Those Who Would Be King

This powerful novel—full of tantalizing twists and turns, powerful heroes and heinous villains—is set in the fictional, impoverished African country of Maleziland and explores the corruption of power, the legacy of colonialism, and the putative integration of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. 

King Mabanda controls his country with a violent, omnipotent fist. The king’s son, Mandebala, is a tyrant-in-training who has grown up with the opulence and privilege of an uber-wealthy prince. But when the king meets Shigeku, the only captive survivor of a border war with a neighboring nation, the prisoner tells of switching his own brother at birth with the king’s actual son.
​     The king immediately extricates his true heir, Mateyo, from the slums to the palace to take his rightful place as the prince of Maleziland, while the loathsome Mandebala is thrown out and forced to live in the nearby shantytown. The benevolent new prince experiences the trappings and privileges of wealth and power, and ultimately embarks upon a plan that will improve the lives of his people and country. Meanwhile, the true brothers, Shigeku and Mandebala, plot, with the keen support of the Catholic Church, to overthrow the regime so corruption and self-serving depravity can once again reign supreme.

TALKING POINTS
-Why would a white Canadian want to educate people about how democracy and foreign aid affects the underlying economic conditions in sub-Saharan Africa?
-How did Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad inspire Brent to write Those Who Would Be King?
-Brent can discuss his thoughts on whether we all have a primitive, atavistic nature hard-wired into our DNA that can be brought to the forefront by the right conditions?
-Does power corrupt? Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Is nature (genetics) responsible for a person’s character, rather than nurture (as in where and how you were raised)? And how did colonialism, and the carving up of the African continent impact relations between countries and people?
-How does the plight of First Nations peoples in North America parallel that of the characters in Those Who Would Be King?
-Which African country is the fictional country of Maleziland primarily based upon in Those Who Would Be King? And why?