Little Rot

Kalu is Aima’s boyfriend and Ahmed’s best friend. He meets Aima while working in Texas, and they move back to New Lagos together. Although he is, from Aima’s point of view, a “good man,” he frequently sleeps with other women behind Aima’s back and attends Ahmed’s sex parties, illustrating the degree to which such transgressions are normalized in New Lagos. Upon returning from dropping Aima off at the airport, for example, he immediately calls “a random hookup he kept on deck” (26). He also fosters a secret, perhaps even from himself, desire for his friend Ahmed, with whom he once shared an erotic night as a teenager. Therefore, despite their purported closeness, there are actually many secrets between Kalu and Aima, even before their relationship begins to disintegrate.

When he hears that a child is being raped at Ahmed’s party, something snaps in Kalu, and he becomes determined to stop it. He interrupts the pastor Okinosho while he is having sex with the young sex worker, Machi, setting in motion events that will lead to his own “damnation.” Although Kalu acts out of a desire to do the right thing, he overlooks his complicity in the corruption throughout New Lagos, including his own womanizing and patronage of Ahmed’s parties. His attempt to save Machi is hypocritical and self-serving—a way for him to believe that he isn’t like the other men in the city. To remind Kalu that he isn’t “superior,” Okinosho devises a humiliating punishment that involves forcing him to have sex with Machi, the very girl he tried to save. In doing so, Kalu becomes precisely the kind of man he wanted to defend her against. Afterward, he feels like the pastor put “a handful of dead things” in his chest (273). He has been irrevocably and irredeemably infected by the “rot” of New Lagos, and he knows he can never face Aima.

Ahmed is Kalu’s best friend. Known for his reputation as “an unserious playboy” (29), he acts as a “debauched ringmaster,” hosting exclusive, expensive sex parties in secret locations around the world. Many of his guests are high-profile, important individuals, and he takes his role as the “guardian” of their privacy very seriously. He is unafraid of violence, and his involvement in New Lagos’s dark underworld extends far deeper than Kalu knows. However, living in New Lagos hasn’t “affected Ahmed the way it did other people” (43). He claims that this is because he “started from the gutter” (43), so the “rot” of the city couldn’t pull him any deeper. He is unafraid of his “own dirtiness” and fully accepts the uglier aspects of life in New Lagos.

However, Ahmed still keeps secrets from himself and those closest to him. He suppresses his desire to sleep with men, for example, and some of his other actions suggest a need to see himself in a better light and separate himself from some of the uglier aspects of life in New Lagos. When Ahmed saves Souraya from a violent client, for example, she reminds him that he didn’t do it “because it was the right thing to do” (168). Many of Ahmed’s clients treat women the same way, making him complicit at the very least. He acted not out of moral conviction but out of his personal feelings for Souraya and his desire to claim moral superiority.

Ahmed is deeply shaken by Kalu’s accusation at the party that he is the kind of “man who lets a girl get raped under his roof” (47). This could be because Kalu has finally glimpsed Ahmed’s true self, and Ahmed fears Kalu will no longer love him. He attempts to rid himself of the sudden insecurity he feels, but this ends in the disastrous murder of Seun. Although Ahmed has paid for men to be killed many times, he has never murdered anyone himself, and he is shocked by the violence he is capable of. By the end of the novel, he is also tormented by guilt for his involvement in Kalu’s punishment with Machi. Despite his claims to be above it, Ahmed must accept he is no better than the other men in New Lagos, and he is also overcome by the city’s “rot.”

Ijendu has been Aima’s best friend since childhood. Growing up, the girls were “sisters in Christ” (12), attending Sunday school and Bible study together. However, somewhere along the way, “Ijendu […] splintered off quietly into a secular decadence” (12). She befriended a group of “bad gehls” and enjoys partying and doing drugs. However, Aima and Ijendu remain close and never “[judge] the other for her beliefs or lack thereof” (12). While this sentiment makes the girls’ friendship possible, it also indicates the tendency to look the other way and ignore transgressions of all types, allowing the “rot” to spread unchecked.

Ijendu is also Okinosho’s goddaughter, and as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that she knows more about the pastor’s true identity than she initially lets on. When Aima and Ijendu find Ahmed with Seun’s body, Ijendu remains calm and immediately takes them to Okinosho. The pastor has “helped her out of a tough spot more than once” (19), suggesting that Ijendu also has deep secrets of her own.

Souraya is a Nigerian sex worker who now lives in Kuala Lumpur. She is friends with Ola and once had a brief but intense relationship with Ahmed in Johannesburg. Despite being from Nigeria, Souraya hasn’t been back in many years, avoiding the place because of the painful memories associated with it. However, when Ola visits a client in New Lagos, she convinces Souraya to return with her.

Souraya has built a comfortable life for herself and overcome much of her trauma, but returning to New Lagos threatens to undo all her hard work. In Ola’s view, Souraya has a “useless soft heart” and can’t “handle” the city like Ola can (149). Although she is part of society’s dark underworld and has seen and experienced people at their worst, she “only played with the edges of that world” (150), and maintains a degree of innocence and belief in justice that Ola has given up on. Reconnecting with Ahmed forces Souraya to confront the terrible memory of being abducted by a violent client. However, she overcomes that trauma and proves she is no longer “the broken girl [Ahmed] found in a penthouse” (245). She has the courage to look directly into Ahmed’s darkness and not “look away.” As he confesses to murdering Seun, she continues to have sex with him anyway, feeling a “warped victory” when he gets rough with her. However, Ahmed’s fear that he’ll “corrupt” her comes true. When she is approached by a “nightmare from her childhood” at the club (258), she stabs the man and is shattered by the experience. She is left with a “blank,” “hollowed look in her eyes” (272), suggesting that, even after less than two days back, New Lagos has already further damaged Souraya.

Ola is a Nigerian trans sex worker and one of Souraya’s close friends. The pastor Okinosho is one of her most important clients, and he pays “exorbitant prices […] for the privilege of being with and near her” (139). Ola is beautiful but in a “stark and alarming” way; there is “a hint of cruelty in her bones,” but she isn’t “interested in pretending to be something soft” (137). She likes her sharp edges and is “truly proud” of the “comfortable” life she has built for herself. Ola has reclaimed her body and sexuality, the things once used to hurt and marginalize her, and used them to literally and figuratively build the life she wanted, from elegant homes in different countries to her gender-affirming surgeries.

Along the way, Ola has lost all her illusions about humanity. She has seen into the darkest underbelly of society and turned it to her own advantage. She knows that a “rotten tree” cannot “bear edible fruit” but that “rot could give you power” (150). She has used the rot to her own advantage, and it has made her powerful. When Souraya asks Ola for help convincing Okinosho to spare Kalu’s life, she suggests the pastor force him to have sex with Machi as punishment. The plan is so “wicked” that it surprises even Okinosho. When Ahmed learns what she has devised, he calls her “sick.” However, Ola laughs in his face, calling him “naive” and reminding him that he put Machi “in a room full of old perverts” (262) to begin with. Although other characters are corrupt and willing to do unsavory things, Ola is the least afraid of the “rot” and the most aware of the reality in which she operates.