Book Review: Boys, Girls and Beasts by Nathaniel Bivan Nathaniel Bivan’s Boys, Girls and Beasts (tempted to say breasts) is more than a science fiction or war narrative. It is a layered allegory that explores the violent inheritance of post-colonial African states. At its heart is the character Jaka, whose transformation from a displaced boy […]
Book Review: Boys, Girls and Beasts by Nathaniel Bivan
Nathaniel Bivan’s Boys, Girls and Beasts (tempted to say breasts) is more than a science fiction or war narrative. It is a layered allegory that explores the violent inheritance of post-colonial African states. At its heart is the character Jaka, whose transformation from a displaced boy to a terrifying “beast,” then a soldier, a teacher, a father, and back again, mirrors the cyclical trauma experienced by individuals and communities trapped in endless crises. In Jaka’s story, we see the vivid metaphor of a generation born into structural dislocation— children from villages ravaged by conflict. These are young lives shaped by the harsh realities of war, hardened by the need to survive, and then thrown back into a system that offers no refuge for their healing.Jaka’s journey, later as Luka, becomes a prism through which we see the unresolved tensions of African statehood. From the outset, the violence that displaces him is not random. It is part of a larger architecture: a state built without consent, inherited without cohesion, and governed without care. His village’s destruction is not just a tragic backstory, but the first movement in a familiar rhythm of state-sponsored silence and abandonment. His recruitment into the United Nations of West Africa Army is less salvation than another layer of conscription. Africa’s youth, again, absorbed into projects of power they never chose.The beasts in Bivan’s narrative are not simply monstrous figures; they are constructed identities, forged in suffering, projected as threats, and then instrumentalised by systems of control. The lines blur between victim and villain, and in this moral ambiguity, Bivan opens space for empathy and reckoning. Luka’s eventual return to “beast” form is not regression, but revelation. It reveals the impossibility of full reintegration into a state that never recognised his humanity to begin with.Through characters like Captain Doko and Dr Frank, each representing different strata of power and knowledge—we see the machinery of the state and global military-industrial systems that co-opt African bodies and narratives for their own ends. The subtext is clear: colonisation did not end; it simply rebranded through institutions, NGOs, and peacekeeping missions. In this way, Boys, Girls and Beasts becomes a meditation on how Africa still reels from the aftershocks of the Berlin Conference—a cartographic violence that drew lines without stories, created nations without nations, and left generations navigating the ruins.The emotional attraction between boy and girl often framed as love rears its head amidst the chaos. Tabitha appears not just as a romantic interest, but as a reminder of the possibility of tenderness. The details of their entanglement are not painted graphically but we can discern there was something between. She aroused something in Jaka that he had previously thought was non-existent.Her child with Jaka/Luka offers a fragile hope and becomes a twist to his topsy turvy life. Bivan’s world also plays with Afrofuturist elements. The metal Tantalum—a rare, biocompatible element—becomes symbolic. Its presence echoes Wakanda’s Vibranium, yet its deployment here feels grounded in a grimmer reality. Tantalum, mined in real-world conflict zones like the Congo, becomes a site of both promise and plunder. It is a reminder that African futures, too, are commodified.In Boys, Girls and Beasts Science fiction is not an escape but return: to trauma, to history, to memory. Jaka’s metamorphoses reflect a world where transformation is not always growth but survival—a constant shifting to meet the next threat, the next erasure. His story is deeply African, not just in its geography but in its interrogation of what it means to exist in nations still struggling to define the boundaries of justice, memory, and humanity.Bivan has written a novel that demands we confront not just the beasts in his pages, but the ones we create, ignore, and institutionalise. The result is a powerful, decolonial narrative that urges us to remember, rethink, and reimagine what African lives can be when no longer trapped in the prison’s history left behind.
