Stool Wives: A Fiction of Africa Hardcover - 1996

From the publisher

Kimbene is an unformed, ambitious Nigerian youth who at first has nothing to recommend him but his height. In his Ibo tribe the tallest member is automatically installed as ruler. Guided by his boyhood friend, Ngugi, who barely tops six feet and therefore has no hope of power, except vicariusly, Kimbene rises from orphan to local chief to regional king and then is faced with an even greater challenge, whether to remain in the isolated world of his highest achievement or return to his agricultural roots. The conclusion turns on a search for truth which is consistently leavened by robust humour. Throughout, pretence is exposed by the integrity of the hero's primitive viewpoint. The targets range from missionaries to oil men to Japanese camera manufacturers to a producer of Sixty Minutes. Revealing as these episodes are in themselves, what makes them telling are the philosophical insights Kimbene achieves in attempting to reconcile the difference between village life and what he calls 'Best Western': TV, billboards, photography, bookstores, modern warfare.A satirist in the tradition of Cervantes, Van Wert provides us with a deeper sense of the causes of trouble in present-day Africa, as well as with what means to have lived life to the full in any culture.