In 1997, long before Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo launched the “Year of Return” welcoming African diasporans to Ghana, the Black American scholar Saidiya Hartman travelled there to retrace the routes of the Atlantic slave trade. Hoping to be treated as kin, Hartman quickly realised that Ghanaians saw her as an “obruni” or stranger, “a foreigner from across the sea”, as she writes in her 2006 book, Lose Your Mother. It is a similar welcome, combining mistrust, admiration and envy, that Black gay American friends Elton, Scott and Vincent receive when they land in Accra in Ghanaian author Kobby Ben Ben’s bold and provocative debut, No One Dies Yet.
The year is 2019. “Returnees” are swarming Ghana’s forts and castles. Our American trio share the fervour, but they are keener still to explore the country’s underground queer scene. They enlist the help of two locals: Elton’s friend for sex, the sassy and flamboyant aspiring crime novelist Kobby (playfully named after Ben Ben), and Nana (cheekily named after Ghana’s president), an enterprising religious homophobe whom they mistake at first for an escort.
Narrated for the most part from the dual perspectives of Kobby and Nana, No One Dies Yet reads like a two-person contest, each eager to claim the reader as confidant. Nana wants to migrate to the US, he tells us, so he chats “with Obroni and America people on the internet”, occasionally swapping his nudes for money. This is how he comes to befriend Elton and co, but now, with Kobby in the mix, the group has little need of him. Nana resorts to cooking and cleaning for them in a vain bid to win their affection. Kobby’s interest in Elton is equally self-motivated. He is with him for the “fiscal comfort”, the “convenient sex”, “the bed and the breakfast”, and the travelling. He intends to hold on to these benefits.
All the while, a serial killer is going around the country, murdering people in the grisliest of ways. Nana believes with good reason that the killer is Kobby and vows to kill him. A third of the way into the book, Scott, Elton and Vincent are told that one of them will soon die. Who kills whom? You wait. You wonder. You wait some more. Ben Ben, you come to realise, is a tease and a prankster; his book is only half-invested in being the “unsettling tale of murder” that his publisher describes.
Indeed, what makes No One Dies Yet a thrilling read is its refusal to fit into a prescribed mould. This is a book that brims with possibilities, contradictions, jokes, puzzles, detours, ambiguities, secrets and metafictional tricks and twists. It is also a book built on other books, and it thrives on irony and moments of sly pastiche. Some of the descriptions of battery could be taken from the pages of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (Kobby’s “awakening book”, which he rereads until its violence “becomes familiar”). There are references to John Grisham, Dean Koontz and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer. In one sequence, Kobby uses the opening of Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby – “a novel investigating the murderous motives of Louise, its psychotic maid” – as fodder for his gruesome fantasy. “I see Louise in Nana anytime I watch him summon an orderly cleanliness into the mess we leave behind,” Kobby tells us. “I find myself fantasising about the moment Nana snaps. Like Louise. His choice of weapon digging into our bodies as he splatters the messy art of our lazy lives on to the white walls, painting an entire apartment with our privilege.”
No One Dies Yet is linguistically inventive and formally daring. It has style and swagger and some of the realest, crudest scenes of gay sex you will read. It also broaches some important and urgent questions. What makes one kin or a stranger in Ghana? What, if anything, does Africa owe its diasporas and vice versa? Can same-sex intimacy really flourish in Ghana? And who gets to be an “African writer”? Kobby writes a crime novel, but fails repeatedly to secure an agent. One, who admits to her “Caucasian limitations”, tries to get him to write something in the vein of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, a novel that places Ghana’s colonial history front and centre. Kobby balks at the suggestion: “It’s 2019. Still, you want to only publish those stories about our castles and those enslaved. When will Africa get a break?”
To elaborate further on Kobby’s literary ambitions would be to spoil some of the readerly fun of discovery. Suffice it to say that Ben Ben has marshalled his anxieties about the publishing world and western appetite for stories of colonialism and slavery to produce a hilarious, irreverent and coolly self-aware novel that confounds expectation at every turn.
• No One Dies Yet by Kobby Ben Ben is published by Europa (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
