The Bookseller: A Literary Profile

Ernest Ògúnyẹmí profiles a secondhand bookseller.

I finished working on this profile six months ago, after a long interview with its subject and linked days of intense writing and rewriting. As I say in the piece, I have known Mr. Paschal Okwudili Eze for seven years; it is only natural that I would decide to profile him. But it is far from “natural” to see ordinary people being profiled in our clime. I don’t know of the existence of that kind of literary spotlighting in Nigerian literature: celebrities get coverage, not pepper sellers. And yet, the greatest profiles have often been of those who belong to what Frank O’Connor called “the submerged population group.” O’Connor was writing about the short story (in The Lonely Voice): the short story form is designed for ordinary people in weird, every-day but potent—sometimes silly—situations. But, as O’Connor says, there are no heroes in short stories; instead, you get moments of astounding intensity and moments of piercing clarity, clarities that you find hard to shake off.

While the short story does not make a hero out of those on the fringe of society, the profile—the genuinely good literary profile—makes a hero out of such people. (At times of ordinary things.) Joe Gould is the hero of Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret,” the eccentric Errol Morris is the hero of Mark Singer’s “Predilections,” and the random little boy, Colin Duffy, profiled by Susan Orlean in “The American Man at Age Ten,” is the hero of that tale (the fact that a ten-year old is called “Man” already makes that evident).

Mr. Paschal is the kind of man you pass in the street, sit with in a danfo or taxi, complain about Nigeria with, he has no degree, does not speak straight-backed English, and he is the hero of this profile. He is a hero because he is representative of many Nigerians who live tremendous but unrecorded lives and who go unnoticed in the literature of this country. As Samuel Johnson said, “The true state of any nation is the state of common life.” How can we start to gauge what we are until we have let “the submerged population group” (the booksellers, the danfo-drivers, the teachers in public secondary schools, the politician who has no substantial media attention)—how can we speak of a culture in Nigeria or of Nigerian culture until we have listened to them? My job has been to put down the life of this man as plainly as I could, with the grace that heaven released.

I think this is a remarkable Nigerian story, and a friend has said it is good work. I spent my money to do this piece and I promised Mr. Paschal that I would send him something from whatever I got from its sale. I sent it to a magazine but they wanted it cut. That would have ruined the narrative. I wanted to send it to an American outlet but, another wahala, I would have to explain every little detail, which would mar the simple grace I have aimed for in the writing. Always a little unwise, I am publishing this piece on Substack.

When I finished writing it, I printed copies and took one to Mr. Paschal. His smile and his words, “This is very good work,” are the accolades. Even more, the kinship we now share. Mr. Paschal now calls me “My friend,” in a felt way. That should do for any journalist.

Still, if you feel, after reading this piece, that it is valuable work, do three things: share it with someone, send me a lovely email or leave a good comment (criticism is welcome, too), and send me money. I would give some of it to Mr. Paschal. I would like to keep my word. Here are my details: Ernest Ogunyemi, 8073910618. OPAY. Thank you.

---

Samuel Johnson, “The true state of any nation is the state of common life.”

Mr. Paschal’s stall no longer stands where once it stood. Nothing else stands beside or behind it, and nothing else stands in its place. He tells me that the local government decided to make a way here. They broke down his stall, which rested on the fence that blocked off the dusty pathway, to link this side of Panseke directly with Oke-Ilewo.

I reposition a bench, fleeing sunlight, and sit under the umbrella. Mr. Paschal sits on a chair. A steel walking stick with a black derby handle rests on the chair. Books are on the table. The table is not very wide and the books are not very many. The stall used to be stocked. It was a partitioned space, carved out with boards of wood on both sides. There were planks in the walls (including the fence), layers of them (three, four planks in each wall), and on each plank piles of books. I felt, each time I came here, that the books I needed were there (i.e., story collections, the rarest to find in a secondhand bookstall, and individual poetry collections), but that I could never get to them, because the Danielle Steeles and John Grishams and the medicine textbooks would not let me.

Mr. Paschal’s “new” place feels naked. It’s like what Lagos looks like early on a Saturday morning, before the people burst out like weevils from wet beans. Although there is much movement, much sound. Cars and cabs and bikes ply the new road—walkers, too. We talk over car-horns and the sound of working engines, of a fork intermittently slicing a show-glass, and voices—the voices of schoolchildren, of people greeting, of those who want directions. It does not seem to bother him much. Close behind him, there’s a fresh foundation on the very edge of the road. He plans to put a container there soon. He has paid a hundred-and-twenty thousand naira to the welder, of one-fifty. Once he balances up, he will have it set up, and bring back the books he has had to cart back to his place at Olomore.

We make light talk. When I bring up the economy, Mr. Paschal speaks with a sense of fairness that’s hard to find in the heat and brew of life under the current administration. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu “wants to do good. His policies are good,” he says. “But we will have to endure it for a while.” He adds that—“This kind of thing also happened in Indonesia when they removed their subsidy. Now they are doing very well.”

He has his right hand on his right leg, which does not move. He taps his knee regularly. He is in a pair of blue twill trousers and a short-sleeved Ankara shirt. There is a tennis shoe on his right leg; he has only a black stocking on his left. The left feet is close to my right leg and moves often, the toes gliding against my leg. Mr. Paschal is tall, has some body, fair but tanned, and a Catholic. He attended the Cathedral at Adatan before he met his wife. Now they both attend what used to be his wife’s church: Saint Anne’s at Ibara. No white in his beards. He has an oblong face, a childlike smile, and speaks gently but audibly. The Igbo tongue is in the English mouth. His tone is relaxed, that drag on certain words, the “Yes, yes” (like Peter Obi). In his late forties, he has fathered five children (two young men and three girls). The oldest, Morgan, studied political science at the University of Ibadan and works, mainly to keep from being idle, with the Ogun State Housing Corporation.

He asks, “What do you mean by ‘essay’?” He rests his back, looks away, and tries to figure it out. I look around for a book (an anthology, preferably) to show him an example, but I cannot find any. I play around with words. I say it is like a report, but not formal, informal. I say that celebrities do get coverage, but “people like you who do important work and are not celebrities rarely do.” He says, “Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah,” as if something in him—a switch, a cold eye—has come on. And graciously, in the midst of this hubbub, this chatter, Mr. Paschal Okwudili Eze, Abeokuta’s first secondhand bookseller, grants me an interview.

---

“Leaving Nsukka”

Mr. Paschal came to Abeokuta from his hometown, Nsukka, in Enugu (“Where you have the University of Nigeria”) in the Lord’s year 2000. “I was on my early twenties. I just finished my secondary school. I was around eighteen, thereabout. I’m not up to nineteen when I came to Abeokuta.” He goes on, “Looking for green pasture now. You know life now. Life can carry you to anywhere. You can never say where you will spend your life. As you are growing up, you may never say where you will end up your life. That is one thing about life.”

A friend of his, a spare parts trader, invited him to the city. Mr. Paschal stayed with him and served his friend for five years. Their shop was at Oke-Itoku and he lived at Ago-Oko. He started a VHS business at Sapon after he got his freedom. He had friends, also Igbo, who sold at Sapon. “We were all at Sapon. We started from Sapon.”

“In the evenings, after work, Mr. Paschal and his friends went to a restaurant tended by one Ijeoma to ‘cool our head.’”

The VHS business fared well. “I was supplying to most of the outlets in Abeokuta. Most of those video clubs, I do supply them video CDs.” He and his friends were making money. The location where he lived forced him to blend into the new environment. “I lived at Ago-’ko. That is where most of these natives in Abeokuta live. If you want to learn some language, especially Egba language or Yoruba language, you need that kind of place. That was where I started my life,” he says. The people he had to commune with on a daily basis could neither speak nor understand English. Learning Yoruba was crucial. “If you don’t learn it, you are on your own.” (A typical Igbo man, Mr. Paschal sounds “your” as “yah.”)

It took him three years to be able to handle Yoruba properly. He says he is still learning the language, although his speaking of it is not clunky, and I believe he hears it faultlessly. By default, his children, all of whom were born here, can speak it fluently. He had to learn it by interacting with the people—although his landlord’s daughters, too, gave him lessons.

Food was another problem. Mr. Paschal could not eat ewedu and soup. He was not used to the excessive “oyel”—his way of pronouncing “oil”—in the soup. I mention pepper, since Igbos are known for having no stomach for it. He laughs; a rattling, disarming laugh. “Most of the time I go for bread. I go for bread and tea,” he says. “But later, I started testing the ewedu. I test ewedu. When I test it, I say, ‘This thing is not bad o.’”

---

“Paean to Youth”

Life was happening through and around his assimilation. In the evenings, after work, Mr. Paschal and his friends went to a restaurant tended by one Ijeoma to “cool our head.” They had fresh fish, on some days isi-ewu—accompanied, for him, with a bottle of stout. A thousand naira isi-ewu was die-there in those days. Sometimes they went to Ogun State Hotel (Park-Inn), at Kuto. Shina Peters and Adewale Ayuba gave performances there on weekends. (This must have been 2006—2008. Ayuba’s Ijo Fuji, with its lengthy, lively sax interludes, meek boasting, and a sustained, well-paced tempo, played everywhere.)

Love being the great temptation of youth, the language lessons took on a touchy connotation. A fine, single young man making some change, he was the first to buy a color television in the house he lived in. Besides the Samsung TV, he had a fridge that he stocked with drinks. He brought video cassettes from his shop and showed films at his place. Rashida and Shaki, his landlord’s daughters, came to see films, to relax. Some days he went to work and left his door unlocked. The ladies—who were about his age, in their early to mid-twenties—were not thieves. They opened his fridge and picked up drinks when they wanted; ate his food. He did not mind. On Sundays, he cooked and gave rice to everybody.

“I think of the American poet Robert Frost, who said the best we can do is ‘come close,’ draw near to; who said that without the right education in metaphor, ‘you are not safe anywhere’; who said that a metaphor is touch and go, you push it too far and it crumbles.”

The landlady had been against her husband giving the Igbo person a house. “It became a kind of problem between the two of them. The wife say, No. The man say, Yes,” Mr. Paschal says. He was reluctant but the old man asked him to pay. “He said I should not mind her, that he is the owner of the house.” He heeded. After moving in, the landlady would not allow him to fetch water in the house. She owned a food canteen, but she would not sell to him. “She was making a case about me. ‘Ah. This is an Igbo man. The Igbos are dangehrous. Igbos are not good.’ And all this, and all that. I keep calm. Early in the morning, I just go to my shop. I come back around seven, eight in the night. I enter my room. I lock my door.”

Three months the Alhaja watched him. He behaved himself seemly, and her daughters were taking the news to her. “Later they now tell their mother that, ‘Ah. This person o. This person you say is a bad person o,’ that . . . ‘This person is a very nice man o. See what he is doing to them o.’” Then one day their mother called him and said, “Please. I’m very sorry.” She added “that she did not know that there are still some nice people in Igboland.”

Like a falling star, briefly, Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” plays from the ice cream man at Sacred Heart’s gate. The sound enters just as Mr. Paschal quotes the Alhaja’s apology. It ceases as he begins to say, “I said, ‘Ma. What do you mean by that? How many people have you been with? How many Igbos have you stayed with? And have you stayed in Igboland before?’”

The woman said no.

She had formed this impression of Igbos based on a singular experience, years and years before. She was living in Kano. Once, at the Sabon-Gari market, a small fire flamed up between an Igboman and a Hausaman; the former strangled the latter to death.

I think of Moses and the Egyptian he killed to save his tribesman from trouble. Cain the Vagabond and Abel his brother. Bigger Thomas and Mary Dalton. I think of Jordan Peterson, his overworking of the metaphor—“archetype.” Archetypes and metaphors. I think of the American poet Robert Frost, who said the best we can do is “come close,” draw near to; who said that without the right education in metaphor, “you are not safe anywhere”; who said that a metaphor is touch and go, you push it too far and it crumbles.

His landlady admitted that he was a different type of man and she had been wrong. He let it go; but when Shaki “started to develop addiction about me,” swore she wanted to marry him, meet his people and see how they live, Mr. Paschal told the lady that that would not be possible. “She told me that she will tell her mother and her mother will agree,” he says.

“‘Life is fun, life is good,’ Mr. Paschal says.”

Mr. Paschal invited tall, yellow Shaki (“a very lovely girl”) to go with him to Lagos for the weekend. She said, “Why not?” They went to Fadire, Ojuelegba, where one of his brothers lived. “We went to different places. We went to amusement park. We go and watch film, enjoy ourselves.” On their way back, he took her to Oshodi and treated her to some clothes and pairs of shoes. She pressed for marriage. But he did not want problems for her and made it clear. “Your parents are not exposed,” he told her. If they were educated, it might have been different. They could be friends. And they stayed friends. She went with him to every gathering, every party. His people began to say he intended to marry her. “I say, ‘No, we are just friends.’”

They stayed that way till her parents died and he moved to a new apartment. She lives in Canada now, last he heard. Although he does not know about her “married status.”

“Life is fun, life is good,” Mr. Paschal says, speaking in remembrance of things past. “What we are lacking that time is wisdom to see far. We didn’t see far, because, as a youth now, nobody advise us what to do. Then, we were making the money, but we’re just spending the money. Lavishly. Lavishly. By the time we now realize our senses, most of those money has gone.”

---

---

“Evergreen Business”

In 2012, Mr. Paschal was invited to a warehouse at Palm Avenue in Mushin by an importer-friend (“He import a lot of goods. He import spare parts; he import electronics. Books as well. He have a very big warehouse.”). That friend, a man from Imo based in the UK at the time, proposed the current business. The friend told him he could start with “a little money.” All he needed was a good location (best: a university, a college area). Business sense, too, was essential, and Mr. Paschal had enough of that from handling previous ventures.

His attitude was, “I like to give something a trial. I say, ‘Okay, let me give it a trial.’”

At the warehouse, Mr. Paschal saw novels, encyclopedias, biographies, motivational books. Dusty, stinky, heavy, naked, tough, neat. Pencil-marked and pen-marked and highlighted books. Some with curious scribbles in their margins. Books that some guy had labored his nights, bemoaning his life, over. Books that survived. One, most likely, with a photo-card tucked between its pages, a loopy handwriting on the back, addressed “To Laura” (to Loss). These bookish warehouses, Mr. Paschal says, are all over Lagos, but only the initiated know where they are. At Alabasuru, at Berger Cement, Mushin, Yaba, Surulere. One is at Mile Two, another is at Apapa Wharf. (One can only imagine how many books sit inside those long trucks that hinder the vehicular flow, facing Oshodi, coming from the wharf; one wonders at their odyssey (like Shostakovich’s “Leningrad”); what lives they will change, the lives—like mine and some of my friends’—that they have changed—, irrevocably.)

“Then, I don’t know much about books, because is not part of what I learnt,” Mr. Paschal says of the experience. But his imagination, as a businessman, kicked in. He thought of higher institutions like Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB, still known as UNAAB at the time, though the adjustment had been made by the school’s governing council in the previous year) and Moshood Abiola Polytechnic (MAPOLY)—both are here in Abeokuta—and he resolved he’d do it: “I bought some. I bought a couple of them.”

“‘I like to give something a trial. I say, Okay, let me give it a trial.’”

The books were priced based on the popularity of their authors. In the region of novels, bestsellers were the most expensive, costing N300 each. The Sydney Sheldons and Hadley Chases and John Grishams were the lords. The vassals (“ordinary fiction,” which would include a Hemingway, Updike, Morrison, a Conrad, a Joyce, maybe even Yeats) cost between N40 and N100. Encyclopedias were sold in sets. A complete set with 32 volumes was priced at ten thousand naira. The price could change if it was a more recent edition. In total, on his first day at the secondhand book market, Mr. Paschal spent twenty-five thousand naira (“That twenty-five thousand was a lot of money then. Money still have value.”).

Call came from Enugu that his father was very sick. So Mr. Paschal travelled home to see him. It was after returning that he took the books to FUNAAB. The uniformed men at the gate refused to let him in; they said he’d ruin sales for the booksellers inside the school. Mr. Paschal explained that his books were fairly used books. Handed a tip, they eventually let him in and showed him a place to lay them out.

The students were wild—seeing him, seeing the books. They were ecstatic. Imagine ants congregating around a litter of sugar. They were crowing and howling.

“Ah, where have you been all this while?!”

“Where have you been since?!”

“Where were you?!”

“Ah.”

They had looked everywhere in Abeokuta for a stall like that, and found none. They travelled to Ibadan (a man sells in front of the University of Ibadan) and Lagos (at Mile Two, Oshodi, Ogba, Ikeja Underbridge, Yaba . . .—they are so many they could form an association, a corporative). Now he was here. They picked Steele, Grisham . . . “They were picking it like. So they encouraged me that I should be coming,” he says.

Five months he went to FUNAAB and sold books like pure-water. Then he put “an helper, an apprentice” there, whose record he checked every week. And he came to try his luck at—or as he puts it, “I migrate to MAPOLY here.” He had not just novels now, he had engineering books as well, and there are engineering students at the school. The reaction was the same: “It was like a carnival that day I came.” Business was extremely good. Every week, he went to the market to replenish his stock. He filled a full seat in a bus or Siena with cartons of books. “I may take the seats, one, two, three line of seats. Then some people will just sit down on the remaining seats. Sometimes I do load the whole bus.”

---

“Roughing It”

MAPOLY is a fifteen-minute drive away from where we are. After leaving Odeda, where FUNAAB is located, he tried out a few other places before settling here. He was at Ikiga House, Kwari Junction. He used a tiny space around Post Office. “That time business was moving fast and I’m having a more books.” He needed a spacious place. He left a shop at Oke-Ilewo after the property was sold. He came to the heart of Panseke much later; but he has been here from before 2017, when I bought from him for the first time.

“Not having a permanent place was my challenge,” Mr. Paschal says. “Government they never build a standard market in Abeokuta. Do you understand me now? The people are just managing those sideway stalls, those sideway shops. Not like other states that you can have a standard shop.”

“Are there standard markets in Enugu?”

“Yes. There is a standard market in Enugu,” he says. “Not like this type that they built at Omida now, these ones that Amosu built now. It’s not a stall. In Enugu there’s a way they organize stalls—do you understand me now?—that it will not be too expensive. The market they are building here is too expensive for any trader to rent. That’s why if you go to Sapon now, or Itoku, all those stalls, or Omida here, most of those stalls they built, they are empty. They build it in a way that they put comfort, they put toilet, they put everything. It’s like a mall. But what you need is just a stall—a stall. But this one they built there, they built it in a way that—like international standard now. What they saw in the America or in China, but we here now, we never ripe to that extent.”

Outside the complexes at Omida, painted light and hunter green, women list their bowls of tomatoes in stick-woven trays, piles of yams on the roadside pavement, fish if you want them, and rows of sachet tomatoes hanging down pegs. The market is outside the gated “standard market.” Two of those complexes have become residential, with clothes spread on the railing. In the other buildings, a few spaces are rented out. There’s one Zamani, a boutique.

“The testimonials from his customers have Mr. Paschal’s heart.”

A place to keep the books was only one of the problems. Mr. Paschal, in the early days, due to the excited response he got from both schools, bought books he ended up not selling. Titles no one cared to buy. Other people came asking for books he did not have. He was helped by a catalogue given to him by the Importer—it had a list of the bestselling authors in America. He also began to note the books people requested for. Usually, they were recommended texts. Chinua Achebe’s trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of the Gods. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah.

“Along the line, I was able to catch up.” Twelve years in the book business have schooled him. “As you are asking me now,” Mr. Paschal says, “people do ask me that, ‘How do you know all these book you are selling?’ There’s no book you will call the name here I will not give it to you. I know where they are. All the books I have here, I know them one by one.”

The young man he left to oversee the business at FUNAAB left, two years later, to start his own bookstall at Kuto. Mr. Paschal gave his blessings. Mr. Paschal’s younger brother came in to replace the apprentice. Now his brother owns the place. “It’s still there up till now. I have given it to him. He is now the owner.”

The testimonials from his customers have Mr. Paschal’s heart. “Buy this book for your children,” he said to a customer once. The “book” was a series of A-Level textbooks. “Do you know that that man later came back and tell me, did I know that one of his daughter score 270 in JAMB because of that book?” She also did great at her Post-UTME and got admissions from the University of Ibadan and the University of Lagos. And “The other day” (in 2017), a guy bought a Robert Kiyosaki—Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing—and returned a few months later to say he had made N200000 from applying the principles in the book.

My own first purchase from Mr. Paschal was Shakespeare’s Complete Works—bought, based on the note I left on it, for N1500 on the tenth of February, 2017. Heavy stuff, with a hard green cover, gold-lettering on the spine—it was neat and entirely unmarked when I bought it (though it bore, still bears, on the first blank page, the name of a previous owner: a Nigerian). I don’t precisely remember how I came to see the bookstall, but I know I felt, like everyone else, maddening joy when I did. Then I found the Shakespeare. I wanted the book but had no money (I had no bank account, had no smartphone). I told Mr. Paschal to hold on to the book for a minute. I’d go home and get the money. He may have had doubts unrevealed by his face (it is hard to fathom doubt by looking at his face, it is always softly lit). He agreed and I hurried home, dug into my light savings, and returned to pay for it.

I still own the book, though the spine is broken. It came off like the bumper of a wrecked Camry, came off whole. It offered me my first extended education in what I would describe today as “serious language.” I still go to the copy whenever I need a kicking.

---

“The Hiatus: ‘It Is Not a Palatable Story’”

“This leg was amputated,” Mr. Paschal says, pulling up his trouser. I see grey plastic, with circles the shape of half-moons but black. He taps it with a finger and it makes plastic sound—a dry, hollow sound where for four decades blood rang. Around the knee, where the brace has been fitted into the body, under the cloth, I glimpse a cup-like shape.

“I suspect some diabolic. . . I suspect foul play,” he says. “Because my leg was just started paining me. They were carrying me to different, different places. Egun side o. Benin Republic. Ilara. Ilaro. FMC. We went to different places. That was what affect me.” He sobers up as he speaks. “Then, nobody stay with me like this. You will be perceiving the odor. It was not a small thing. What my eyes see.” Mr. Paschal makes sounds. “Some people say na bad people, some people say na witch, some people say na . . . Only God knows.”

“It was not funny,” he says, “I didn’t know I will survive it.”

“His tone suggests that a dark cloud could gather, the ice-cold blackbird of despair flutter, there above his soul.”

I missed it when I was here months ago. That day, Mr. Paschal did not stand up at all. He picked out titles for me to consider, but a woman with skin like milk, though sunburned, attended to me. She was the only woman there, with myself and Mr. Paschal and some three other men. One of them was a little old man who parked his Bajaj beside the road and had a towel over his shoulder. He had on a faded cap, faded pants, and said he fought (on the Biafran side) in the Civil War. I expressed my worry about a possible secession (this was their talking point), and the little old man assured me that much was happening in Igboland—enough perhaps to keep J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s words in “Skulls and Cups” (“And the goblets are legion, / Broken upon the fields after Nsukka.”) from moving from record to prophecy. The stall still stood (myself, the lady, Mr. Paschal, and one other person, sat inside; the undecorated war-hero stood on the pavement). The woman helped to pack my purchase. She picked out a nylon from her market and doubled the bag.

That was at the beginning of the year, the right leg was gone by then. The ordeal began on October 17, 2021. He had just returned from a visit to the village; he’d gone for a funeral. Back in Abeokuta, “The thing just started.” Mr. Paschal saw things like boils on his toes. The way he describes it, I imagine whitlow. “Later the thing burst.” And between that time and December 2022, all of his right leg below the knee had gone bad. He burned two million naira through it all, if not more. On the counsel of his doctor—“My doctor say if I want to live, that’s the only choice I have”—he let the leg go. “On December 25, Christmas day gan-gan gan-gan, that was when they amputated this leg.”

He is still on drugs. He has the stick for support, but walking with the artificial leg is not easy. “If I’m walking now, I will be leaping like this. I will be leaping. It cannot be like your leg. It always pains me.”

“It pains you?”

“It pains me. If I walk little time now, e go pain me. I cannot walk a long distance. It is not a palatable story,” Mr. Paschal says. “That’s how I’ve been managing myself. It was my friends that—,” he hisses, as if words won’t do. “It is well. It is well. What my eyes see.”

During that time, his shop was mostly closed. Morgan, at home from Ibadan, sometimes came to open the bookstall. (I believe I have met him before, a few times.) His children are not too happy about him coming out every day, but he tells me, “I don’t like depending on somebody.” His wife sells house decorations here at Panseke and so leaves the house every morning. Staying at home is not going to be the best for his health. His tone suggests that a dark cloud could gather, the ice-cold blackbird of despair flutter, there above his soul.

“Look at the way we are talking now,” he says. “It is very good for my health. But if I am staying alone in the house, only me will just be at home. I say, ‘Let me be coming out. I will be fine.’ They say, ‘Daddy, the stress.’ I say, ‘Forget about stress. I’ve been used to that . . . I’ve been used to it. I’ve never lived a luxury life since I was born. When I was serving my oga, I was serving my oga with hard labor. I never lived a luxury life before. Allow me to do it.’”

“Around the knee, where the brace has been fitted into the body, under the cloth, I glimpse a cup-like shape.”

He is thankful for his wife, who has stuck with him through thick and thin. “Had it been I marry a bad wife, by then maybe I might have died. She was just there for me.” The woman is from Udi; Udi, Mr. Paschal tells me, shares “common tradition” (in regards to marriage) with Nsukka. They’ve been married since 2016.

---

“As Things Stand”

“Before they demolish my shop, I do make a good sales every day.” But the economy has not been favorable. In June 2024, Stears reported a 34.19% rise in inflation, from 22.79% in June 2023. It has dropped by about 2% in the past few months. Mr. Paschal says he spends N1300 on transportation from Olomore to this place. “That’s how I must spend it every day, before you talk about what to eat,” he says. He mentions a bag of rice; it was N6500 under Jonathan, it’s N75000 now. Under President Jonathan, clearing “a forty feet of container,” in liberal estimates, cost about N300000. “I think now, if you don’t have up to seven to eight million naira, you cannot do it. So how much are you going to sell the books?”

“‘Many people now say they want to read online. Instead of buying the hardcopy, some will say let me go for online. But you see, the best way is to have a hardcopy.’”

“The economy is not helping matters,” he adds. “Where we are today, all of us now see the impact of the mistake we did in 2023. We just pray that God should touch our leaders, because many of them they don’t have human sympathy at all. They tell us say when they remove subsidy, the money—they will press it back to the people, to the masses. Food will be bokku, transportation will be bokku, everything will be bokku. Light go dey, everything go dey. Where is it o? Are we seeing anything? Obi wanted to cut all those things. All those cost of governance, Obi wanted to trim all those things. Somebody go say he have aides, one-hundred-and-fifty aides, what are they aiding? And masses are suffering. They don’t have middle class now. What they have is: the higher class and the lower class. No middle class anymore. It’s either you are poor—, or you are rich. How many people are rich? Poor lo yapa. Poor people yapa, like sand. That’s where we find ourself now.”

Mr. Paschal continues, “All this tribalistic, eh, thing we are practicing in Nigeria. Tribal, tribal, ‘I’m a Yoruba man, Yoruba man must be there,’ it doesn’t pay anybody. Now that some of us are suffering now, Yoruba man doesn’t have a particular market he is buying something. Abi do you people, do you have? You don’t have. Is only where Hausa man buy market, the Igbo man buy market, that the Yoruba man too will go and buy market. So there’s no particular market for Yoruba people to buy their goods, cheap.”

In addition to the economy, the Internet and social media have posed challenges to the business. “Many people now say they want to read online. Instead of buying the hardcopy, some will say let me go for online. But you see, the best way is to have a hardcopy. If you are reading book online, you cannot understand it the way you understand it if you have a hardcopy. When you see something, you can mark wherever you see.” Mr. Paschal adds that students often ask Google questions and are given incomplete answers: engaging a book is a more rewarding experience. Generally, the culture of reading among the youths has diminished. “But if you see ones that are reading book, they are always exceptional.”

Going to the market himself has not been possible, because of his “accident.” He sends a list, with money, and they send the books. He goes to pick it up at Kuto garage. But it’s not the same. “Sometimes, if you tell them to send you this one, if they don’t have it they will send another one for you. That another one they send for you, may not be the one you really want. And you have already paid.”

The troubles notwithstanding, if someone comes to him tomorrow and says, “Mr. Paschal, I want to do this business,” he will encourage them to go ahead. “Book business is a very good one. Is evergreen business. If you don’t allow water to touch it, books can stay with you for how many years. And the more the older, the more even the value now. You are looking at history now, talking about 1917, 1918, you need books like that. It doesn’t matter whether they are old or not.”

Although Mr. Paschal has a seasonal side-gig (he goes to Ilara to buy corn and sells to poultry farmers), “As for me, I don’t have any other business I am doing except this book business.” By which he means—the blessings have come through bookselling. “By the grace of God, my effort is not in vain. God used the business to bless me.” He has been able to put “some one or two properties down”—a house of his own here in Abeokuta, at Olomore, and another in Enugu. He has also successfully sent four of his children to the university. All four have an English, a Yoruba, and an Igbo name. Morgan, the political scientist, is Tobiloba—“I born him in Tobiloba hospital, in Abeokuta here. They gave him Tobiloba as Yoruba name,” Mr. Paschal says. His Igbo name is Amobi (“We don’t know the mind of God”). Ngozi is Blessing and is Opeoluwa. Gideon is Chidebere and is Iyanu. Another daughter is called Joju. One child is studying to be an architect; one is at FUNAAB to study Animal Medicine; and another, at Federal Polytechnic, Oko, in Anambra, is studying Science Laboratory Technology. The lastborn, a girl, graduated secondary school recently.

“‘Book business is a very good one. Is evergreen business.’”

The glow on his face is turned up a notch or two when he talks about this. There’s that satisfaction, that joy, it lingers and beckons to something in me, and I am reminded of that poem by Alicia Ostriker, “The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog.”

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God’s love 
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

. . .

To be blessed 
said the dog 
is to have a pinch 
of God
inside you
and all the other
dogs can smell it.

I smell Mr. Paschal’s joy. So I say to him, “You are a blessed man.”

“Thank God,” he says. 🔷