For Sam Omatseye, the author of Crocodile Girl, which has been recently re-issued by Paresia Books, Nigeria, the novel is all about prejudice and how it can corrode the society.

Responding to question by Laura Angela Bagnetto of Radio France International on what inspired the work in a recent interview, Omatseye said: “The story of the Crocodile Girl was told to me by my father. There was actually a situation in his own village when he was growing up. There was a woman who was so beautiful, she could not be thought human. So, they said that at night she went into the river and became a crocodile, so that was the prejudice that was cast on the woman.

“So, that was where I took the story from. I was in the US when I started thinking about this novel, so I decided that I would use that material to track this prejudice and also look at African history and how prejudice even within African history, especially with slavery also affected relations between black and black as against white and black.”

Omatseye, who described Alero as a very interesting character, said he saw her as the fulcrum of the whole narrative. According to him, “She is the one who is beautiful and charming and she is the one who has to suffer because of her beauty, and she is the one who has a relationship with the white visitor, Tim, and she is the one who has to suffer because of that. The story of the prejudice is here. She simultaneously reflects it and she reflects on other people her own prejudice that she suffers.”

“The other issue is beauty, because one of the main characters, Alero, is constantly told how beautiful she is but the fact that she is a nurse is disregarded and she is almost two dimensional, because people see her with her beauty or her curse as being the daughter of the crocodile woman. It defines her, which is really sad, because, obviously she has more depth than that.”

Veteran is Omatseye’s favourite character, for “He is the liberator of the tale, he is the one that catalyses the narrative because it is on him that the story about how to get to the forest takes place and it was him that makes Tim get adjusted to the environment. It is he who can challenge the local elites, the traditional elites without consequences. So, it is around that man that the whole narrative hinges. He belongs to that generation and he is also a rebel to that generation.”

The author is working on another novel at the moment. :It has a sort of resemblance to this but it is quite a different story,” he said