Teju Cole's "Small Fates"

Teju Cole, who wrote the excellent Open City and the intriguing but unfindable Every Day is For the Thief, is tweeting "small fates," which are a variant on Feneon's "three-line novels," based on/culled from(?) Nigerian local news. Here are some that I particularly liked:

• E. Mozie, 28, won’t finish his political science degree at the University of Jos. He stole two phones and is to be hanged.
• Segun, 16, who toppled into the flood waters of Egbe Idimu while answering the call of nature, was pulled out by divers, alive.
• If sneaking into a house to have sex with a neighbor's sleeping wife is wrong, Edunjobi, of Oshodi, doesn't want to be right.
• Hamidu, 19, sent to eliminate Baba Ali, 65, in Ibeju Lekki, killed a chicken while waiting. The old man arrived and was likewise cut open. 
• Love is so restless. When T. Dafe’s girlfriend dumped him in Surulere, he went at her with a pen knife until she was no more.
• The 40 long-dead Edo State pensioners who had kept drawing their pensions will now be left without a source of income.
• Professor A.B. Mamman, after a tiring journey from Abuja to Zaria, lay down on a hotel bed and never woke up.
• One, two, three, four, five. Women sleeping on a restaurant floor in Ikeja. No, dead.
• On Forcados street, Kaduna, where money buys intimacy, someone took strenuous exception, and detonated a bomb.
• In Lagos, Mr Sikiru, 33, and Mrs Awosanya, 38, inspected schools and pocketed bribes, as though they were actual government employees.
• Mr Malik collapsed while on duty at Murtala Muhammad International Airport, which, unluckily, has no doctor, ambulance, or medicine.
• At the gates of the College of Education in Ekiadolor was placed, by his enemies, the freshly-severed head of an unnamed student.
• What God has joined together, Olubukola, in Agege, wants to put asunder, merely because her husband knocked three of her teeth out.
• Mr Henshaw Asuquo, a clergyman, traveled from Eket to his village and, upon arrival, went into his room and hanged himself.
• In Abuja, Mrs Ali, wife of someone who used to be something, put up illegal structures, and started a brawl when they were demolished.
• Micah, 30, of Igbolodun, breast fondler, was for that reason jailed.
• The Minister of Aviation, Princess Ogiemwinyi, arrived in Kano in long-sleeved shirt and jeans, scandalizing moderate Muslims.
• Like Moses, Romulus, and Remus, a baby, newly-born, was found under a parked SUV outside a mosque in Orile-Agege.
• In Ekemgbo three Cameroonian quacks were caught peddling Chinese herbs.
• Mr Okiemute, of the Delta State House of Assembly, entered the chamber dressed as a boy scout. Nevertheless he is sane.
• “Madam, the car has been stolen,” Amaziah, a driver in Lagos said, correctly, as he had stolen it himself with a duplicated key.
• Miffed during a cleanup exercise, a truculent roadside trader in Port Harcourt showed sanitation officials his gun. 

• Arrested by fearless police officers, the four men who robbed a bank in Ikorudu were all themselves fearless police officers.

I am not, btw, convinced by his introduction. It seems to me that the slight archaism, or perhaps the more general instability of register (many of these sound, I assume intentionally, like translations), is doing a lot of the work. (So is the writerliness, of course, the impression that the names and stories are being used like symbols in a mathematical formula, which contrasts nicely with the grisliness of the stories.) A particularly nice example of shifting registers:

Pomp, pageantry, and tears of joy. A ceremony was held for graduates of the entrepreneurial training program at Kirikiri Prison.

Surely a good part of what's going on here, literarily, is the juxtaposition of somewhat dated bombast ("pomp, pageantry...") with late 20th cent. business-speak ("entrepreneurial") and with the local detail. This might owe as much to the dialect as to the writer -- for some reason one thinks of Nigerian English as tending toward the florid; an uncle of mine used to live in Lagos, and claimed that in Nigeria a cold was always a catarrh, but he did not like the place much... -- but it seems to me a large part of why these things work so well.