In response to my piece, “Is Betrayal Avoidable in Relationships,” inspired by the Sanusi and El-Rufai story that has become one of the most fascinating national conversations today, I received a message from Hadiza Bagudu, the popular author and public intellectual based in Abuja.
She wrote: “Hello! It’s a pleasure to hear from you, Bagudu Mohammed once again. That was a very thoughtful piece on friendship and betrayal. Since you have such a keen interest in literature and deep social themes, I think you’d really enjoy Fantah.”
She described Fantah as an immersive historical novel set in a 19th-century Fulani kingdom, exploring love, ambition and the difficult choices people make to survive. She also pointed out that political interests complicating friendship is a central theme of the novel, which navigates the history of the Sokoto Caliphate.
Intrigued, I explored the story further, including available material about the book, to understand its themes and draw lessons from it.
Before entering Fantah’s world, however, two distinctions are important. First, my original article dealt with raw reality, people experience in real life, without the comforting structure of art or the expectation of a satisfying ending. Life does not necessarily conform to the moral symmetry that fiction often seeks. Second, my central argument remains that betrayal among friends is not always avoidable, and it is not always the fault of the betrayer.
Fantah provides an interesting fictional lens through which to examine that dilemma.
At its heart, Fantah is a story about love, ambition, loyalty, betrayal, power and destiny, set against the cultural and political landscape of 19th-century Northern Nigeria. Fantah is a young Bororo girl from a nomadic cattle-herding community in Fombina. Her relatively simple world changes when she encounters Hayah, a Fulani prince and military man in his early forties.
The story begins in October 1884. While hunting in the savannah, Hayah saves Fantah from a lion. That dramatic encounter becomes the foundation of their relationship. Fantah falls deeply in love with him, but Hayah is no ordinary romantic hero. He is a descendant of Sheikh Usman dan Fodio, with royal connections to Sokoto, and is consumed by the desire to reclaim what he considers his birthright.
That is where the story moves beyond romance into politics, warfare and power.
Fantah is the emotional centre of the novel. Her love for Hayah becomes so powerful that she abandons the life expected of her, rejects the traditional marriage arranged with her cousin Sa’adu, and accepts personal sacrifices to remain with him.
Yet she also demonstrates remarkable intuition. She repeatedly sees dangers in Hayah’s political decisions that his ambition prevents him from recognising.
Hayah, meanwhile, is deliberately complicated. He possesses military ability, royal legitimacy and genuine affection for Fantah, but his political ambition repeatedly competes with his responsibility toward her.
His dilemma resembles what Social Exchange Theory describes as the weighing of competing rewards and commitments. He wants both love and political restoration, but when the two collide, ambition often takes precedence.
The novel therefore asks a difficult question: How much should a person sacrifice for love? Its answer is far less romantic than the question suggests.
Hayah’s political journey eventually leads him into an alliance with the powerful rebel warlord Rabeh. This is where ambition and betrayal become inseparable. Hayah believes Rabeh can help him achieve his political objective, but the alliance eventually turns against him. The consequences extend beyond Hayah to Fantah, their families and wider communities.
Other characters, including Diddi, Fantah’s confidante; Malam Buba, her father; Talatu, Hayah’s wife; and Fadr Allah, Rabeh’s son, deepen the personal and political dimensions of the story.
If Fantah is read merely as a love story, some of its sharpest lessons are missed.
First, love does not always conquer ambition. Hayah genuinely loves Fantah, yet his political aspirations repeatedly place that relationship under strain.
Second, loyalty can involve profound sacrifice, but sacrifice without boundaries can become self-erasure. Fantah’s devotion is admirable, but it also raises questions about whether complete devotion to another person can coexist with genuine personal agency.
Third, ambition itself is not necessarily destructive, but it becomes dangerous when it blinds judgment. Hayah’s alliance with Rabeh illustrates an old political lesson: shared interests do not necessarily mean shared principles. When people cooperate only because their objectives temporarily coincide, the alliance can collapse once those interests diverge.
Most importantly, Fantah warns Hayah about Rabeh. He does not sufficiently heed her. When the betrayal eventually comes, therefore, the story becomes more complicated than a simple tale of a wicked betrayer and an innocent victim.
This is where Fantah strongly echoes my original argument. Betrayal can involve the moral failure of the betrayer, but it can also expose a failure of judgment by the betrayed. Trust without discernment can become vulnerability. A person may betray you, but your own decisions can sometimes create the conditions in which that betrayal becomes possible.
The novel’s cultural dimension is equally significant. Its portrayal of Bororo settlement life, cattle-rearing, marriage customs, village authority, language, clothing and social organisation provides a world rarely represented in mainstream Nigerian fiction.
Hadiza’s own experience of growing up in Yola surrounded by Fulani culture and cattle camps evidently informs this richness.
Yet even cultural preservation invites critical reflection. Historical fiction can preserve a culture while also romanticising aspects of it.
The beauty of tradition may sometimes obscure internal inequalities, particularly those affecting women. Fantah possesses considerable agency. She leaves home, chooses love and challenges Hayah, but much of her agency remains tied to a man whose journey is primarily political.
That creates the novel’s central asymmetry. Fantah’s cry is essentially, “I want to love, and I want to be loved,” while Hayah’s is, “I want to reclaim what I believe is my birthright.” Their journeys intersect, but they never completely align. She is willing to sacrifice much for him, while he is willing to sacrifice much of their relationship for political restoration.
This is what makes Fantah fascinating on three levels. As a love story, it is tender and tragic. As a cultural story, it offers a rare window into Bororo Fulani life. As a political parable, it traces a cycle as old as power itself: birthright, ambition, alliance, dependence, betrayal and destruction.
And that political reading brings us back to my original argument.
Fantah demonstrates how conflicting interests, difficult choices and survival instincts can create circumstances in which betrayal becomes almost inevitable. Yet fiction naturally seeks moral clarity. It wants us to identify the victim, the betrayer and the lesson. Real life is rarely so neat.
Sometimes betrayal is a deliberate moral choice. Sometimes it is the consequence of competing loyalties, fear, survival or political necessity. Sometimes the betrayed person ignores warnings or misreads the person they trust. And sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, relationships reach a point where interests simply become irreconcilable.
That is why betrayal is not always avoidable, nor is it always the fault of the betrayer alone.
Perhaps it is precisely in this tension between fiction’s desire for justice and life’s refusal to provide it that Fantah becomes unforgettable.
*Bagudu Mohammed* is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
