10 The New York ReviewA Country Out of Control
Colin Grant
Chronicles from the Land
of the Happiest People on Earth
by Wole Soyinka.
Pantheon, 444 pp., $28.In Welcome to Lagos, a TV miniseries
broadcast a dozen years ago, the BBC
claimed to turn a compassionate lens
on the sprawling Nigerian city of at
least 10 million, which it portrayed as
an uncaring and brutal place populated
by resourceful poor people, rogues,
and vagabonds. The program followed
impoverished inhabitants eking out a
living on the beach, at the lagoon, and
at a rubbish dump.
When Nigeria’s Nobel laureate Wole
Soyinka watched the episodes, he strug-
gled to contain his ire at what he consid-
ered a reflection of the worst aspects of
Britain’s attitude toward its former col-
ony. The depiction was “jaundiced and
extremely patronizing,” he lamented,
as if it were saying, “Oh, look at these
people who can make a living from
the pit of degradation.” Lagos, as a mi-
crocosm for Nigeria, acted as a soiled
canvas, Soyinka implied, on which
others, largely ignorant of the society’s
nuances, had too often and without
sanction imprinted their prejudices.
The BBC was guilty of a reductive por-
trayal of a richly vibrant city.
Soyinka’s complaint has long been
echoed by his contemporaries and by
younger generations, who have ques-
tioned the myriad hackneyed ways the
continent and its cities are depicted by
outsiders. In his fiercely satirical essay
“How to Write About Africa,” the
Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wai naina
advised:Never have a picture of a well-
adjusted African on the cover of
your book.... An AK- 47, prom-
inent ribs, naked breasts: use
these.... Taboo subjects: ordinary
domestic scenes, love between Af-
ricans (unless a death is involved).Soyinka would concur, though in
writing about Nigeria he has at times
sounded like a relative who is happy
to voice criticism of family members
himself but takes umbrage when a non-
member articulates similar sentiments.
When he was in his early thirties this
prolific poet, playwright, and essay-
ist had two intensely solitary years to
ponder his homeland: in 1967 he was
imprisoned without trial for twenty- six
months by Nigeria’s military regime
for presuming to act as a peacemaker
during the war over Biafran secession.
Soyinka chronicled his detention in
the memoir The Man Died, recalling
how he was cruelly kept in a compound
where the condemned were usually
housed ahead of their execution.
He had thought to call the book A
Slow Lynching, but the final title ar-
rived unbidden one day when he was
inquiring about a Nigerian journalist
who’d been badly beaten by police and
hospitalized. A cable informed him
simply, “The Man Died.” Later So-
yinka reflected on the terrible news:I was struck first by the phrasing.
It sounded weird, yet familiar....
The ending to a moral tale... a cat-echumenical pronouncement, the
eyes of a surgeon above the mask,
or the surprise of a torturer that
misjudged his strength. I heard
the sound in many different voices
from the past and from the future.
It seemed to me that this really is
the social condition of tyranny—
the man died... the matter is dead.
The man dies in all who keep si-
lent in the face of tyranny.In numerous plays, essays, and
speeches over the decades, Soyinka
called out the tyranny of Nigerian re-
gimes and their moral corrosion, which
infected the country’s institutions and
schooled its population. He called for
fundamental change, even as he was tol-
erated by each new government only be-
cause he was Africa’s first winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature. The critical
assessment outlined in those hundreds
of thousands of unsparing words has
not, though, found its way into one of his
novels for almost fifty years, until now.
The title Chronicles from the Land
of the Happiest People on Earth is
ironic. Finland ranks as the world’s
happiest country; Nigeria is nowhere
near the top ten. And in this novel-
ized rendition of Africa’s richest and
most populous nation, a satire in broad
brushstrokes focused mostly on the
elite and establishment figures, all the
characters accept the title’s description
of the country as a necessary or useful
fiction.The book sets out to be an all-
encompassing state- of- the- nation novel,
looking at Nigeria’s broken society
through four fictional figures: the ole-
aginous prime minister, Sir Godfrey
Danfere (Sir Goddie); a media mogul,
Chief Modu Udensi Oromotaya, pro-
prietor of the salacious newspaper TheNational Inquest; Papa Davina, an
evangelical preacher who presides over
a megachurch; and an altruistic public
servant, the philosophical surgeon Dr.
Kighare Menka. Only Menka is clear-
eyed, enraged, and passionate enough
to articulate the urgent need for the
population to wake from its torpor (his
voice and outlook are perhaps closest to
Soyinka’s); the other three are cynical,
self- serving narcissists.
Ekumenika, Papa Davina’s healing
ministry, is located in a festering neigh-
borhood with “scattered ledges of iron
sheets, clay tiles, and corrugated tin
rooftops” alongside isolated pockets
of “ultra- modern high- rise buildings.”
To get to his sacred retreat, seekers and
penitents must wade through “pebbles
and screed, garbage that sometimes
featured both human and animal fae-
ces.” Early on Papa Davina puts a pos-
itive spin on the negative assumptions
about Nigeria:There are many, including our fel-
low citizens who describe this na-
tion as one vast dung heap.... [But]
if the world produces dung, the
dung must pile up somewhere....
It means we are performing a ser-
vice to humanity.Davina has worked hard to create
his ministry, but his evangelism has
garnered him a fortune. Preacher-
entrepreneurs have long attracted the
attention of novelists and journalists.
In 2011 Forbes published a list of the
five richest pastors in Nigeria, whose
combined net worth was estimated at
$199–$235 million. Soyinka compli-
cates the stereotype with Davina’s idio-
syncratic backstory.
Like several of the other characters,
as a young adult Davina (then known
as Dennis Tibidje) spent time studying
in Europe, but he took more interest infemale companions than his required
reading list and dropped out to try
his luck traveling without a visa to the
US, a folly that earned him months in
a detention center. His incarceration,
during which he read widely about
self- made men, brought on a kind of
epiphany: God called and, on being
deported, Dennis Tibidje, fired by the
captivating story of the messianic Afri-
can American preacher Father Divine
(circa 1876–1965), transformed himself
into a pastor.
Father Divine provided the template
for Papa Davina, who began sporting
a gold- topped walking stick and dress-
ing “mannequin sharp in a three- piece
suit... with an embroidered waistcoat
that glittered with gemstones.” His sig-
nature hybrid look, “his face wreathed
in camouflage,” included a “neutral-
izing turban and sunglasses,” and his
voice exuded rapture.
Early chapters of the novel devoted
to Davina can be confusing, partly be-
cause of Soyinka’s layering of detail
without giving any initial sense of its
relative importance, but primarily be-
cause of the character’s various name
changes. From Dennis Tibidje, the
overseas student goes through several
versions of himself before he settles
on the vision of a “creative spiritual
trafficker.” He starts by traversing the
country in a camper and holding im-
promptu revivalist meetings, and fi-
nally becomes a national celebrity, “the
Gardener of Souls,” Apostle Tibidje.The obsessive zeal for taking a new
name, thereby reinventing oneself and
improving on one’s identity, is found
throughout the population. Even the
dissatisfied prime minister Sir Goddie
upgrades his title to “the People’s Stew-
ard.” “‘Branding’ is a word entirely free
of irony,” the Nigerian writer Chima-
manda Ngozi Adichie has said, “and
[Nigerians] use it to refer even to them-
selves. ‘I want to become a big brand,’
young people brazenly say.”
In Chronicles, the country’s leaders
have also learned its value. The phrase
“The Happiest People in the World” is
a consummate exercise in rebranding.
The Ministry of Happiness distracts
the population with fiestas and innu-
merable nationwide awards, including
the Yeomen of the Year Award (YoY)
and the People’s Award for the Com-
mon Touch (PAC T). The competitive
awards seem tantalizingly winnable,
and though resignation to one’s fate is a
national pastime, there’s also a popular
belief in divine intervention to improve
the chances of winning and escaping
one’s destiny. The power of prayer-
ful change for individuals is echoed
in the state’s National Day of Prayers
“against drought, floods, diseases, cor-
ruption, locust invasion,... kidnappers,
paedophiles, traffic carnage, ritual kill-
ers, etc., etc.” Luckily the “Gardener
of Souls” does not just confine himself
to his congregation’s spiritual health;
he’s a modern Moses with an electronic
staff, we’re told, tuned to detecting oil
reserves, for instance, beneath farm-
land and ancestral fishing ponds.
Papa Davina assuredly navigates a
world of increasing religious militancyWole Soyinka; illustration by Hanneke RozemullerGrantGreenhouse 10 _ 17 .indd 10 3 / 10 / 22 4 : 00 PM