Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi is a noir detective novel set in a French colonial city in West Africa during the dry Harmattan season.
Plot Overview
Boubacar, a down-on-his-luck “chercher” (finder of missing persons), lives in the Ethnic Quarter of a city under French colonial rule. One night, a severely wounded young woman named Hawa stumbles into his apartment seeking refuge. She’s bleeding from a stomach wound and being pursued by police. Before he can help her, she disappears, only to be found days later suspended in mid-air above the city square—dead, her body grotesquely displayed as if floating.
As Boubacar investigates, he discovers Hawa was a “Floater”—part of a militant resistance movement whose members surgically remove an internal organ in a ritual act of defiance against French occupation. This organ, when removed, grants the ability to levitate but eventually proves fatal.
Major Revelations
The investigation uncovers multiple interconnected conspiracies:
- Mass Graves: French housing developments (“Adam Islands”) are being built on sites where French forces massacred entire villages during the war
- The Bombing: The French Quarter attack was orchestrated by the colonial government itself as a pretext to suppress the native population before an election
- Boubacar’s Past: He’s a war veteran who fought for the French in the sorodassi (colonial army) and participated in the very massacres now being covered up
Key Themes
- Colonial Violence: The novel explores how colonialism operates through both spectacular violence and bureaucratic erasure
- Dual Identity: As someone of mixed heritage (“deux-fois”—tried twice by God), Boubacar navigates between French and indigenous worlds
- Truth and Reconciliation: The political subplot centers on the “Murutilen” (Rebellious One), a candidate promising to expose wartime atrocities
- Guilt and Redemption: Boubacar seeks atonement for his war crimes while grappling with systemic complicity
Resolution
Boubacar exposes the conspiracy by bombing an empty housing development built on a mass grave, revealing the bones to investigators. His friend Moussa, a policeman also wrestling with their shared past, arrests the French developer Honoré Mirbeau de L’Isle-Adam. The novel ends on election day, with the outcome uncertain.
The final chapter reveals Hawa’s perspective: she had come to Boubacar’s apartment intending to kill him for murdering her family during the war, but in her dying moments, chose forgiveness instead.
Harmattan Season is a powerful meditation on memory, justice, and the impossibility of escaping history in a land where the violence of colonialism remains both buried and ever-present.