Fine Boys by Eghosa Imasuen:The Unflinching Portrait of Nigerian Youth and the Pursuit of Identity
At the heart of Eghosa Imasuen’s Fine Boys lies a burning question: what does it mean to be young in a world that feels like it’s constantly shifting beneath your feet? Set in Lagos during the late 1990s, a time when Nigeria was reeling from military dictatorship and the shadow of an uncertain future, Fine Boys traces the lives of two young men navigating a landscape defined by political unrest, class tensions, and personal ambition. It is a novel that boldly examines not only the complexities of Nigerian youth but also the ways in which the forces of society, family, and desire intersect to shape the lives of those at its mercy.
The novel’s protagonist, Sade, is a 22-year-old student at the University of Lagos. But in this coming-of-age narrative, the real focus is on his best friend, Ike, a figure whose charm and bravado encapsulate the contradictions of Nigerian masculinity. Ike is, as the title suggests, a “fine boy” in the most traditional sense: handsome, charismatic, and always the center of attention. But beneath his smooth exterior is a man struggling to reconcile his personal desires with the crushing weight of societal expectations.
Ewaen’s story begins in the late 1980s, just as his family is grappling with the slow, uncertain unraveling of Nigeria’s postcolonial dream. His father is a stubborn, principled doctor; his mother, a quiet source of strength. They are educated, conservative, and increasingly irrelevant in a society where power has shifted to soldiers, oil barons, and politicians with shifting loyalties. As a child, Ewaen tries to find his place in this shifting order. As he enters university, he is thrown into a world of new codes and unspoken dangers.
Imasuen is particularly deft at portraying the fractured nature of Nigerian identity. Ewaen, from Benin, is constantly made aware of how tribal affiliations colour perceptions. The university experience, with students from every corner of the country, becomes a microcosm for a nation still struggling with the ghosts of Biafra, the tensions between North and South, Christian and Muslim, civilian and military.
University in Nigeria during the ’90s was never just about academics. It was a crucible for identity, resistance, and often survival. Imasuen renders this period vividly, with all its contradictions. There’s a great deal of joy in the novel; friendship, first love, the heady thrill of independence, but these moments are constantly shadowed by the threat of violence. Cultism, student fraternities that mirror the country’s larger political dysfunction, hovers like an omnipresent specter. The way it is woven into campus life, normalized even among bright students, is one of the novel’s most chilling insights.
What makes Fine Boys a riveting read is its unflinching exploration of identity, both personal and national. Imasuen’s characters are not simply reacting to the world around them, they are trying to define themselves within it. In a city like Lagos, where everything seems to pulse with urgency, both the grand and the intimate struggles are interwoven in a way that forces the reader to confront the complicated nature of self-definition. The characters’ internal battles are set against the larger political and social context of Nigeria, where violence and corruption are everyday realities and where the desire for change often comes face-to-face with the brutal consequences of activism.
As Sade and Ike grapple with their futures, they find themselves inextricably linked to the forces that surround them: their relationships with women, their ambitions for success, their fears of inadequacy, and the ever-present influence of their families. The intricacy with which Imasuen portrays these pressures is nothing short of remarkable. Whether it’s Ike’s unrelenting pursuit of wealth or Sade’s strained relationship with his distant father, every character in Fine Boys is marked by the internal tension of wanting to break free from the limitations imposed upon them by society while still seeking a sense of belonging within it.
Imasuen’s prose is sharp and evocative, capturing the vibrancy of Lagos and the anxieties of youth with equal precision. The setting itself feels almost like a character; one that is both a source of possibility and a constant reminder of the harshness of life. Lagos is a place that demands hustle, but it also exacts its toll on those who try to carve out a space for themselves in its ever-expanding narrative. The city pulses with an energy that is both exhilarating and exhausting, and Imasuen’s depiction of it serves as an apt backdrop to his characters’ struggles.
At its core, Fine Boys is a meditation on masculinity; how it is shaped by external forces and how it often fails to align with the realities of the men it seeks to define. Ike’s pursuit of “fine boy” status is a reflection of a deeper desire to prove his worth in a society that values surface-level attributes. But as the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that the pursuit of this ideal is a hollow one. The “fine boy” image, with all its charm and allure, cannot protect Ike from the messy, painful realities of life, nor can it shield him from the emotional burdens that come with being a young man in a society that expects so much from him.
Sade, on the other hand, is a more introspective figure. His journey is one of quiet rebellion against the expectations placed upon him by his family and the weight of his own conscience. But like many young people in a country like Nigeria, his path to self-discovery is marked by confusion and uncertainty. He oscillates between wanting to carve out his own identity and being pulled back into the fold of traditional expectations; torn between familial duty and the desire to live authentically.
The novel’s exploration of love, sex, and relationships is equally nuanced. Imasuen portrays the complexity of romance and intimacy, capturing the delicate balancing act between desire and power, between affection and expectation. Whether it’s Ike’s complicated entanglement with a university girl or Sade’s distant crush on a fellow student, the relationships in Fine Boys are a microcosm of the larger societal dynamics at play. They are messy, often fleeting, and marked by a sense of longing and yearning for something more than what can be easily attained.
One of the most striking aspects of Fine Boys is its refusal to offer easy resolutions or tidy conclusions. The novel does not shy away from the complexities and contradictions of its characters, and it resists the temptation to provide a neat, satisfying ending. Instead, it leaves the reader with a sense of ambiguity; an acknowledgment that the search for self, for meaning, and for a sense of belonging is never a straightforward process. It’s a journey filled with detours, setbacks, and moments of revelation, but it is a journey that is ultimately worth taking.
Fine Boys is a searing exploration of the lives of young Nigerian men caught between tradition and modernity, between expectation and desire. It is a portrait of a generation grappling with the challenges of identity, ambition, and love in a country that is both a land of opportunity and a place of struggle. With its evocative prose, complex characters, and keen social insights, Fine Boys is a novel that resonates far beyond its Nigerian context. It is a story about the universal desire to find one’s place in the world, to navigate the turbulence of youth, and to emerge from it stronger—if not necessarily unscathed.
What makes Fine Boys so effective is that it does not turn this generational malaise into a performance of despair. There’s a deeply humane undercurrent that runs through the novel. Ewaen and his friends still joke, fall in love, dream of America, trade tapes of Tupac and Fela. Their minds are lit by books; Achebe, Soyinka, even foreign writers like Bukowski and Kerouac. They are part of a lost generation, yes, but not a passive one. Even in their most self-destructive moments, there’s a restlessness that hints at their desire to define themselves beyond their circumstances.
The title Fine Boys is layered with irony. On the surface, it refers to the youthful charisma of the protagonists, their swagger, their bravado. But as the novel progresses, “fine” becomes harder to pin down. These boys; witty, intelligent, hopeful, are battered by a system that neither protects nor uplifts them. Many fall through the cracks; some fall into them. Others just drift.
The novel is particularly honest about masculinity; not in a preachy or moralizing way, but in how it shows boys posturing, concealing pain, performing toughness to mask fear. Ewaen’s emotional evolution is subtle but powerful. He starts as a quiet, observant boy, a bit of a nerd, and gradually grows into a man aware of the fragility of life, the finality of loss. There are no grand epiphanies, only the quiet hardening that life in Nigeria imposes.
Friendship anchors the novel. Whether it’s Ewaen’s brotherhood with fellow students like Wilhelm, Lothario, and Mark, or his complicated entanglement with Onome, the relationships in Fine Boys are textured and believable. These characters argue about literature, smoke weed, seek solace in music and poetry, and occasionally break under pressure. But their bond feels real, one of the novel’s enduring achievements.
Stylistically, Imasuen writes with an ease that makes the novel feel conversational without sacrificing literary depth. There’s a musicality to the dialogue, rich with Pidgin English, slang, and pop culture references. This is English as it is spoken in the streets, classrooms, and beer parlors of Nigeria; a hybrid, adaptable, alive. Imasuen is not interested in translating Nigeria for the Western reader. He invites you in, instead. If you don’t understand a term, you catch up. This, too, is part of the novel’s honesty.
The pacing is leisurely but purposeful. There are no neat arcs or climactic resolutions. Life, as Imasuen portrays it, does not offer such structure. Tragedy strikes abruptly. Friendships dissolve. Love fizzles. And still, people move forward or sideways, or in circles. The episodic nature of the plot reflects the improvisational reality of youth, especially youth lived under the strain of failing institutions.
What’s most striking, though, is how the personal remains political. The novel never loses sight of the larger forces shaping its characters’ lives; military rule, ASUU strikes, police brutality, unemployment, but it doesn’t reduce them to symbols. These are full-bodied individuals whose interiority is respected, whose choices are not always noble, but always human.
Fine Boys ends not with triumph but with a kind of weary acceptance. The innocence is gone, the losses tallied, the dreams recalibrated. Yet there is something quietly defiant in Ewaen’s survival, in his decision to keep moving even when everything else collapses. It is a novel that says: even in dysfunction, there is dignity; even in failure, there is beauty
Since its publication, Fine Boys has not always received the same fanfare as more internationally celebrated Nigerian novels. Yet it stands as one of the most authentic portraits of 1990s youth in African fiction. In tone, it may remind readers of Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief, or Helon Habila’s Measuring Time, but it possesses a looseness, a lived-in quality that is distinctly its own.
In choosing to center ordinary lives, Imasuen resists the temptation to dramatize Nigeria’s dysfunction. Instead, he shows how that dysfunction becomes embedded in the minutiae of daily life; in missed lectures, in whispered warnings, in the tight clutch of fear when a student doesn’t return from class.
For Nigerian readers, the novel is a mirror, sometimes uncomfortable in its clarity. For international readers, it is an invitation: to see beyond headlines and hashtags into the lived experiences of those who came of age in the shadows of military boots and economic despair.
This is a novel that lingers, not because it offers answers, but because it asks the right questions. What do we become when the system gives us nothing? What do we remember when our youth is taken too soon? And how do we keep going, even when the road ahead is shrouded in smoke?
In Ewaen’s quiet resilience, in his stumbling toward adulthood, we see not just the story of a boy but the story of a country learning, painfully, to grow up.