Background for The Ingarie Files
The future isn't real, but don't let that stop you from imagining it. At the very least, you'll be entertained.
Picture created by Bing AI
On January 1st, 2015, I published a short story titled “The Retrieval Team” on my Facebook page. It is a science fiction story set in a post-breakup Nigeria in 2060 featuring a teen spy group of four from the section of the country which owned Lagos infiltrating a facility in the Niger Delta, a region that reorganized itself into a confederation of states.
The story was flashy, too ambitious, and not prudent in its projections. If anything, it was written on the strength of this idea alone: what if the country broke up and we had a cold war, the tech to create cyborg soldiers, and the moral bankruptcy to make this experiment on teens? It was only a “cool” idea. But realistic projections have hardly been a defining feature of sci-fi, so I can’t damn the effort on that count alone.
The dissolution of a state is in itself a rich enough story primer, regardless of whether this reflects the wish of this writer or not (for what it is worth, it does not). It gives me the right amount of explosive tension to begin a story and the right amount of excuse to introduce wild scenarios that would not fly had I launched the narrative from a well-ordered and peaceful state. Unless I have a Fire Nation armed and ready to attack from some extra-territorial quarter. I don’t fancy an invasion story or a full-scale civil war, so I’ll settle for a family break-up squabble. Besides, I think cloak-and-dagger stuff is better than a guns-blazing face-off. I’ll take Ludlum over Clancy any day.
In August 2022, the story popped up in my discussion with a friend. “There are potentials to that story,” he said. “You could make a novel out of it.” At that point, I had forgotten about the story, how you forget about things you’d done in the past that didn’t amount to much. I vaguely remembered that after I had published the story, I got reviews from friends who convinced me to expand it into a novel. I had woven a story before, and after the in-media res episode; I had posted and struggled to recall the bits at that moment. I immersed myself in the world of post-breakup Nigeria to flesh out a short story into a novel.
And I entered the Ingarie rabbit hole.
Say you are writing about a break-up. When did it happen? What were the proximal causes? Who broke away first? What sort of government do the newly independent states run? And what sort of relationships do they have with each other? What kind of life can be had in these places? (Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina by noting how happiness—as a state—is sameness, while each sadness is uniquely sad, and this idea holds great narrative potential) What technological developments, drawn from current trends, would shape the social experience of that future? What social changes, drawn from our contemporary society meeting an event like that, can we expect to see?
What came of the mind-wandering venture is a world where you can browse and sight-see when not watching spy teenagers engaged in a cybernetic-enhanced melee atop an eastbound night train speeding from Igbarra to Dembe. What came of it is THE INGARIE FILES.
The names of the locations have been altered, and the universe is schizo-different. The historical information, geographical details, and demographic sketches are off, and my taking license is motivated by a need to establish that this is not Nigeria. However, THE INGARIE FILES is still loosely based on our world because why invent a whole new world when you can plagiarize another fully-formed one? I wish my readers would read this as fiction only, not meant to reflect real characters, people, or places.
THE INGARIE FILES is a series of loosely connected stories, vignettes, travelogue entries, essays, news reports, magazine articles, academic papers, white papers, and so on that stitch together a world in patchwork.
The idea is that we patch together the place of a story by side glance as we read the stories. If we read one hundred stories set in a particular place, we can catch a panorama of the place as if we were taking snapshots of a mansion from different viewpoints and at different times. This simultaneously but indirectly gives us a view of the grounds and the change in weather according to the seasons. We can begin to feel like we know the place.
We can begin to learn its history and circumstances and feel like the place is part of us. We are not quite sure which is more real. The stories—because we sense their characters acting in a world we can believe in, for its expanding complexity and immersive depth? Or the world—because of the variety of people acting in it and off the actions of each other on a wide scale or over an extended period.
THE INGARIE FILES is a jigsaw puzzle where all the tiles tell stories, and the more tiles are attached, the more the puzzle changes, develops, and enriches. I set out to cover a period from 2038-2070 across various sub-locales in the Ingarie, the country whose break up founds the story.
How many Ingarie files? I don't know—a hundred?