoir). Although the subjective or affective burdens of the text do represent a very real form of experience for the reader, as they do in much war writing, they have not been privileged in considerations of the veracity or utility of the “experience” contained within the memoir (Barkhof and Smith, 2014; Bugeja, 2012; Nealon, 2001).

Writing A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck: From letters, to narrative and documentary

How Fadoyebo wrote his memoir, and what he has to say about writing, are essential contexts to any reading of the text. Most important among these is the fact that his memoir was constructed in several stages. Although it narrates events that took place in the 1940s, A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck was written between the 1960s and the late 1980s. As soon as Fadoyebo returned to Africa he “resolved to put into writing [his] experiences in the battlefield” (1999: 3) ¹ and he had already had much experience of telling his tale to “the British navy boys”, who Fadoyebo informs us, “would gather round me to listen to the story of my ordeal in the jungle”, which they found “exciting” (53). “In no time,” Phillips later imagines the scene, “officers and men were crowding around Isaac’s bedside and begging him to relate his adventure once more. He didn’t need too much persuasion” (2014: 159). Phillips, who had interviewed Fadoyebo several times himself in the twenty-first century, observed that while narrating his tale, Fadoyebo “was the centre of attention, and he loved it” (2014: 159). It was only on the prompting of a colleague at the Department of Labour, where he then worked, that Fadoyebo collaborated with the British historian Michael Crowder and received advice on how to commit his memories down on paper (2014: 220). Despite this industrious start, various personal circumstances meant that the project existed only as a rough draft for many years, until Fadoyebo was inspired to finish his memoir after hearing a BBC World Service feature about African soldiers in the Second World War.

Published in 1999 by Wisconsin University Press, Fadoyebo’s memoir was, from the outset, presented as an historical “source”, rather than as a literary text. This confirms other stages of the text’s genesis, including historian Crowder’s original involvement in planning the project, and Fadoyebo’s intentions for his work expressed in the Preface to the printed edition confirm this “documentary” focus. The memoir was intended to relay a body of concrete historical experience as accurately as possible. “The contents of the book”, Fadoyebo writes,

are purely documentary. They are a photographic picture of what actually happened and not a mere attempt to re-convey the scene of what took place several years ago [...]. Apart from dates there is no doubt that I have given a graphic account of the various phases of the story. (3)

This imperative to archive shaped both the planning and the writing of Fadoyebo’s memoir, which was primarily concerned with documenting the historical experience of his military service. It has since been shared by his readers and has led to a book and documentary film about Fadoyebo’s life. (Phillips, 2012, 2014). In the film, produced for Al Jazeera in 2012, journalist Barnaby Phillips returns to Lagos and interviews Fadoyebo, before journeying to Burma. The book tells the full story of this quest, and Phillips’ reunion with the grandchildren of Shuyliman (the Burmese farmer who sheltered Fadoyebo), as well as his research into David Kargbo’s life in Sierra Leone and his presence at Fadoyebo’s funeral.

But Fadoyebo’s memoir is far more than “a photographic picture” (on the distinction between memoir and autobiography, see Smith and Watson, 2010: 274; Couser, 2012: 9; 23). In Phillips’ book the memoir is referred to as “understated”, “slightly dated in its language” (2014: 221) and Fadoyebo’s writing style itself is seen as “rather stiff and formal” (2014: 170), while the subjective passages such as the conclusion are understood as “idiosyncratic musings” (2014: 221). This risks giving the impression that the memoir is somehow an obstacle that distracts readers from a compelling story. The linguistic specificity of memoirs is integral to their meaning, as Alexander and McGregor have demonstrated in the case of Zimbabwean guerrilla writing. These works, though written in the 1970s, demonstrate “high diction”, a register comparable to Fadoyebo’s style, which “drew on abstractions, late romantic idiom and a vague spiritualism” (Alexander and McGregor, 2004: 81). “High diction” is a term originally used to describe a variety of British First World War writing, itself heavily influenced by the work of George Alfred Henry, Robert Bridges, William Morris, and Tennyson. This work displays an array of earlier textual influences, with Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress being particularly prominent (Fussell, 2013: 22–3). Its usage has never been systematically researched, although it has been linked to the degree to which African literacy was often reliant upon missionary education. Fadoyebo was exceptional when he enlisted into the army, because unlike most soldiers he was literate and had completed primary education (Hamilton, 2001: 328). “Vague spiritualism” plays a key role in Fadoyebo’s memoir, far beyond mere “idiosyncrasy” and is, in fact, a central quality of the narrative. We will see that such moments of spiritual reflection and philosophizing play a key role in making historical experience accessible to the reader, and thus lending it veracity.

Autobiography, war writing, and the archive in colonial literatures

Life-writing’s deployment of “experience” relies upon narrative and, in particular, how the narrative positions the reader. Before turning to colonial autobiography and African soldiers’ stories as examples, we will review the way in which life-writing constructs experience. This “construction” of experience, does not demonstrate whether that experience is “true” or otherwise, rather it identifies the role of the narrator as a purveyor of experience. The “experience” narrated in autobiography is intricately related to our perception of the narrator and therefore to the success of her/his narrative. This “construct[ion of] a place from which to speak” is a persistent quality of autobiographical writing (Anderson, 2011: 108). Whether “true” or false, “experience” has to be discursively maintained, it needs to repeatedly remake itself as credible or true for the reader (Scott, 1992: 24). “The project of making experience visible” (1992: 25) is therefore a central undertaking of all life-writing.

In colonial literature autobiographical writing is often understood as resolutely public and linked to the ideological projects of nationalists such Nkrumah, Azikiwe, Nehru, and Gandhi (Young, 2001: 227). The political power of such work emerges from the fact that, as Said argues (1993: 215), it had the potential to rewrite history and form “a counterpoint to the Western powers’ ‘monumental histories’”. For Said, these writings form one of the “three great topics [to] emerge in decolonizing cultural resistance”. More recent studies have greatly complicated this understanding of how autobiographical writing functioned in late-colonialism. They propose a more reflexive understanding of how colonial subjects constituted themselves in their autobiographical writings. Javed Majeed (2007: 3), for instance, argues that autobiographical writing is primarily concerned with constructing the self as these texts are “less [...] retrospective accounts of [...] lives, and more [...] projects of selfhood. Philip Holden (2008: 17) has argued that political autobiography forms a crucible for “the formation of postcolonial social imaginaries”. In the case of the nationalist elites he has studied, he argues that these writings not only relay lived experience but also construct and refine national projects (2008: 13).

Colonial literature has yet to engage directly with the war memoir, despite the resurgence of this genre in postcolonial mass-marketed literature, often written in diaspora and aimed at Western readers (Harari, 2004, 2007; Haynes, 1997; Vernon, 2005). Child soldier narratives have reached a global audience, although have still to attract a developed body of criticism. In their global reach, they are in some ways comparable to the Iraqi bloggers, who, Whitlock argues, were central to public understandings of the second Gulf War: “Autobiography [...] circulates as a ‘soft weapon’ and war memoirs do the work of personalizing apparently remote conflicts in the minds of Western readerships, while representing subjectivities that are otherwise ‘unseen and unheard’” (Whitlock, 2007: 3). As ever, questions of narrative and credibility are central because these memoirs “refer [...] to lived experience; it professes subjective truths; and above all it signals to the reader an intended fidelity to history and memory” (2007:12). These texts not only engage, but also actively situate their reader, and make this narrative strategy indispensable in their profession of truth.

Emerging criticism on the writings of former child soldiers has identified readers’ “empathetic investment” as a key demand of these texts, which often serve to locate the reader as a witness to an otherwise apparently lost body of experience. The two best-known examples of this genre in the West are Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (2007) and Emmanuel Jal’s War Child (2009). Mackey has shown how these narratives, despite purporting to represent the “voiceless”, nevertheless continuously work to situate a Western reader conversant with the discourse of international human rights (2013: 99). This positing of a privileged and international readership is not always intended to flatter and the narrators often berate the Western reader for their relative privilege (2013: 90–100). This “troubled relationship between the spaces where child soldiers are being used and those where narratives about them are being consumed”, is thus foregrounded by emphasizing the role of the reader as a witness to the atrocities being described. The role of the narrator as a participant in conflict is often central to the authority of the experience conveyed in such narratives, and the ethical engagement with the reader performed within the text (Ndibe and Hove, 2009: 12).

Returning to colonial African literature, we find a proliferation of personal narratives, most being more familiar to historians than to literary critics. Many of these were diaries and letters circulated among friends or within families and kept in a proverbial “tin trunk” at the foot of the bed, lending them the moniker “tin trunk literature” (Barber, 2007; Miescher, 2006; Watson, 2006). Another form of life-writing consists of the rare public narratives forged in relation to both World Wars (Killingray, 2010, 2011). One of these (there are very few) was John G. Mullen’s narrative of his service in Cameroon during the First World War, analysed by Stephanie Newell (2008; see Mullen, 2008). Serialized in 1916 in the Gold Coast Leader, Mullen used multiple instalments to advance his narrative. His tale of how his work at a British-owned trading station in Mbua in the German Cameroons led him to be imprisoned by Germans, and his subsequent escape attempt on foot provides a unique insight into African participation in the First World War. Despite major differences in chronology, themes, and narrative structure, Mullen’s narrative presents some points of comparison with Fadoyebo’s. Mullen enlisted because his professional advancement was blocked at home and he went abroad despite warnings that “a penny at home is worth more than a thousand abroad” (Newell, 2009: 3). Once he arrived in Cameroon, Mullen was suddenly “vulnerable and isolated” and thrown into an ambiguous relationship with the hierarchies of race, class, and capital that structured colonial life. He does not readily fit in with the Cameroonian “natives”, but neither does he feel close affinities to the British traders. Like Fadoyebo, Mullen deliberately chose to make his story public. Both Mullen and Fadoyebo therefore differ from the “tin trunk literature” of “semipublic” diaries and letters (Newell, 2009: 5). Newell’s argument that Mullen’s work constitutes a separate genre and “seems to operate outside the discussions of politics and identity generated by elite Africans” is certainly true of Fadoyebo’s memoir, although with the caveat that Fadoyebo had secured the support of an astonishing array of prominent figures and institutions, such as Enahoro, Crowder, Killingray, Phillips, and the Al Jazeera news agency, to help disseminate his story.

An extraordinary story: Fadoyebo’s narrative in context

The Second World War is central to Fadoyebo’s story, but the theatre of the war in which he fought has largely been forgotten today. For this reason, we must refresh our awareness of its outline and make a general overview of Fadoyebo’s narrative that will contrast with the closer discussion of selected passages later on. We will consider the major elements of Fadoyebo’s memoir, including his description of his enlistment, home-life, and how he perceived the British Empire and his role within it. This will contrast with our later focus on the function of the narrative voice in the memoir.

Fadoyebo served in the Second World War as one of over 100,000 Nigerians who enlisted into the British Army. Alongside him, some 23,000 West Africans served in the 81st (WA) Division in Burma, representing “the largest concentration of African troops ever assembled” (Morrow, 2010: 19). From January and December 1944, 81st and 82nd (WA) Divisions fought the Japanese in the narrow and jungle-covered ravines of Burma, successfully capturing the city of Myohaung, ancient capital of the Arakan (Hamilton, 2001: 260; Morrow, 2010: 21). Despite their distinguished record in combat, the Africans of 81st Division were never acknowledged in official histories of the war and got a “raw deal”, with most soldiers returning home to unemployment as government promises of resettlement and support failed to materialize (Hamilton, 2001: 347; Olusanya, 1973: 98; Ubah, 1998: 343).

Not finding a teaching post at a local school, Fadoyebo reveals that he “simply saw military service as a good job”:

Without consulting my parents and other relations and caring less about the consequences I took a plunge into the unknown by getting myself enlisted in the army at Abeokuta in January 1942 at the age of sixteen. (17)

His matter of fact prose contrasts with the dramatic nature of his war service, as revealed to the reader in the first pages of his narrative. Fadoyebo chose the army when other options were blocked and he became resolved that he “was not going to sit down at Emure-Ile and rot away”. All of this is made more poignant as Fadoyebo reveals, with the benefit of hindsight, that he “could have secured a teaching job if [he] had waited a little longer” (17).

Home is a place of mixed emotions in Fadoyebo’s narrative; it is a place of comfortable security, but also of boredom. This becomes apparent not only in Fadoyebo’s dramatic return home, which we will consider later, but also in his observations about his father who was the Anglican Scribe at Emure-Ile until his death in 1947. The father’s rooted existence meant that “after a few years stay at home he could no longer see beyond the Emure-Ile horizon” (17). His father’s great gift, by contrast, was to bestow on his son the opportunity of education, and this led to the broadening of Fadoyebo’s mind:

For example, in Owo town, there were poor and stark illiterate fathers and even mothers at that time who struggled to send their children to secondary schools in Lagos, Benin-City, Ilesha, Ondo, and so on. (17)

While he is keen to flee the narrow horizons of the village, he respected the sacrifice of those parents who saved what little money they had in order to provide their children with an education.

In his memoir, Fadoyebo offers only isolated reflections on the working of the British Empire and his role within it, although he has since made more extensive statements about this in interviews. To refer to the memoir, we have already seen how Fadoyebo enlisted because he “simply saw military service as a good job” (17). He remains detached from the transnational world of Empire and chooses instead to relate his early career as a civil servant in the Labour Department. The sections of his memoir relaying his military training and the voyage to India provide ample details of the racial divisions present in the colonial military. African soldiers are barred from contact with white commissioned officers, treated with contempt by sergeant majors, made to wear uncomfortable shorts and to use separate washing facilities on board ship (27–31; see also Haywood and Clarke, 1964: 373). Soldiers did not always accept this treatment and Fadoyebo reveals that the discriminatory uniform policy “was one of the things we complained about when we were told to keep our mouths shut otherwise we might find ourselves in a situation we did not expect” (27–8).

Although politically disengaged, Fadoyebo observes the fury of nationalist firebrand and fellow Owo resident Anthony Enahoro and notes that “one could understand what led to his furious anger” (58). Enahoro was so angry because he saw first-hand how Fadoyebo was now injured for life, thanks to his military service and was receiving little help from the British. Although unproven, it is a fascinating possibility that his conversation with the disabled Fadoyebo inspired Enahoro to write his trenchant editorial in the pro-nationalist West African Pilot criticizing the government for letting down ex-servicemen (see Phillips, 2014: 176; Miners, 1971: 32). Despite his sympathy toward Enahoro and his lack of support for the British Empire, Fadoyebo took little interest in politics and was able to enjoy close personal friendships across racial boundaries. Only later in life did Fadoyebo become more politically engaged, as he found himself languishing away the 1980s on a fixed pension following his retirement at the start of the decade (this is not described in his memoir; see Phillips, 2014: 209). Fadoyebo’s invocation of the United Nations as a mediating force in the world in the conclusion of his memoir suggests that his military service led him to value an internationalism more suggestive of the postcolonial (or decolonizing) world, than its colonial predecessor (64–6).

A further context to Fadoyebo’s writing is his overriding sense of his own “luck” in avoiding death, and the role of divine grace in his life more generally. He is grateful to God for his survival, and this is particularly apparent in his account at two points: in his account of how he sustained serious injuries at the Battle of Nyron, and later his luck in finding the family in Burma to provide shelter and support. This gratitude for divine grace is poignantly relayed in Fadoyebo’s observation that “as a young and healthy man I felt I possessed such a remarkable agility that I could run to safety in the event of an attack” (6). These illusions are shattered by injury: “it occurred to me that I was in serious trouble and on the threshold of [a long] agony” (8). Despite being severely wounded, Fadoyebo admits that his survival was itself exceptional: “I would have thought”, he explains, “that I had developed supernatural powers […] It had only pleased God that the bullets should miss their target” (8). This conviction is also present in the passages where Fadoyebo describes how he survived in the jungle after his injuries and is subsequently rescued by Shuyiman’s family. He reminds the reader that “I would like to give prominence to and draw attention to the fact that every attempt made by the enemy to have us liquidated had always been aborted through the inscrutable design of Providence” (44).

Much of the literary interest of Fadoyebo’s memoir arises from those moments when it transgresses our expectations that historical experience be bound to some degree of externality, and that this should underwrite “photographic record” of experience. To put this differently, its narrative complexity is particularly apparent in the most avowedly subjective sections of the memoir, and it is to these that we will now turn.

Archiving and narrating exceptional experience

The narrator continually reminds us that the experience he recounts is rare and traumatic; he himself is marked by exceptionality because he has survived these events. That he “live[d] to tell the tale” is as much a part of the exceptionality of Fadoyebo’s narrative as the compelling events he narrates. This exceptionality is crucial to establishing the bond between the narrator and the reader, and to positioning the reader as a recipient or archivist of historical experience. It is enforced at many points throughout the narrative (particularly during hiding and upon Fadoyebo’s return home).

Before considering how Fadoyebo’s exceptional and tenacious grasp of life transfuses his tale, we must briefly examine the more mundane ways in which Fadoyebo vouches for the exceptionality of his narrative, situates it in context, and also states his own exceptionality. The intention to transmit his experience to a general readership is made explicit in his admission that his writing was aimed at two groups in particular: his family (“my own children and their own children and indeed subsequent generations”) and the “general public, particularly those who had no idea about warfare”, because his memoir would allow them to “share in the excitement” (3).

From the very start, the narrator has established that his is a narrative both of filiation and of publication. This is therefore not only a project attempting to archive experience on behalf of the (public) reader, who also serves as a guardian of historical experience, but it is also an exercise in controlling the interpretation of future generations (see Derrida, 1996: 33–4). We will consider the public reader of Fadoyebo’s memoir, because it is in this frame that we read the published manuscript of Fadoyebo’s memoir. We should note that in Africa and in Europe until recently, understandings of what we might term “the archive” or of a repository of historical experience, have been inextricably bound to Fadoyebo’s other imperative of “transgenerational memory”, and with attempts to defend the authority of parents over their children, enforcing “the discourse of the patriarch”, which the reader is left to confront and interiorize (30; 35; 61).

One of the defining features of Fadoyebo’s claim to exceptionality is his humility. As we have seen, those who have interviewed Fadoyebo observed that he enjoyed telling his stories: “he was the centre of attention, and he loved it”. Apparent also was the fact that “he looked back on his survival with a sense of wonder” (Phillips, 2014: 159; 225). But to focus on the memoir itself, we can see that humility is established precisely as a quality that makes the narrator’s adventures and survival all the more exceptional. This is particularly apparent in Fadoyebo’s open claims about the uniqueness of his life, which he attributes both to humility and to luck. He has remained: faithful to my humble origin. My life style is unique as some of my habits can almost be termed monastic. (6)

When Fadoyebo has just received his life-changing wound he hears “several shots” which:

rang out again [striking] nearly all the grass around me. They all missed me miraculously. I really heard the sounds of bullets flying or whistling past my head almost uprooting the shrubs around the spot I laid my head. The situation was indescribable. The bullets would seem to be bouncing off my body particularly my head. I would have thought that I had developed supernatural powers were it not that two bullets had already been lodged in my body. It had only pleased God that the bullets should miss their target. (8)

In these lines, the narrator’s humility becomes a vehicle of his exceptionality. He does not wish to be exceptional — after all, he is an ordinary man — but God has decided otherwise. God’s protective power enables Fadoyebo to survive close combat in a way that could only otherwise be explained by “supernatural powers”. This explanation is proffered conditionally in “I would have thought” but is then immediately limited both by the admission that he has already been shot, and by the location of any supernatural agency in God.

Fadoyebo does not argue that he is the luckiest man in battle, for he has not escaped unscathed and his wounds have humbled him and ended his expectations of youth and health. He admits that “I was wrong in the estimation of my prowess” (6). But once he has been brought low by his wounds, he begins to accrue exceptional experience. His friends Sergeant Lamina, Sergeant Major Archibong Bassey Duke, Oyediran, and Moigboi Jagha all are “in a position similar to mine”, but they all die. Unlike these men “David Kargbo and I survived the ordeal through the inscrutable design of providence — a stroke of unbelievable luck” (10). As we shall see later, David Kargbo shared Fadoyebo’s “unbelievable luck” in surviving the battle, but his relationship with the narrative voice is complex and very much unequal; Kargbo is never allowed to have a complex subjective life of his own within Fadoyebo’s text. Only the narrator can be “exceptional” on this level.

This personal exceptionality of Fadoyebo is very powerful and becomes particularly evident on his return home from Burma. At this point, we are encouraged to share in the spectacle of what appears to be a dead man returned to life. On the morning after his return, he joins his father for “his usual morning prayers”:

[Fadoyebo’s father] was a devout Christian and a foundation member of the Anglican Church Enure Ile. After the prayers, he announced that it was that morning that he actually realised that I had in fact arrived. He thought he was dreaming the previous day. After a few days there was calm and we started to exchange stories. The point that struck me most was the exactness with which the various soothsayers or fortune-tellers who were consulted described what I passed through and the incidents that happened when I was in the jungle hiding away from the enemy. My people particularly my maternal grandmother were going from one place to the other consulting one oracle [from][…] Emure Ile and beyond. The fortune-tellers were unanimous in their view that I was still living. Some of them misinformed my people that I was once threatened with a dagger and that there was a time when my only possession was a pair of shorts. (61)

This passage provides an insight into the way exceptionality accrues around the narrator. At first his father “thought he was dreaming”. Fadoyebo emphasizes his family’s shock and indulges in the fortuitous chance of his return. Initially, he remains in an unreal and phantasmic realm, his return is seen as something more likely to happen in a dream than in reality. It takes a few days for things to settle down and for there to be “calm”.

It is worth quoting this episode at length, because of the discursive precision with which Fadoyebo locates his own exceptionality (and it is also worth noting that in Phillips’ biographical study, this moment resurfaces as he witnesses the second (real) burial of Fadoyebo):

as soon as I was sighted the whole village rocked. Some people could not believe their eyes while others were frightened away to avoid seeing a dead person. It was as if a dead man was back to life — resurrection of a sort. I had difficulty in wading through the multitude before I could finally get to the door of our house […] I had to stay out standing with my back to the wall as more and more [people] poured in to catch a glimpse of a man who had just been back from “heaven” […] The belief of our people was that anybody who reappeared alive after his death had been mourned should have his body sprayed with dust — a sort of ritual. (60)

These reactions enforce Fadoyebo’s exceptionality. We soon learn that although most villagers assumed he was dead, “fortune-tellers” and some elders insisted upon his survival. The narrator allows these competing understandings to briefly surface in his text. “The point that struck me most” (61) consolidates the possibilities of the multiple “stories” exchanged. Fadoyebo is making his selection from the discussion, imprinting his own needs and those of his narrative onto the tales being told. “To catch a glimpse” (60) allows us to see Fadoyebo’s return though the eyes of those who believed him to be dead. Like his survival at the Battle of Nyron, we are invited to view Fadoyebo’s life as providential, and almost uncanny. “It was as if a dead man was back to life — resurrection of a sort” (60) captures this fascinating, yet fearful, potential of this vision in as understated a manner as possible. “A sort” marks both the mortuary ritual of spraying the undead man’s body, and his resurrection. It extends possibility, without committing to it and the inverted commas of “heaven” similarly enhance the exceptionality of the experience Fadoyebo possesses. We are allowed to believe in the narrator’s resurrection, his return from the beyond and the “heaven” of sorts that constituted experience in Asia. It exceeds the terms of the physical and historical experience that Fadoyebo described in his narrative, and it carries such affective power that the moment has even resurfaced in subsequent reportage and biography (see Phillips, 2014: 280–1).

Looking back from the future

Fadoyebo’s engagement with his reader has stressed the exceptionality of his experience, and suggested that as a narrator, he is “unique” because of his luck and good fortune. But this bond between narrator and reader, so crucial in establishing the credibility and significance of the experience being described, is itself maintained by passages in the text describing Fadoyebo’s subjective world. At these points Fadoyebo breaks from his descriptive narrative and interprets events with the benefit of hindsight, finally turning to events still firmly in the future (such as the afterlife). Whereas many of the events in the narrative are chronologically and culturally remote, at these moments of retrospection we are invited to directly share in Fadoyebo’s subjective vision. We do this on relatively equal terms, without the weight of historical experience. This type of imaginative evaluation of experience parallels what Irele, in reading postcolonial novelist Kofi Awoonor, terms “reflective prose”, which concerns “individual fate and consciousness amidst the pressures of [social or historical] experience” (2001: 215–17).

Time is therefore complex in Fadoyebo’s narrative. Not only does his memoir deliberately use digression to explain biographical and historical information to the reader, but it also moves between relaying experience in the 1940s and evaluating this experience in the present. The retrospection is so important because it implicates the reader affectively within otherwise remote experience. Because we connect with Fadoyebo in the (shared) present and even in the future (in heaven), we do not need to entirely understand the whole context of the more remote experience in the 1940s.

This body of anterior experience (which is shared between reader and writer) inhabits the passages set in the 1940s. We have already seen how Fadoyebo glosses his return home and explains the perceptions of the villagers. This is still more apparent in the passages describing his ordeal in the jungle; here a psychological and interior world flourishes against the backdrop of intense fear and boredom, while Fadoyebo and Kargbo languish in their hideout. Although both men are sharing the experience of hiding, and speak to each other on a daily basis, Fadoyebo’s prose continually reaches beyond the specifics of his physical situation and looks forward into a providential and imaginative space. This space is kept remote from Kargbo, but is readily available to the reader. We are encouraged to share the narrator’s interior world and thus further enforce a bond of trust, first established in Fadoyebo’s early promises of veracity and uniqueness. “We had to accept the situation as it was”, writes Fadoyebo:

we slept at night, woke up in the morning […]. It got to a stage at which I felt I was directly communicating with God my Maker. He seemed to have assured me that our lives were no more in danger and that we would eventually survive the ordeal. From that moment onwards, I imagined that God Himself had strengthened my faith in Him and that “all will be well.” I revealed to my comrade what I thought I heard during sleep or in a trance like state. He thought I was not serious or that I had judged the situation wrongly. He further remarked that my assessment of what I thought I heard was based more on hope than reality. We later joked and laughed over it. (43)

Fadoyebo’s language here directly privileges the interior and veers away from the external experience he has accumulated throughout the text. “We slept”, thus gives way to “I felt”, “He seemed”, “I imagined”, and “I revealed”. The account is propelled forward by revelations concerning the narrator’s interior state. Even as Fadoyebo’s belief in the future is framed as interior and speculative, the proleptic reach of the narrator enforces this with “we later joked” and reminds us that everything would turn out well in the end.

“A few days after my imaginary communion with God”, writes Fadoyebo, reflecting further on his time spent in the jungle with David Kargbo:

[Kargbo] woke me up one afternoon and informed me that he saw two Japanese soldiers with rifles at alert position filing past the back of our hut […] He looked worried and visibly shaken. His eye balls turned red as death stared us in the face once more. At first I thought he was having his own visionary ideas regarding our fate. I felt he was not sure of what he thought he saw […] I kept cool and completely unruffled as I began to feel the presence of the Good Lord. (43)

Even as these lines admit that Kargbo has his own complex interiority, they strictly separate it from the intimate subjective access we have been granted to the narrator. Fadoyebo’s own meditations, which he describes as “visionary” or “imaginary”, generate calm amidst the explosive tension of the men’s situation: “I kept cool and completely unruffled as I began to feel the presence of the Good Lord”. Undisclosed to Kargbo, Fadoyebo’s interior world is instead shared with the reader. While Kargbo is “red” and “shaken”, Fadoyebo remains “cool” and “unruffled”; he has begun “to feel the presence of the Good Lord” and this restates the faith in the future shared by narrator and reader. This nullifies the threat of loss and the possibility that, as Fadoyebo expresses, “my bones would probably be lying in a rice field” (23). His experience will not die, but will continue into the future to be articulated and shared with the reader.

The outstanding example of the narrator’s fashioning of a bond with his reader comes in his concluding “Views Regarding War and Its Atrocities”. We have by now become accustomed to the humble, yet unique narrator who trades in exceptional experience. We are all the more receptive to this because it is framed with a frankness and directness that relies as much upon the present, as it does on events in the 1940s. Although not a material or social process, this narrative accommodation of the reader, surely constitutes a form of what Barber terms “addressivity” (2007: 202). In these concluding lines, which Fadoyebo admits in the Preface is an exception to his commitment to the “photographic” representation of experience, he meditates on the bonds of comradeship forged in war:

one thing that impressed me so much when I was in the battlefield was the degree of friendliness. The friendly feeling and behaviour among the officers and other ranks were beyond description. Ordinarily a captain and a private being poles apart in rank would not come together to share drinks or cigarettes […] Officers and men of all ranks often exhibited [an] inclination to come together intimately and sometimes shared food and other things […] why the sudden development of brotherly love? Could close proximity to the grave be responsible? It may be the nearer one is to his Maker the better his behaviour. If this logic is sound, the only inference I can draw from it is that heaven must be [a] peaceful and lovely place, an abode full of friendliness and co-operation. This statement is however based on the assumption that heaven is the place our souls go to when we die and where else, for heaven’s sake, can they go to? One might feel that I am being moved by sentiment rather than reason in arriving at this conclusion, but what other explanation can one give for the benevolent attitude of soldiers in the battlefield? (64)

Fadoyebo argues that his experience in the War (and those of other men, too) knows no chronological boundaries. He finally violates his apparent commitment to historical experience and, instead, embraces a defiantly subjective vision. Yet because of the success of his narrative in situating the reader, this enhances our reception of historical experience, rather than detracts from it. We have always been reading with the narrator, as he recounts events in the 1940s; but we have also been communicating with him in the future, considering his experience retrospectively. Now we are invited to abandon the illusion of the “pastness” of his experience, and realize that it speaks articulately in the present. Far from detracting from our understanding of the soldier’s experience in Burma, we now find our awareness of its trauma more apparent than ever.

Although these subjective passages do not convey the kind of experience commonly privileged as historical, or evidential, they nonetheless play a definitive role in constituting their more factual neighbours. They rely on an affective force that we could term “subjective experience”. Their force enables us to trust Fadoyebo, because we feel the accuracy of his experience, even as we are forced to read it from a chronological remove. The more we trust, the more we feel confident of the veracity of the (historical) experience he relays. The fear, hope, and faith that Fadoyebo professes are all vital subjective experiences that reach out affectively in the present. They enable us to trust and therefore to archive the historical “experience” contained in the more factual, less idiosyncratic passages of the memoir.

Conclusion

No matter how true, or how real, the events that Fadoyebo describes, we still need to feel implicated by them, in order to be “excited” by them and to read on. This relies not upon historical felicity, nor on the veracity of historical “experience”, but rather on literary technique and, in particular, the work of the narrative voice. The narrator must constitute historical experience in such a way that it invites the reader’s attention, while simultaneously positioning readers so that they can comprehend the experience contained therein. It is critical to the success of Fadoyebo’s stated objective (to transmit his experience into the imagination of the public reader, as well as to facilitate its dissemination across generations), that both narrative strategies are achieved. As Quayson has argued in a different context, when we downplay the discursive, the mythic, and the imaginative, we risk suppressing the richness of our encounter with history (1997: 21–2).

Any attempt to engage Fadoyebo’s memoir as a record of military service that does not appreciate the literary strategies used to present his experience will immediately encounter at least three serious problems. First, the most compelling sections of the memoir are those that appear to speak directly to the reader about religious and emotional affinities. These rely heavily on their discursive framing within the text in order to achieve their undoubted impact on the reader. Second, the temporal complexity of the text defies such a reading as it repeatedly manoeuvres between a body of experience located in 1944/45 and a time of writing in the present of the 1980s. This complicates the degree to which the memoir can be periodized as a colonial text, versus a postcolonial text of the 1980s. Finally, as we have seen, the positioning of the reader (and her/his relation to the narrative voice) is carefully crafted in Fadoyebo’s memoir. The text anticipates that it will be read historically, or in relation to a body of exterior experience, and in this sense it recommends itself for archivization. No matter how humble the narrator professes himself to be, he knows that his experiences are extremely significant to a readership interested in their historicity. As we have seen, this quality can in part be traced to Fadoyebo’s response to a BBC documentary that considered veteran’s experiences in an historical frame. Regardless of its origin, this awareness constitutes a distinct discursive layer within the text and the reader’s curiosity is generously accommodated with interpretation and glosses. These considerations should not obstruct, but rather, enrich our engagement with a very rare record of an African soldier’s military service in the Second World War and an unusual example of African public memoir writing about the colonial period.