Looking for Transwonderland
Travels in Nigeria
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A “remarkable chronicle” of a journey back to this West African nation after years of exile (The New York Times Book Review).
Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to visit her father in Nigeria—a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. After her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was killed there, she didn’t return for several years. Then she decided to come to terms with the country her father given his life for.
Traveling from the exuberant chaos of Lagos to the calm beauty of the eastern mountains; from the eccentricity of a Nigerian dog show to the decrepit kitsch of the Transwonderland Amusement Park, she explores Nigerian Christianity, delves into the country’s history of slavery, examines the corrupting effect of oil, and ponders the huge success of Nollywood.
She finds the country as exasperating as ever, and frequently despairs at the corruption and inefficiency she encounters. But she also discovers that it is far more beautiful and varied than she had ever imagined, with its captivating thick tropical rain forest and ancient palaces and monuments—and most engagingly and entertainingly, its unforgettable people.
“The author allows her love-hate relationship with Nigeria to flavor this thoughtful travel journal, lending it irony, wit and frankness.” —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this combination travel narrative and personal memoir, Noo, who was raised in England, seeks to explore and understand the country where she was born as well as her father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a respected Nigerian writer, television producer, and environmental activist who was executed on false charges by the Abacha military regime in 1995. Many of her observations are bleakly comical: the "Transwonderland" of the title, an amusement park touted in a travel guide, turns out to be a few rusting carnival rides surrounded by unmowed grass and perplexed children who can't afford to ride them. Others are tragic: unreliable public infrastructure, the decay of historic sites, and the theft of artworks. Most damaging of all is the absence of the social contract whereby work is honestly done and honestly rewarded. Employers delay payment of wages for months; public servants seek bribes; government funds are repeatedly squandered or embezzled. In a passage that is all the more stirring for its emotional restraint, Saro-Wiwa describes how she and her family received the skeletal remains of her father in 2005. She has come to love some things about Nigeria its natural beauty, its fascinating indigenous heritages, its music and dancing but finds that her native land "couldn't seduce me fully when all roads snaked back to corruption, the rottenness my father fought against and the cause he died for."
