When I began reading Paul B Vitta’s Fathers of Nations, I felt as if I had stepped into a rickety, old jalopy, and would have to steel myself for a bumpy ride.

Its bland, grey cover and first chapter, hesitant in its direction, had me sceptical. But it was with great delight that, as I moved on, hard plastic seats gave way to soft velvet ones; the grey interior to a luxurious cream one; and the bumpy ride had turned into joyous smooth sailing such that, in the end, I felt like I had stepped out of a sleek, stretch limousine.

Published by Oxford University Press Kenya, the book is a satire on the absurdity of African politics.

The author is a retired physicist, who worked as a director of the Unesco Regional Office for Science and Technology in Africa.

From the second chapter, where the story picks up, the tale is rife with satire directed at African politics and the academia.

The plot of Fathers of Nations revolves around the lives of four men from different parts of Africa and how, amid their various misfortunes, they get together to try and make African heads of state ratify a document that could transform the continent’s economic fortunes. Each of them has suffered under unwieldy political systems in their respective countries. Each bears a grudge against the system and has a reason for wanting it to change.

Freak accident

Prof Karanja Kimani from Kenya has lost his wife to a former university colleague now turned politician. His only daughter died in a freak accident on the Nairobi roads, a death that could have been averted.

Pastor Chiamaka from Nigeria is a wild, intense man, whose message on government accountability earned him days in jail and a ban from preaching.

Dr Abiola Afolabi, also from Nigeria, is an academic, who has been ditched by his American wife. He advises African heads of state, but hates his role in offering theoretical solutions.

Comrade Ngobile Melusi from Zimbabwe, on the other hand, is a failed politician who found himself on the wrong side of the political divide after Independence, suffering for being Ndebele when the Shona president embarked on repressing his community. His wife died in the ensuing genocide.

The paradoxes

In chronicling the hilarious antics of African governments, the author also succeeds in pointing out the paradoxes, inanities and idiocies the political systems rest on.

The book is not so much an attack on African leaders, or a tale of the failure of Africa, but an account of the heartwrenching stories of the men involved: Their journeys and how they have found inner strength in adversity.

With each person’s story, a short history of their country is revealed, and some of the atrocities the characters witnessed and were subjected to. The reader sees the similarities in the political failings of each country.

But while one could easily infer that the book is a challenge to the patriarchy and the overt negative masculinity rife on the continent — given that all the leaders are men and the title is Fathers of Nations — it is not that simple. It does not simply say that men are the problem in Africa, seeing how it gives us different accounts of masculinity.

On the one hand, there is the buffoonery, heartlessness and indifference to the woes of the people exhibited by the African leaders and, on the other, four broken men — heroes really — who embody the values of humaneness, empathy, vulnerability, openness and tenderness.

It has the air of the Biblical allegory of how the cornerstones that the continent rejected became vital to its building.

I was gradually seduced from a sceptic to a fan by Vitta’s dexterity and turn of phrase. Humour brings the story alive. It is narrated with a light, jaunty air. There is a blithe, devil-may-care candour and irreverence.

“Forty-nine foreign heads of state were in Banjul for the summit. All looked happy, and why not? Had they not escaped from troublemakers in their home countries?”

Mistrustful neighbours

“Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, a triumvirate of mutually mistrustful neighbours better at killing institutions they established jointly than at nurturing them, had just killed an inter-territorial university they had founded together only a few years earlier,” reads a passage in the book.

Beyond the book’s aesthetic merit, it sets itself apart by delving into the fate of Africa, explaining why it is where it is today and what can be done to take it forward. This is cleverly done in the various references to Dr Afolabi’s book Failure of States, and his lectures on it.

The story ends rather sweetly, leaving just enough suspense to wonder what happens next. Fathers of Nations sets itself apart by providing new, vivid metaphors for the situation in Africa.