African Prose Fiction and the Depiction of Corruption in Islamic Society and Religion: A Critical Study of Abubakar Gimba’s Witnesses to Tears and Sacred Apples

African prose fictions have written on a whole number of ideas and perception, but have conspicuously paid little or no attention to what is predominant in the Islamic society and religious world. For Gimba, the intrigues and contestation over power, especially within the civil service, assume a metaphoric significance in unraveling social contradictions in society. Gimba thus, evaluates the various dimensions of power and how it is used to subjugate or oppress people. In most of his works, Gimba pillories the repressive nature of power and the conflicts it engenders are graphically illustrated. In his articulation of this disabling environment, Gimba evokes a consciousness, concerned with Manichaeism and alienation. Gimba is sensitive to his characters as they adjust to the uncertainties of a postcolonial society with all the indices of underdevelopment, greed, corruption, bureaucratic tardiness, indiscipline, political instability etc. These characteristics of modern Nigeria form the background from which Gimba’s characters are drawn. However, drawing from their Islamic background, the characters in Gimba’s works express their morality, conviction and thought through the ideals of the religion. This leads to a remarkable blending of social and moral concerns with the supervening influence of Islam without sermonization. The outcome of this fusion is a balance between aesthetics and spiritual interests in a way that captures the essence of Northern Nigeria with vividness and freshness. Gimba, like Tahir, therefore relates the traditional and cultural values of the people to their response to the dilemma of new experiences and their interpretations of them. Gimba draws his sources from The Holy Qur’an in the delineation of setting, action and character. As a liberal feminist, he chooses urban heroines through whom he restructures our visions. This article attempts to investigate Gimba’s works using Neo-humanistic theory in evaluating his inclusion of religion and the techniques used conspicuously in the novels, Witnesses to Tears and Sacred Apples. This scholarly work equally argues that the writer’s creativity in religion can best be appreciated through an analytical study of the novel.


INTRODUCTION
As a prolific and proficient writer, Gimba had within the span of a decade taken he Nigerian Literary scene by surprise with the following titles: Trail of Sacrifice (1985), Witnesses To Tears (1986), Innocent Victims (1988, Sunset for a Mandarin (1991), Sacred Apples (1997), Footprints (1998), a collection of essays Once Upon A Reed (1999), a collection of poetry, Inner Rumblings (2000). He is a writer who is interested in the world and the people around him, particularly in the intrigues and intricacies of the civil service and the bureaucracy. His works revolve around morality, encoding sympathy for the innocent characters who are usually persecuted and unfairly treated by the system. Gimba's works are intensely concerned with decency, IJALEL 9(1):61-66 its inception. Most early writers came from the South-East and were witnesses to the clashes between traditionalism and Christianity during the colonial encounter. Colonialism in Africa found a justification for its mission in certain halftruths peddled about the continent by Christendom in the sixteenth century. Leo Africans, an ex-slave and Christian convert, for instance, was known to have said: "The inhabitants of the black lands are bucolic people without reason, wit or skill and with no experience of anything at all; they live like brute beasts without law or order" (Claude Wauthier, 1978:48). The colonizing powers convinced the Christian West that Africa was a dark continent of barbaric races, a land of all the iniquities only the devil's world could muster, which, for this reason, needed to be rescued and civilized. Nigeria, as a colony of Great Britain, was seen in the above light. The country's name speaks volumes of this unbridled savagery which the colonizers set out, with Christianity in the vanguard, to crush.
The problems facing African societies are multi-dimensional and in phases. Slavery is the worst and darkest experience in the history of African people. Religion, including Islamic religion and colonialism immediately followed and now neo-colonialism through African dependent on the Western World for its economic and political stability. To sustain and promote their interests at the expense of Africa, the international hegemonic forces have ensured that their African collaborators remain in power to do their biddings. These agents consider and pursue policies that satisfy their interest and those of their imperialist masters even at the brink of economic collapse occasioned by the "fictitious debts and religious charlatanry and propaganda. Achebe (1975:45), states the position of the early writers: … I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that, their past -with all its imperfections -was not one long night of savagery from which the first European acting on God's behalf delivered them.
Achebe and his contemporaries in Nigeria did not write to profess Christianity. On the contrary, their objective seemed to have been to present the truth about the pre-colonial past. Thus, if they ever took recourse to doctrine, they did so only to ridicule.
The aim of this study is to investigate the theme of corruption in Post-Colonial African Novels. To fulfill the aim of this study the objectives are to: 1. Assess the realism in Witnesses to Tears by Gimba Abubakar? 2. Assess the realism in Sacred Apple? By Gimba Abubakar 3. Investigate how Witnesses to Tears and Sacred Apple portray corruption in Post-Colonial Islamic Africa?

CONTEXTUAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS WITNESSES TO TEARS AND SACRED APPLES
Witnesses to Tears: 'Tears' is the most important in the novel. "Tears" are the drops of salty liquid that come out of one's eyes usually because one is unhappy, hurt or in pains. The novel deals with the pervading unquenchable drive of the modern man to acquire wealth by perversion as well as the wanton destruction of both self and others by the perpetrator. Man's inordinate ambition is portrayed as leading to a total disregard for the value of life and humanity in general. It pushes out the bestial nature of human beings, even when they struggle to cover up with open kindness. The fictionalized situation of the novel deals with a beautiful, loving and innocent victim of blind love, Hussaina, whose husband's inordinate desire to amass wealth, even through perverse means resulted in, although by a twist of fate, an impenetrable horror that became the ironical reward of Hussaina's innate kindness, love, respect and good manners. The concern of the novel is the plight of the innocent ones, especially women and children, who suffer over crimes committed by people close to them as they share in the retributions for those crimes. The message of the text is that acquisition of wealth through dubious means results in the destruction of both the perpetrators and their family members who might be innocent; and that good name is far greater and more enduring than wealth acquired through dubious means. This message is projected at the primitive level using lexis and structure. "Tears" in the title of the novel refers to the fictionalized situation in general and to the major characters in particular. "Tears" come out of one's eyes when one is crying.
In the text's semiotic universe, they are mostly shed due to loss of loved ones. "Tears" are a result of melancholy caused by either pains or grieve. When adults cry, it is often a result of death of loved ones. "Tears" in this novel refers to death and wanton destruction of human beings caused by Lahab's burning desire to amass wealth and to fight for positions through abnormal means, which involve the use of human blood that resulted in multiple deaths. They are both a result and a sequence of the disregard for the value of life. There are multiple killings of souls, which violate the sanctity of human life as preached by all religions of the world. "Tears" serve as a node for the following list of expressions and lexical items that mean or connote death, murder, mourning and other death related terms. The following is a list of some of these lexical items for illustration: (P.7) A safe coma (P.10) extremely critical but safe (P.11) …was as awesome as death (P.14)…dead Zarah was very much alive (P.15) …khartoum Hospital was filled with about a score of men from the police homicide squad. The list provides evidence that there is the projection of the message of human destruction resulting from the illicit acquisition of wealth in this novel based on the lexical items and expressions underscored in the list.
Admissibly, Abubakar Gimba is the only Nigerian novelist who presents the world of Islam with some measure of concentration and a sense of metaphorical felony. In his Witnesses to Tears (1986) and Sacred Apples (1994), he seeks explication of event and character through references and allusions to the Qur'an. This way, his writing can be said to have a special touch of Islam and, by extension, responds to the theme of the role of literature in national development. Nigeria's unity depends on the extent, to which her peoples understand one another, particularly, the religions which inform every group's ethos. This point is easily appreciated when one recalls that ignorance leads to intolerance and accounts for most of the violent social conflicts the nation has experienced since the amalgamation of 1914.
Our study of Gimba's novels, therefore, is bound to anchor on the Pro-Aristotelian or Neo-Humanist concept of literature as a utilitarian art, one which edifies through delighting. For our purpose, what T. S. Eliot (1962:724) has said about literature and religion is significant? "The common ground between religion and fiction is behaviour. Our religion imposes our ethics, our judgment and criticism of ourselves, and our behaviour toward our fellow men".
The Holy Qur'an regulates the ethos of an Islamic society. And Gimba's fictional world, though it does not exclude other religions, is fundamentally Islamic.

The Quran (Islamic Influences) on Gimba's Prose Fiction
According to F. A. Klein (1971:38), Islamic scholars accept two divisions under which doctrines and religious practices are treated. The Tauhid deals with scholastic theology and reviews concepts of the godhead. For want of competence, this is beyond the scope of our discussion. The fight on the other hand, is the practical part which consists of precepts and commandments to be obeyed, rules and customs to be observed, duties to be fulfilled. The exhortations from the Sacred Book, relating to this second part, are the bases for the assessment of social sanctity and parameters with which to gauge the extent to which individual ethics conform with the teachings of Islam. Gimba explores this part in his plot structure, the depiction of settings and the portrayal of characters.
Within these aspects of the novel, the author presents the main themes of his writing.
The plot of each of these novels reflects a picaresque structure wherein the major characters are very mobile. Witnesses to Tears is the story of Hussaina, the only child of a widower, Mr. Anas Al-Amin. In spite of her father's cautionary statement that a man who bribes the police could be a criminal, Hussaina marries Lahab: she is enchanted by this man's taciturnity, and is sympathetic toward him for having just lost a wife. It turns out that Lahab is a hideous character. As soon as the wedding is over, Al-Amin leaves his Futa Toro Heights apartment in Sabonville and embarks on an extensive tour of the country. He dies on the way back. Lahab feels relieved from his father-in-law's watchful eyes: he amasses wealth through corruption and engages the services of a marabout, Dr. Saahir, for protection. Though Hussaina is suspicious of her husband's sudden affluence, she is kept in the dark until a traumatic experience happens to her: her only son, Anas Al-Amin Sagiir is kidnapped from his school. Later that night, she discovers the boy's decapitated head in the deep-freezer in one of the rooms in the basement of her home; he has been the victim of Dr. Saahir's ritual murder aimed at saving Lahab's business empire from collapse. Hussaina ends up in B8 at the Female Traumatology Ward of Khartoum Hospital. Her husband returns from a pilgrimage to Mecca only to join his mentor, Dr. Saahir, in police custody.
Sacred Apples is a sequel to Witnesses to Tears. Lahrah is Hussaina's great-granddaughter. Zubaydah, Lahrah"s grandmother, is the product of a later marriage after the Lahab-Saahir saga.
When the story in Sacred Apples begins, Lahrah has just been divorced by Yazid. She together with her three children -Unnnaymah, Bilguees and Mustapha -is on her way from her ex-husband's home in New Tymbuktu to her brother, Ya-Shareef, who resides in Rabbah City. Hardly, have mother and children left New Tymbuktu than their car is attacked by an irate mob of protesters. Lahrah is abducted, her car is set ablaze and, as far as she knows, her children have been cremated. As soon as she leaves hospital, she changes course to Minsra, her grandmother's city. Before she completes her iddah, she is re-united with her children: a couple -Rashad and Miriam -had rescued them before their car was set on fire. Lahrah and her offspring finally settle with Ya-Shareef in Rabbah. She gets employed as an industrial officer and soon, her boss, Nousah proposes marriage. This marriage exposes her to the hostilities prevalent in polygamy: Nousah's other wives -Salma and Ailimah -team up against her. They are regular guests of marabouts. Ailimah, who is already pregnant for her witchdoctor, An-Najmu, brings home the sacred apples which kill Nousah and endanger Lahrah's life.
These picaresque structures make for a lot of journeys which generate the conflicts built up and expended over panoramic settings. Such settings are utilized to explore themes essential to Islam.
Unlike the traditional settings of the earlier novels, Gimba's fictional world is a diffused picture of the social IJALEL 9(1):61-66 realities of the new African urban aggregations (Eustace Palmer, 1978:105). Events or actions move, along with characters, from one city to another. In Witnesses to Tears, most of the happenings occur in Sabonville, the capital of an imaginary country known as Songhai. In this city, there are such street names as Gambia, Mali, Zimbabwe, Angola and Libya; there are institutions named after major African landmarks and personalities: Khartoum, Lusaka, Futa Toro; Cabral, Luthuli, etc. In Sacred Apples, action begins in New Tymbuktu, moves on to Minsra and Rabbah City. The distance between the first and third destinations amounts to about ten hours journey by road.
In both novels, therefore, we are dealing with cosmopolitan settlements. Thus, Gimba brings together characters with diverse religious interests. In such settings, the author presents the theme of Islam as a tolerant religion. It is very likely that Serah Bello, in the first novel, is a Christian; yet, she and Hussaina, a Moslem, are so close for the one to die in an effort to protect the other. In Sacred Apples, the union of faiths is symbolized in the marriage between Rashad, a Moslem, and Miriam, a Roman Catholic Christian. Each of the spouses retains his or her faith. Their marriage succeeds while those where both partners are Moslems hit the rock. Gimba is making a point that is fundamental to the unity of our country: Islam respects human interaction, for to God "belongs every being" (Sura xxx:26). The true faith is that which upholds the one-ness of God and man should set his face perpetually "To the pattern on which/He has made mankind" (Sura xxx:30). The author is suggesting that every sect should strive to build bridges across those religious gulfs that threaten Nigeria's unity in diversity. The reflection of pan-African ism in the settings conveys a message of the brotherhood of all men.
Closely related to the above theme is another -the quality of Islamic faith. The orthodox doctrine holds that faith is a thing of the heart and one can be faithful without confessing and without performing any good works. As Klein (1971:40-1) puts it, "A man. may be a believer, though he neither confesses his faith nor performs any good works, but on the contrary be an evil-doer so that consequently faith and wicked works may be combined". Islam sees this kind of faith as the lowest. "He, however, who combines belief with confession and good works ", Klein continues, has reached perfection... in faith".
In Gimba's novels, these categories of faith are displayed. Evil and violence are rife. The first lines of Witnesses to Tears introduce us to a comatose in B8 in the Female Traumalogy Ward of Khartoum Hospital. The rest of the story shows the bestiality of man with violence as its aftermath at all times. That Hussaina begs for a lift, a choice which introduces Lahab into her life, is to avoid exposure to a looming storm as well as a possible attack by hoodlums. That choice only ensnares her. The society, evil is pervasive. She is eventually wedded to a criminal: Lahab steals students' fees, a crime for which his weak messenger is to be incarcerated for ten years; he connives with school contractors to dupe the government; he fraternizes with a witch-doctor who ensure that he is protected; the last violence to which he is a party is infanticide, and, in a twist of fate, his only child, Sagiir, is murdered for the ritual. At the time of this last evil act, Lahab is in Mecca asking "for Allah's forgiveness for" himself and his marabout Sacred Apples begins and ends in violence. Protesters in New Tymbuktu attack Lahrah's car; her life and those of her children are in jeopardy. She is nearly abused physically and psychologically by Al-Aswad; then follow the murder of her new husband and the shooting and arson involving An-Najmu and Al-Aswad.
Gimba does not refute the existence of evil and violence in the Islamic world. In fact, he highlights these as factors which have aroused universal suspicion and ridicule for Islam. However, he acknowledges that this situation is far from what the Prophet has enjoined. The faithfuls who are malevolent end tragically: Lahab in Witnesses to Tears returns from the hajj and walks straight into prison; An-Najmu and Al-Aswad in Sacred Apples, pay the bitter price of death for their crimes. The Holy Qur'an says: "Eschew all sin, Open or secret those who earn sin Will get due recompense for their earnings".
(Sura VI: 120). Those who heed this injunction attain perfection in faith. Anas Al-Amin, though dead, leaves his good name behind. Blessings accruing to his good works pave the way for Hussaina's husband. Ya-Shareef, Lahrah's brother, sees the divorce of a dutiful wife, rape and murder as violence, and goes on to guard and protect his sister. Gimba approves of these men because they combine faith and good works.
Finally, God's commandment on marriage is another theme that engages this writer's attention. Islam enjoins marriage and discourages celibacy. The Qur'an permits polygamy but it is not the given: Marry women of your choice, Two, or three, or four; But if ye fear that ye shall not Be able to deal justly (with them), Then only one... (Sura IV:3). God knows that no man can be fair to four women at once; that makes the proviso absolutely important. Gimba is in favour of monogamy, knowing that polygamy was expedient as a result of the depletion of the male population during the Jihads. Flis heroines are women who are emancipated, empowered and urban, characters whom Gloria Chukukere (1989:64) would describe as "dynamic and politicized". Their pedigrees mark them out as women who have exceeded Nana Ai, in Alkali's The Virtuous Woman, in their quest for self-actualization, even though they do not attain Li's militancy in The Stillborn. In Witnesses to Tears, Hussaina's father, a graduate of Queen City University and, before his death, a director in the Department of Information and Culture, ensures that his daughter whom he has brought up single-handedly is adequately educated and can depend on herself. Her freedom at home is unhindered and her father has "absolute confidence" in her "sense of judgement (54). Lahrah, in Sacred