Syl Cheney-Coker - In a chimerical world of illusion and truth, fired by a language that challenges the imagination, this book tells the story of a Sierra Leone-like country, from the time of the freed black American slaves who returned to Africa

Syl Cheney-Coker, Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar: A Novel of Magical Vision , Heinemann, 1990.


In a chimerical world of illusion and truth, fired by a language that challenges the imagination, this book tells the story of a Sierra Leone-like country, from the time of the freed black American slaves who returned to Africa.


Pioneering former slaves from New World plantations, Englishmen, Arabs and natives marry and murder in this passionate epic history of the small town of Malagueta on the Atlantic coast of Africa. Covering two centuries, the tale ends with a modern-day failed coup. The harmattan, a dust-laden wind that sometimes blows in the area, comes to symbolize the misfortune of the town's inhabitants as it grows, prospers and is finally ruined by disaster in an unavoidable, bittersweet cycle of events first prophesied by the legendary Sulaiman the Nubian. Renamed Alusine Dunbar in his active afterlife, in which he occasionally returns to Malagueta, Sulaiman develops testicles with vision, which hang to the ground. This first novel by West African Cheney-Coker is full of such unusual occurrences, but in the tradition of magical realism, a sense of history and psychological drama make the story believable. The riveting skeleton of the narrative is often slowed, however, by fatty adjectives and verbiage, and tired metaphors (such as "the floodgates of her desires") sometimes mar the otherwise titillating love scenes. - Publishers Weekly






Magic realism is all too often restricted in its use to Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez. However, there are many other examples, from Salman Rushdie to Italo Calvino. Syl Cheney-Coker, in this novel, produces a first-class example which can compare favourably to those of the Latin Americans and others. His novel tells nothing less than a the history of an African town (and the surrounding area) from its early settlement by (black) immigrants to its present-day, post-colonialism under a ruthless and exploitative dictator. But the story is not a conventional historical novel but a magic realism story. Though he focuses on the development of the town, he is far more interested in the magic behind the story – the magic of the people and the magic of the place and his gift is to make this a convincing story but also a beautiful one. The only mystery is why this book is so little known and why it is out of print.
It starts with the present, as a general awaits his execution in a prison for planning a revolution against the current despotic dictator but then soon jumps back to the arrival in Malagueta (the name of the town) of Jeanette Cromantine, wife of a former slave. It then jumps further back to Sulaiman the Nubian (an approximate anagram of which is Alusine Dunbar, the name he later adopts), the half man, half sorcerer who predicts what will happen to Malagueta (good and bad) and influences some of the developments, not least through his magical, though herniated testicles. - The Modern Novel
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Syl Cheney-Coker, Sacred River, Ohio University Press; Reprint edition, 2014.


The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty. Two hundred years after his death, the great Haitian emperor Henri Christophe miraculously appears in a dream to Tankor Satani, president of the fictional West African country of Kissi, with instructions for Tankor to continue Henri Christophe’s rule, which had been interrupted by “that damned Napoleon.”
Ambitious in scope, Sacred River is a diaspora-inspired novel, in which Cheney-Coker has tackled the major themes of politics, social strife, crime and punishment, and human frailty and redemption in Malagueta, the fictional, magical town and its surroundings first created by the author in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, for which he was awarded the coveted Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Sacred River is equally about love and politics, and marks the return to fiction of one of Africa’s major writers.




“Sacred River is a novel of epic proportions powered by a microscopic gaze and magisterial sweep. Told with pain and passion, withering wit and satiric humor, this is a tale of these and other times: thronged, sensuous, cerebral, and visionary in the most unpredictable ways. There is magic in the telling, a magic wrought from the myths and legends of the African world, and facts which belie the strangest fiction. Sacred River reads like a magnificent poem with multiple chapters. A truly virtuoso achievement.” - Niyi Osundare
“The novel fits easily into the post-independence disillusionment novel canon along with Achebe’s A Man of the People, Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow.” - African Studies Quarterly
“Syl Cheney-Coker’s beautifully written book explores life in a fictional West African country in all its pain, spirituality, and glory. The poetic lilt of the sentences combined with intertwining stories of suffering, hope, and historical allusions make for a breathtaking and thought-provoking read.”  - World Literature Today
“The promise and problems of postcolonial Africa mix with a rich tradition of mythology and magic in this sequel to The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990)…. Readers of this work, part of the publisher’s Modern African Writing series, will be reminded of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie.” - Booklist
This innovative epic by Sierra Leone native Cheney-Coker (The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar) is firmly set in West Africa and features magical realism grounded in native myth. In the fictional capital city of Malagueta, Tankor Satani, a 65-year-old ex-dogcatcher, is inspired to seize power by his potent dreams of Haitian independence leader Henri Christophe. The extravagant, violent, and politically cagey Satani constructs a hilltop mansion he dubs Xanadu to insulate himself from Malagueta’s poverty and civil unrest. The pervasive influence of West African legends emerges in Satani’s sorcerer-eunuchs, his bizarre dreams, and his theft of a mermaid’s golden comb, which magically ensure his good fortune. This sprawling story describes Satani’s eventual death, when his “magic plane” crashes into the sea and the mermaid, in the guise of a barracuda, devours him; it also tells of his successor, General Dan Dogg, who, like Satani, enjoys an opulent lifestyle underwritten by the wealth generated by the local diamond industry. The central figure of the latter part of the book is 16-year-old Yeama Iskander, who represents a new generation seeking to effect social change as a brutal insurrection in a neighboring country spills across the border and Malagueta is threatened with destruction. Despite the perils facing the city, Yeama refuses to abandon her homeland for the security of Senegal. Cheney-Coker’s sweeping tale climaxes with the “sacred river,” the spiritual center of the story, offering Yeama its healing and rejuvenating powers. - Publishers Weekly



 Sacred River is set in the fictional West African nation of Malagueta, and in an Author's Note prefacing the novel Cheney-Coker avers that his story is: "a work of fiction, although some of the events are set against the background of recent political history in the region where Malagueta is located". He offers the usual claim that: "Any resemblance to actual people, dead or alive, is purely coincidental", too, and yet there's no way around seeing Sacred River as a close -- if very creatively respun -- history of Sierra Leone in recent decades.
       Malagueta is a small, diamond-rich West African nation of only about five million souls (roughly Sierra Leone's population at that time) and has suffered a similar history as its real-life counterpart. Malagueta was (mis)ruled by Tankor Satani (with his devilish name) for roughly the same period as Sierra Leonean president (from 1971 to 1985) Siaka Stevens was in office (though at least Cheney-Coker imagines a different fate for the retiring president's alter ego). The fates of several of Steven's underlings, associates, and opponents -- notably minister of finance Mohamed Forna -- are also mirrored in the story. And while Tankor Satani is the dominant figure for much of the book, he's washed off-stage for its final parts, and the brutal events in neighboring Bassa (a thinly-veiled Liberia) also spread to Malagueta. (As in Liberia, Bassa finds its ruler, President Kangoma (William R. Tolbert, Jr.) overthrown by "Sergeant-turned-General Sey Warawara" (Samuel Doe), only to be overthrown a decade later by the brutal Judas Sampata (Charles Taylor -- and like him: "a deserter from U.S. justice").)
       Events and personalities provide a strong framework for Cheney-Coker's novel, but this is not realist historical fiction, as instead the author impressively builds on these in essentially demythifying them through the use of traditional stories, traditions, and beliefs. Cheney-Coker's portrait of Tankor Satani -- a man occasionally visited by the spirit of self-styled Haitian King Henri Christophe and a mermaid -- is a corrupt and decadent but ultimately also very small man, of peculiarly petty, blind ambition.

No, he was not corrupt. It was worse than that. He was an empty shell of a man, someone not driven by an uncontrollable passion to possess people, to control them.

       He builds a ridiculous Xanadu, "the biggest example of presidential architectural madness in the whole subregion" until "his brother-presidents built a huge basilica in the Côte d'Ivoire" -- but it is ill-fated, "a grove of the dead". Tankor Satani goes all out in setting up a "Versailles-like convention", but his claims for posterity continue to fall short. Cheney-Coker's portrait -- as also that of several of the other figures, from the eunuch Pallo to the strong female figure of Habiba Mouskuda -- impresses, built up over the course of the story rather than simplistically laid out from the first for the reader.
       While Tankor Satani is the major figure for much of a Sacred River, the novel suffers some from a lack of focus. Despite his prominent role, it is is far from just Tankor Satani's story -- and the storylines of the many other significant characters largely move too tangentially to his own to make for a sene of a larger whole. Oddly, too, Malagueta -- which could be the core of the novel -- isn't given enough space of its own, and so, despite being a nation-chronicle of sorts doesn't come to feel like a true national saga.
       A page at the end of the book lists the dates and places of its writing -- recording it as begun in Sierra Leone in 1991-93 and completed in December 2005 (and then revised in 2012) -- and it has the feel of a book that has been too worked over. The writing is often remarkable, the individual chapters very strong, and yet there's a clear sense of the forest having been lost for all the trees. As the dates suggest, whatever Cheney-Coker's original conception was (presumably a fiction focused entirely on Siaka Stevens's years in power), it changed as history continued to unfold in and around Sierra Leone (hence the distinctly appendage-like latter parts of the novel dealing with the post-Tankor Satani years in Malagueta), and he never quite managed to pull it all together.
       In his Author's Note Cheney-Coker also explicitly distances himself and his writing from: "that intellectual humbug called 'magical realism'", arguing also:

African writers really have no use for so-called magical realism because our lives, contrary to other people's misconceptions, have the pulse and sense of the magical on a day-to-day basis.

       One can understand his wish to not be labeled by a term that has been twisted and warped in so many ways as to render it near-useless, but its worth noting that in its writing, incidental detail, and understanding and presentation of the characters Sacred River compares -- and compares favorably -- to the work of Gabriel García Márquez (while avoiding the various excesses of many of his Latin American imitators). Sacred River is rooted firmly enough in the West African -- and, indeed, in Cheney-Coker's own myth-making ("Malaguetans had not really lost their capacity for magic since the fantastic days of Alusine Dunbar" -- a reference to his earlier novel) -- that he shouldn't have to worry about being lumped together with other 'exotic' works under a (completely) worn-out designation like 'magical realism' . (Perhaps it's meant to serve as a warning to critics and reviewers; it didn't work with Publishers Weekly, where they promptly slapped the label on .....)
       Sacred River is a strong work, and an often wonderful read, even as ultimately it is not entirely successful (as an entirety). - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/sierraleone/cheneycoker.htm