If the title of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s book, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, sounds familiar, you’ve probably opened some spam in your day. Perhaps a Nigerian Prince needs your bank account to secure his fortune, but will soon pay you back, or perhaps a sure fire business deal overseas needs a modest investment to get going.
Hopefully, we now all realize that this is BS.
But here’s a fictitious story about the people behind sending those e-mails. A recent Engineering graduate, Kingsley, can’t find work in his home country of Nigeria. His lady leaves him, he’s stuck with his family that he’s expected to assist in supporting, and his fancy degree isn’t amounting to squat.
Enter Kingsley’s uncle, Cash Daddy. I think the name should be the first deterrent, but it turns out that, if he works with Cash Daddy, he can make a modest living running e-mail scams. What follows is fairly predictable hi jinx, but hilarious nonetheless. As funny as the book is, it reminds us that, even if you find it despicable, people usually do what they do for a reason, be it family, necessity, or the occasional greed.
My thanks to all the librarians who set up the bookshelf near the check-out counter. I found this book there, and was absolutely fascinated. I was not terribly surprised by Kingsley’s attitude toward his “marks” in the U.S. and Britain; after all, how much have most of us felt for Africans living under some of the conditions he describes initially. Distance breeds complacency. It is worth considering how much his motives in joining his uncle were convenient justifications, and if we could all be so easily swayed into a criminal life by dramatic life circumstances. What implications might this have for people in the U.S. in drug-infested or gang-dominated neighborhoods and what sort of moral stamina is necessary to resist the lure of luxury. It is also interesting to compare this novel about Africa to another one that I read recently: Little Bee, which gives yet another view of what young adults there must face.