What does it mean for a Western audience to be engaged with the internal critique of Nigerian politics through reading Sousa Boy? This question is primarily one of identification. To the extent that we look at Mene from a position of privilege, is it possible to identify, and thus learn, from his subject position within the novel? Further, as taxpaying members (and maybe more to the point, gas consuming drivers) of a nation-state complicit in the power dynamics that created the civil war in Nigeria, can attempting to identify with Mene fundamentally alter the colonizer/colonist position at play within our reading of the novel (are we better for reading this book?)?
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