Sefi Atta’s short story “The Twilight Trek” explores one of the biggest challenge that affects people living in African states which continue to be affected by many problems-social, political and economical-the problem of illegal emigration to western countries in pursuit of better life and better opportunities. As in the story, the problem is not limited to a few selected states but it is an African problem as emigrants make exodus all over from Rwanda to Nigeria,Mali,Sierra Leone and Senegal. These states are characterized by hardship which pushes people to the brink of survival.Poverty and despondency is common, poor infrastructure, war and insecurity and lack of employment opportunities alongside proper structures for individuals to reap from their God-given talents. Characters such as Patience and the narrator’s mother resort to prostitution as a way of surviving and the narrator has to go to Spain where he intends to make it in football and raises money to make this exodus by selling Marijuana for a street-drug-peddling group from which he steals the proceeds of the sales just to raise the much dollars he requires to make the illegal exodus to spain since Africans are never granted visas by the embassies of the western nations.
The writer puts lots of question marks on the value of the African emigration: if it is really worth the pain, suffering, anxiety and sometimes the lingering death that people face in the name of running away from their countries in search of a better life. She seems to conclude that the coveted ‘better life’ is an elusive venture and it ends up being an illusion since many fail to get to Europe and those who get there end up being more miserable as they fall into the arms of neo-slavery.
More interesting though is the question of religion in the context of hardship in Africa and the illegal emigration people attempt to make to places they believe they will get a better life and opportunities especially Europe. Is religion and lessons from religion relevant to the people’s quest for practical solutions to the problems they face?
The writer seems to be cynical of religion as a pillar people can lean on. Religion is beset with hypocrisy that is not helpful to lifting hardship off the back of the suffering people. That is why the narrator would rather fall asleep on a Moslem prayer mat than use it to pray.While briefly taking asylum in Gao waiting to be ferried across the Sahara desert by the Tuareg guides that evening, he wallows in acute hunger yet the Malian Moslem women shrouded in robes who appear to be good moslems cannot bring themselves to sharing their meals with him. Patience who constantly reads the Bible in the narrator’s presence appears to be a reformed prostitute yet she too is simply using religion as a facade to shroud her real self. She uses the Bible to elicit trust in the narrator who gives her all his money to secure she and him the means to get to Spain across the water.He is left stranded in North Africa with no financial means to get to Spain nor to get back home and is thrown into a limbo of his unknown fate. This blatant hypocrisy with which Africans themselves treat others who are hard-pressed by hardship in life becomes one of the major hindrances that threaten to grind Africa to a stand-still in terms of getting a way out of the many problems that face the people.
The Bible story of the Israelites tumultuous exodus from Egypt to their promised land, Canaan that flows with honey and milk is akin to modern African exodus to the ‘promised land’ in Europe where they intend to find lands flowing with honey and milk’ from the face. But the narrator’s sceptism about their resemblance and the Bible’s practical lessons in the current situation is so obvious. The story doesn’t mean much to him if not passing for a good story that puts him to sleep. In his dream about his mother, the mother wonders why Africans too won’t put down the African stories in a holy book about their past from which they would learn about the African migration to other nations in search of better opportunities other than reading about the Israelites of the past. To the writer, Africans can only learn and in so doing get valuable lessons to address African issues if they would use African approach got from lessons from Africans’ own experiences.
However, she stills expresses disdain at the value of the African stories which are incomparable to the Bible’s experiences which bear great lessons that can be of value to posterity. Africans seem not learn from the experiences of those who earlier on have attempted the same journey to Europe as illegal emigrants. Modern stories of African exodus are stories of despair and disillusionment that bear little encouragement and hope for them that want to go away. They are rather more of a myopic people’s act which are rather irrational than sensible and which end up wasting the precious lives of those who attempt the exodus and therefore a shame that posterity needs not to be proud of and neither to be fed on.
By elevating the Bible and the relevance of its stories in comparison to African stories, the writer expresses her recognition of the vital role religion can play: the lesson being that we need to look for practical solutions that bear hope; solutions which we shall be proud of tomorrow rather than those we will be ashamed of passing to the forthcoming generations. Not to be forgotten as fore-stated is the fact that religion in itself can be a hindrance to the quest for a way out of hardship facing many people in Africa.
