Every Day Is for the Thief

Nigerian author Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief is a work of autofiction originally published in Nigeria in 2007 and published in the US in 2014. The novel unfolds in picaresque style from the first-person perspective, as a narrator who closely resembles the author returns to Nigeria after 15 years in the US to reckon with Nigerian national identity and his own legacy. Surprised to find that he feels less comfortable in his homeland as he would have expected, he struggles to readjust to the realities of Lagosian life. Rather than get bogged down with plot, Cole delivers a sensory exploration of this African city, resulting in individual moments that, combined, render an authentic and complex portrait of Lagos.

This guide uses the 2015 Random House Trade Paperback Edition.

Plot Summary

Every Day Is for the Thief follows an unnamed narrator as he journeys from New York City back to his hometown of Lagos for the first time in 15 years. He’s searching for an understanding of Nigeria as a modern place through the lens of an emigrant without strong ties to his homeland—his Nigerian father is long dead, and he’s estranged from his white mother, who also left Lagos—and is trying to decide if he still belongs. The novel unfolds in a non-linear manner, through brief snapshots of life on the streets of Lagos, and resembles a travel diary or memoir, as the narrator intersperses what he sees wandering through the city or running errands with his family with his thoughts about Nigerian culture, art, and history.

The beginning of his trip is marked by numerous encounters with corruption: As the novel begins, he visits the Lagosian consulate in New York to obtain a new passport, and he’s told that to receive it in a timely manner, he must bribe the government officials. Upon his arrival in Lagos, an airport worker tries to exact a bribe to avoid detainment, and as his Aunty Folake drives him home, the operator at a toll booth pockets the toll money. In addition, he witnesses two police officers arguing about turf as they pull cars over and demand fines without cause. The next day, he visits an internet café and finds himself at the source of the infamous 419 scam that plagues the internet and is rife in Nigeria. Throughout these instances of corruption, a broken system of interpersonal grift replaces official policies and rules. The narrator finds it disheartening and longs for a way to hope for his homeland.

He finds one, briefly, in his conversations with a young relative and in a day trip into the city on the danfo (the local public transit), where he sees the vibrant city up close and encounters a woman reading one of his favorite authors. His hope is tempered, though, by more stories of corruption and violence. At the wedding he came to attend, he hears the story of one of the guests whose husband was killed by thieves. He describes how the nation’s pastors grow rich from donations, and he recounts how his nephew doesn’t knowing the difference between a humanist and an atheist. In the most troubling story, he learns of a young boy who was burned alive in the markets for being a thief.

The narrator sees the city’s vibrancy and life but can’t ignore the problems. He seeks out culture, finding some promising places like the MUSON Centre, which is devoted to cultivating music education, but he’s dispirited by how the National Museum’s whitewashes Nigeria’s history and government officials plunder their own culture. When he finds a music store that sells jazz, he’s alarmed to see that they’re pirating the work, and only later does he find a bookstore and record label that’s trying to create a sense of community around Nigerian art.

He encounters old friends, including his childhood best friend and his first love. They reveal different ways that the Nigerian middle class struggles; even doctors live on close to subsistence wages. When he and his family are held up and threatened while trying to unload a container of goods for a local school, he realizes that he can’t move back to Lagos, as he’d be too troubled by the violence around and within him. All around him, he sees corruption, an ignorance of Nigeria’s history in the slave trade, and an unwillingness to move beyond being a culture that imports innovation instead of investing in its own. He connects all these ideas to paint a portrait of a nation whose history has led its people to oppress each other.

Near his departure, the narrator comes down with malaria and is surprised when his friend tries to explain that if he didn’t believe he had it, he wouldn’t. To him, this exchange emblemizes Nigeria’s larger problems. After returning home to the US, he can’t sleep, and he thinks of a neighborhood he visited where he saw a group of carpenters carving coffins for their compatriots, an honest bit of work that speaks to the complicated nature of Lagos and the narrator’s hope for a better future.