The Other Side of Truth

When their mother is assassinated, Sade and Femi's father, an outspoken journalist highly critical of the government, decides that the children must be smuggled out of Nigeria to safety in England. That same evening they board a plane under assumed names to join up with an uncle in London. However, when they arrive, there is no Uncle Dele to greet them...

Set in the Nigeria of General Abacha (under whose regime the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was hung for protesting about the activities of multinational oil companies in Ogoniland), this novel enables our young readers to view political events in other parts of the world as relevant to their experience and concerns. In the same way that Naidoo brought the realities of apartheid to life for young readers via her powerful novels set in South Africa, she now conveys the quality of life in Lagos under military rule, and then as political refugees. How Sade and Femi survive wandering the streets of London, their fear that they might put their father in danger if they tell the social workers whose children they are and the frustrations when their father finally arrives but is then kept in a Detention Centre is compellingly told. And underneath these struggles is the children's grief at the loss of their mother and motherland for which there has been no time to mourn.