Measuring Time

Set in a culture laden with mythic symbols and superstition, it is not without symbolic significance that Measuring Time follows the story of twins living out their youth in rural Nigeria.

Mamo and Lamamo Lamang owe their lives to encroaching Western modernity, born into a culture in which, until recently, twins were considered evil portents and left to die.

The Lamang twins form two parts of one whole, true to the Nigerian belief that twins share one soul.

Mamo dreams of fame as a means to finding immortality and thus eluding the continual threat of his terminal illness. After their uncle returns home, a broken man after years of fighting, only to commit suicide, the twins naïvely decide that becoming soldiers is the path to fame and glory. They plan to leave the village to join the rebel army, but Mamo is too weak to complete the journey and so the twins’ parted ways. Lamamo’s story is told as a series of letters. We see him becoming disillusioned with the brutality of the fighting in Liberia and Mali on behalf of despotic, megalomaniac rulers.

While Lamamo actively participates in creating history, Mamo travels through his brother’s eyes and laments his own passivity. When Mamo unexpectedly reaches adulthood, he is offered a teaching post, and begins a passionate love affair with a fellow teacher called Zara. His life changes when he discovers a history of his village, Keti, written by an American missionary, depicting the villagers as “backward” and is compelled to write a piece of polemic against emphasising the “savage” aspects of Keti’s culture and the desirability of the “civilising” influences of Western culture.

When Zara has his work published in a journal, Mamo is established as a historian and finds the fame for which he had searched. However, in finding fame, Mamo uncovers terrible corruption at the heart of Nigerian officialdom and the great suffering it has caused to his people.

At the heart of the novel is Mamo’s conception of how history should be told. Mamo believes that history should be written as the myriad biographies of the ‘ordinary’ individuals living out their lives and imaginatively interpreting the world around them.

The title could be read as a reference to Mamo’s life, overshadowed by the possibility of death, but also to the work of the historian recording lives. While the plot could perhaps cohere more effectively, this does not detract from the enjoyment of reading the novel. A rich blend of modernity and tradition, Habila deftly interweaves intercultural textual references, such as Nigerian folklore, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, mythic superstition, the poet Christopher Okigbo and Shakespeare. The pleasure of reading this novel lies in this blending of literary heritages. It is a story that can be enjoyed both for its engaging plot and for the beauty of its prose. 8/10 Faith Giles