At the end of Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike's 1965 novel, Toads for Supper, one of the key characters, Aduke Olowu, lover and fiancé of the central protagonist, Amadi Chukwuka, had suffered a mental crisis for which she is taken to the Aro Psychiatric hospital in Abeokuta. The cause is heartbreak. She had received a letter from Amadi which seemed to have broken off their engagement, already under severe pressure, from the tension of ethnic and identity politics, the undercurrent of both the novel, and its imaginary site, the University of Southern Nigeria. In a sense, Ike is an intellectual flâneur, a traveller through the landscape of Nigeria's pioneer centres of knowledge-making, the universities, in a critical era of late colonial and early postcolonial nation-building. His novels thus constitute a formidable archaeology of nationness. That is why they are such vital sources of the modern national cultural memory and its historical narrative.

Through such novels as Toads for Supper and the Naked Gods, for instance, we get a sense of the contradictions, and the emergent ‘Crises in the Temple’ as the famous Nigerian intellectual Dr Pius Okigbo once later described them, in Nigeria's modern universities, actually mirroring the crisis of the modern Nigerian state. This crisis is reflected in the inter-ethnic wrangling between the Igbo and the Yoruba ethnic groups in their quest to inherit the leadership of postcolonial Nigeria. The conflict is telegraphed powerfully in Toads for Supper. So then comes Toads Forever, and Aduke Olowu is still in the psychiatric hospital under the strict care of the Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr Modupe Aina, and the hovering scrutiny of Aduke's room-mate in Oliaku Hall at the University, Bisi, whose guardianship is as fervent as it is suspect. From the opening pages, the situation of the novel is confined to the exact place of its last action, the very ambiguity of it, which many critics have already pointed out, insisting that Toads for Supper ended unsatisfactorily, without resolving the moral contradictions that it had erected.