Twilight of Crooks - Mwalimu Johnnie MacViban

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Twilight of Crooks

by
Mwalimu Johnnie MacViban

general information | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Twilight of Crooks
Author:	Mwalimu Johnnie MacViban
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2021
Length:	129 pages
Availability:	Twilight of Crooks - US
	Twilight of Crooks - UK
	Twilight of Crooks - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B- : some promising ideas and a weirdly engaging style, but ultimately way too thin

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

Twilight of Crooks opens in 1977 in the port metropolis of Tumaranda -- "the Big Mango City" (the national flag is white, with a mango at its center) that is apparently the heart of the country with the same name. The country is run by local strongman Nikita Mangope and the Salami League Party; the city's mayor is Yuris Sonni --- "a perennial turncoat and a sell-out", but staunch supporter of the ruling party.
Tumaranda is rife with corruption; and among the examples on offer here is a two-year-old murder case; that of geophysicist Mabala Mungo and his wife and daughter. It's been believed the professional killings were because Mungo knew too much about some corporate deals -- maybe the black market sale of embezzled crude oil to a multinational -- and reporter Jason Makelekele, of The Tumaranda Star, is still digging into the case -- including with some help from his friend, detective inspector Bundu Bakasili. But even his newspaper eventually can't go along with Makelekele's continuing investigations: as his editor explains:

"Your case has become too hot for The Tumaranda Star," Liza said, with a faux smile on her face. "We are dropping it. I am under a lot of pressure.

Apparently just to make sure, Makelekele gets what seems to be a great opportunity: he's selected to be The Tumaranda Star's representative for a: "three-month refresher course that was part of a partnership between the newspaper and several German and international media outlets". So off he goes to Bonn, six thousand kilometers away. Things go well enough there until it's time to return: going to the Tumaranda embassy to collect his return visa he finds himself refused -- and his passport taken away: he finds: "He was now an unperson, soon to become a stateless person in quest of nationality", as:

Since a contrarian was not welcome in his hometown, it was now goodbye to the ersatz of a place called Tumaranda. He now had a wrecked psyche as he hailed a taxi for the hotel. There is no news like bad, sad, mad news.

       In the background, meanwhile, with the new year, the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction kidnap an industrialist in retaliation for the pervious summer's raid on Entebbe. MacViban plays a bit loose with bits of history here -- this 1978 kidnapping is a fictional one, which can pass in a novel, but claiming: "Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke for two hours on the phone with his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Golda Meir" is rather too much of a (and a completely unnecessary) stretch. (As readers will recall, Kohl only became Chancellor of West Germany in 1982, while Golda Meir had resigned as Prime Minister in 1974 .....)
       There's a bit more mystery -- including a mysterious manuscript Makelekele comes across -- and international tensions continue to bubble in the background, including the heat apparently being turned up on the powers that be in Tumaranda. Makelekele can follow all this in reasonable comfort for now from Germany, and, at the novel's conclusion, his future doesn't look all too grim.
       All in all it makes for an odd quasi-thriller. The Mungo murder-mystery is pretty much forgotten about -- and, once the action (or at least Makelekele) moves abroad, Bundu Bakasili doesn't figure much any longer. There are some decent swipes at the authoritarian regime and its ways along the way, but MacViban doesn't follow through very strongly with any of them.
       What the novel does have going for it is its happy-go-lucky and very creatively carefree style, with passages such as:

Clichés aside, the insights though interwoven and contradictory led Makelekele to muster much in a wracking moment of decision. Could it be engaging ? Reflection in the Galbraithian sense needed introspection and a sense of knowledgeability. He still had to muster attitude to remain true to himself: be alive and kicking, and perhaps ambitious in that spacious world of journalism.

MacViban musters attitude, too, -- to some (if not always ideal) effect. The numerous cultural references would also work better if they were more consistently in line with the times: the Talking Heads' 1977 'Psycho Killer' is a nice touch, but reference to the 1973 movie Live and Let Die (with the sighting of a poster: "of a new James Bond film starring Roger Moore and Yaphet Kotto") or those posters announcing: "Günter Grass and Herman Hesse had new novels out" make for a disorienting asynchronicity. (The misspellings of names -- of Hesse's first name, or Mayor Sonni (as 'Sunni' at one point) don't help, either.) So also, summings-up are less convincing when, for example, MacViban suggests:

The situation had clearly become a Salman Rushdie sacrificial exit to the whole conspiracy. All was a now a je ne sais quoi matter.

Aside from the fact that, for all its clarity, I have no idea what a 'Salman Rushdie sacrificial exit' might be, at the time the novel is set (1977-8) Rushdie had published nothing beyond Grimus yet and thus seems an odd name to invoke.
MacViban writes of the situation when Makelekele finds himself made an: "unperson, soon to become a stateless" that: "This was a little de trop", and that goes for the novel as a whole, too. There's an appealing ebullience of style here, but, despite a great deal of potential and some decent plot-ideas, much too little interest is shown in actually fleshing out much of a story.

- M.A.Orthofer, 18 June 2025

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Links:

Twilight of Crooks:

Bakwa Books publicity page
Excerpt

Reviews:

Literary Hub (scroll down for review)

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of books from and about Africa
See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers

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About the Author:

Cameroonian journalist and author Mwalimu Johnnie MacViban was born in 1955.

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