Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

Guided by his mother's sixty-year-old diary, a son re-enacts her arrival in Nigeria and the next twelve tempestuous months of her life in an attempt to solve her mysterious and bloody death

Genres: Mystery, Historical Fiction, Africa

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson OBE FRSL was a prolific English author and poet, best known for children's books and detective stories.

Peter Dickinson lived in Hampshire with his second wife, author Robin McKinley. He wrote more than fifty novels for adults and young readers. He won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Award twice, and his novel The Blue Hawk won The Guardian Award in 1975.

Reviews

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man makes me proud to be classified as a mystery writer.

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is really two interwoven stories, one taken from the diaries of Betty Jackland, a young women newly arrived in 1920s Nigeria as the wife of a British colonial official, and the second following her son Ted as he tries, 60 years later, to make a documentary of sorts based on the diaries. The diary half is better, I think: Dickinson does a really good job of finding an interesting voice for Betty, effectively showing her increasing self-confidence as she finds her feet in a strange country and steadily asserts her independence from her husband. Despite the fact that we are in principle reading a record of what Betty is thinking and feeling, he nonetheless manages to keep us guessing as to what some of those thoughts and feelings really are. The depiction of the intersection of the court politics of imperialism, with British district officers (and Betty) scheming against each other to install their preferred Emir, with a more modern style of mass politics, albeit one carried out in a primitive-seeming register, is also very well done. Plus, Dickinson is good at the semi-anthropological description of the Kitawa (who are, I'm pretty sure, entirely his invention) that makes up a chunk of the diaries: he has a knack for subtly bringing out the sophistication of what a modern reader would think of as a rather primitive people. And the fact that we know that something terrible happened at the end of the period covered by the diaries -- the Tefuga Incident that gives the book its name -- ensures that a certain measure of suspense is maintained throughout.

The modern chapters don't do quite as well, partly because Ted's position, that of a famous journalist and filmmaker spending a short time in Nigeria to shoot a few scenes for his latest project, simply isn't as interesting as his mother's. He is, like the reader, trying to work out what really happened during his mother's time in Nigeria, but while this detective work adds interest to the diary chapters, the fact that all the events happened sixty years prior removes the suspense from his half of the story. So Dickinson works to add some, using post-colonial politics, which makes sense but doesn't quite work out because the continuities with the colonial politics of the diary chapters aren't established as firmly as they could be. In the end, he falls back on a military coup, which, though realistic for Nigeria, isn't all that interesting. The final revelations, not just of what actually happened at Tefuga but what came afterwards, still pack a punch, though. "Tefuga" is an excellent example of Dickinson's expansive view of what a mystery novel can be.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A television journalist examines the circumstances surrounding an African revolt in the 1920s; a revolt in which his parents were involved. The protagonist bases his research around his naïve and idealistic mother’s diary of colonial life and scandal in northern Nigeria and dark secrets surface in a nicely written if underwhelming novel

[Rogue Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminiscent of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa, a son seeks his mother's truth in 1920s Nigeria, then under colonial rule and in the midst of insurrection.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is in many ways very good, but not what I was quite in the mood for at the moment.

[Phoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to get past chapter two

It’s a slow starter, some skipping around might be in order for chapter two. It gets good, really good, after that.

[Junessa Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

The bio about this book on Goodreads is not correct - the women does not have a mysterious and bloody death. Overall, very bad book - do not waste your time.

[Cera]

I got about 100 pages in and was just really, really distracted by wondering how much of the described situation in Nigeria was historical and how much was made up for the purposes of the novel, and then further distracted by wondering what a post-colonial take on the period would be, so in the end I decided to give up on this one. Plus, the main character being named Betty further distracted me, because I connected it so much with the Betty from Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine, which is also about British colonialism in Africa and the way it ties in to the patriarchy. There seemed to be enough thematic connections that I can't help wondering if Dickinson did it on purpose.

Also, having now read (or in this case half-read) five or six of his adult suspense novels, I find that the frame he uses of having a past mystery and present-day investigations shedding light on it is very hit or miss for me; some books I love it, but in some (including this one) I feel like I already know how everything came out, so I don't really care what happens.

[Cathy Posner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is like an original Out of Africa. I read it a long time ago but still one of my favorites.