Black Sunday

Tola Rotimi Abraham’s first novel Black Sunday was published in 2020. It takes place in Lagos, Nigeria. Rotimi Abraham attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her previous fiction and nonfiction work has been published in Catapult, The Des Moines Register, and the Nigerian Literary Magazine, among others. She is originally from Lagos and therefore offers a truer experience of living in the city.

Lagos as a nation and society provides an important setting to this novel, which is structured in four parts, each of which has four chapters except the last which has two. The first chapter begins in 1996 and the last ends in 2015, allowing readers to understand how the characters grow and change over time. The narrative centers on four siblings—Bibike, Ariyike, Andrew, and Peter—as they deal with the departure of their parents and their quest for survival and success in Lagos.

This study guide refers to the 2020 edition published by Canongate Books Ltd.

Plot Summary

Black Sunday opens in 1996 on the first day that twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike have to get home from school on their own. When they arrive home, their parents pull them aside to confide that their mother has lost her job as an assistant to the Minister of Petroleum. The sisters begin to worry for their family’s future.

Their father tries to start a business venture with a man he met at the New Church in Lagos; the man turns out to be a con artist who scams the family out of millions of naira. As a result, their mother leaves; soon after her departure, their father drops the four children—the twins and their two younger brothers—off at their grandmother’s house. He does not return.

The children slowly adjust to life with their grandmother; Bibike and Ariyike each get jobs. They start by selling water, but Bibike eventually gets a job cleaning in the hospital, and Ariyike auditions at a radio station. While she does not get the part for which she auditioned, one of the producers offers for her to take over his Christian radio show because of her ability to explain facets of Christianity to him. She begins to sleep with the producer. Bibike has also started a relationship with an older man who gives her money to sleep with him. Both sisters work to fund their brothers’ education.

Andrew and Peter attend a boarding school where they are treated harshly both by teachers and other students. Andrew eventually starts dating a girl named Nadia. One night, when he and Nadia are exchanging Valentines, they are caught out past curfew. One of the two men who caught them forces Nadia to have oral sex with him, and the other sends Andrew away, which haunts him.

By the early 2000s, Bibike lives in Lagos and meets a man named Aba. She enjoys being in love with him, but after seeing a woman who claims Aba is her brother who was killed, Aba leaves and Bibike is left alone feeling out of control of her life. Around the same time, Ariyike experiences a similar feeling when her Christian radio show is cancelled because the New Church is starting a TV network instead. She decides to go see Pastor David, who had first invited her into the church as a teenager and beg him not to cancel her show. Instead, he sleeps with her, tells her he will give her a new job, and says he will find her parents so that they can marry.

As a result, the siblings’ mother returns from the United States where she has since had a child by another man. Both sons eventually accept her back into the family. At the end of their stories within Black Sunday, both boys live in America.

Bibike remains in Lagos, staying with their grandmother and raising her own daughter. She is present when their father, also remarried, comes by with a new business partner, and she gets the feeling that his goal is to take their grandmother’s house. When she returns from seeing her boyfriend, who is in the military, her grandmother has passed away—likely due to the shock of seeing her son again.

Still worried that her father will take the house, Bibike’s boyfriend Tunde inadvertently plays a role in his death. Ariyike tells Bibike she never wants to speak with her again. By now, Ariyike is the leader of women’s ministry in the New Church. When a young mother comes to ask for help because her baby’s father, a governor, refuses to speak to her, Ariyike tries to avoid scandal within the church. However, she remembers that it was Pastor David who played a role in the scam that ruined her father; she also learns he set this young woman up with the governor, and she stands up to him.

The book ends up with the young mother attacking Pastor David while Ariyike is uncertain about the future.