A sad review of Wole Soyinka’s (2021) Chronicles from the land of the happiest people on earth
Obviously, the structure of the narrative is pure genius. The suspense is achieved by first letting the reader know briefly what happened but not why and how. This intrigues and makes for fast-forward reading. Some critics have apparently called it a ‘who dunnit’ but I don’t think so. Some have described the novel as a satire. Yes and no. The narrative structure, as praised above, may of course reflect the author’s long tenure in writing, padding the story line with vocabulary worthy of a poly-polyglot, invoking not only the zeitgeist to the point of ridicule but also displaying a globalized array of connections that Nigeria and Nigerians have with tragicomical places like Austria and Germany, the latter which features the Oktoberfest, an absurd festivity that runs parallel to the presumed Nigerian addiction of public festivals featured so prominently in the novel.
Having been brought up in Bavaria myself, I can lend an air of authority to the proceedings at said fest but I must confess that prior to reading the novel I knew next to nothing about the local flavours of Nigeria. Now I certainly do, even as distilled from a work that is a presumably a great mixture of fact and fiction. Of the facts one can read in Wikipedia and the daily news: corruption in high places, murderous religious bigotry – from Boko Haram to Soyinka’s hopefully fictional semi-Christian Papa Davina dealing in human parts – the traffic chaos of Lagos, the colonial hangovers in the professional elites, etc., etc. (I was always told not to use the ‘etc.’ as it invites unwanted questions like ‘what etc.?’ but now I like it seen used by Soyinka to great effect – there are also other orthographic gems, like the use of double quotation marks that here are NOT used for reported speech, and bold script as emphasis and using italics for reported speech without quotation marks – great to see a writer breaking the “grammar” rules which BTW are also invoked by Soyinka as a distinguishing feature between the snobs of the educated classes versus the Nigerian salt of the earth that follow no such rules).
The universal themes of human companionship, as portrayed between the two main protagonists, the engineer and the surgeon, is in my reading quite outside satire or cynical political porn revenge that only rears its ugly head in the last chapter. The two characters symbolise the humanist streak that Wole Soyinka must have acquired over his long life: eschewing religion and politics as the root of all evil, not forgetting the perverse business that emerges when religion and politics are in each other’s pockets, as played out in the novel between Papa Davina and the prime minister. Nigerian professionals, like the engineer and the surgeon, who got their degrees in European or American universities are the stuff of legend, as is Wole Soyinka himself by all accounts. In their respective student days abroad, they formed brotherhoods with plans to stick together when they return to their homelands. Unlike Soyinka who had to flee his native Nigeria for some time, the engineer and the surgeon – as well as their third member of the Gong of Four, the Scoffer – keep a sufficiently low profile until they are caught up in the insane machinations of the unholy combination of criminal business and state and religion. The prolonged description of the history of the two companions, Pitan-Payne and Dr Menka, whereby the former’s family clan turns out to be as deranged as any, is testament to true professionals who dedicate their lives to a worthy cause rather than just making money based on their specialist skills. The medical profession has not always been in the high regard it is today, and in some ways, Dr Menka embodies that ambiguous space between butcher and god, what with his odd dereliction of having severed an arm of a goat thief, as convicted and ordered by sharia law. This conundrum, as many others, is a literary device akin to the endless discourses in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, between the Jesuit and the rationalist. It gives space to deliberations about the human condition. Soyinka’s intelligent observations deserve anthropological if not philosophical respect. The engineer in this context, as the expert in electronics, code breaking and more, while making lots of money along the way, never compromises his ethics, employing his skills in the service of progress for humankind in Nigeria. When he is called to serve as a consultant for the UN, he suspects that he was called for nefarious political reasons – as the prime minster attests – but accepts after he is assured by UN officials that he was picked based on his professional skills alone. Of course, he never gets there, being murdered before departure to New York. The ensuing family saga of his erstwhile burial in Austria versus Dr Menka’s vow to have him buried in Nigerian soil is quite a perplexing chapter in the novel. The incredible detail invested in this tragicomic repatriation of the engineer’s decomposing body, with an emphasis on the ‘tragic’, seems to serve no particular purpose in the narrative, other than to show off a pig-headed family (the nasty tales of corporate family battles seem to be a current Netflix favourite – hint: this novel would make a great series!). While mention is made of cultural practices around the world whereby no effort is spared to return the dead to their respective homelands, this is mainly in the context of recovering soldiers fallen in enemy territory, as did the Americans in Vietnam and the Israelis in their theatres of war, where the motivations seem to be that the ‘enemies’ are likely to desecrate the bodies. Soyinka could have explored more appropriate practices from the anthropological literature, such as Maori beliefs that the body must return to its native soil. As such body parts held in overseas museums are repatriated but not the many Maori soldiers that died in the world wars, presumably because it is taken for granted that soldiers fallen in “civilized” countries are interred in war graves that are respected with military honours.
Another small complaint concerns the third member of the Gong of Four: the Scoffer, as briefly mentioned above. This “aristocratic” figure lives by his mathematics, the supreme tools of the rationalist/empiricist but is strangely married to a quite mad sounding religious nut whose main contribution to the story is her insistence that he meet Papa Davina, the evil evangelist, who in the very end turns out to be the fourth member of the Gong of Four, unrecognised by the other three (more of that at the end of my review). The Scoffer, of distant princely extraction – maybe of the sort that Soyinka can claim – departs the story when he is arrested for some dubious crimes that involve stashing boxes of cash everywhere in his house. His mathematical accounting practices had detailed all the money. After nine months of detention, he returns home a broken man and fades from the story altogether. Why? Was he unwittingly involved in the body parts trade? Was he the unwitting money laundromat for a Nigerian scam? We would have liked to know.
A more substantial criticism is the role of women in the novel. Apart from the engineer’s (second or third?) wife, they seem to be mainly of the nasty or religiously deranged sort. There is the curious case of the engineer’s first wife while he was a student in Salzburg, and having met a “fraulein” at the Oktoberfest who claimed to be impregnated by him. The “honourable” solution was to marry her, give the child a name, and then get divorced again. This child, by the way, turned into the evil Damien who, more or less, killed his father: a somewhat dubious literary device! The description of “infertile” women driven by their insane husbands to get cured by Papa Davina who forcibly bows their heads down to his crotch seems equally unnecessary, even if such practices are common knowledge in these crazed surroundings. The primitive subjugation of women is no more prevalent in Nigeria than in other parts of the world.
The two “evil” characters, Papa Davina and the Prime Minister, Sir Goodie, are impressive inasmuch Soyinka gets into their heads, making them sound as rational as can be at times, calculating like professional mathematicians, being aware of themselves as way ahead of everyone else, including their underlings, and yet showing of their banality, very much in the mould of Hannah Arendt’s phrase of the “Banality of Evil”. The career of Papa Davina as the spitting image of the American TV-evangelist combining all religions to garner more devotees is as ridiculous as it is real: honed to perfection as a business empire, image is everything, substance is nothing. The Prime Minister, concerned only about getting elected again, will do everything to subvert the meaning of democracy, buying votes by legal and illegal means, usurping resources (the farcical story of the gold deposits), sidelining competitors, etc., etc., as played out in daily real life in the kleptocracies of the world, East and West, North and South. Here Soyinka is at his so-called “satirical” best: I say “so-called” because if one labels such realities as “satire” then its impact is diminished. Other might even call him a cynic, which in my view is fair enough, as I consider such cynicism as a form of art. In our lamentable era of the Trumps (we read in the blurb that Soyinka “destroyed” his green card when Trump got elected – bravo!), Putins, Xis, Merkels, Johnsons, Kurtzs (of Austria), Buharis and so on and so on, the so-called satirists have become obsolete because their subjects are beyond a joke. That the engineer’s own son, Damien, joins the ranks of the criminals is perhaps a bit over the top, even when in reality, deadly father-son conflicts in the corporate business empires are the stuff of legend. That Damien is depicted as the half-caste (although never mentioned but a trigger for many a racist) offspring of a German/Austrian “fraulein” and the Nigerian engineer may well rankle with current “woke” identity politics. The final straw, however, is in coming back to Papa Davina, i.e. the unlikely scenario – only played for shocking effect? – that the forth member of the Gong of Four, a character named Farodion when they formed the “gang” in their student days in Europe, is in fact the Papa Davina, who had gone un-recognised by all of the other three Gong members, even though they often wondered what had become of him. Only the Prime Minster, for some reason in the end recognises the connection. Why he? A loose ending?
In conclusion, as they say, and to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, as I often do, “nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely”, the plot of the novel seems “unlikely” unless one subscribes to the pessimistic view of the world whereby the depravity of human enterprise plumbs the very depths in Nigeria as much as in the rest of the planet. The idea of dealing in human body parts as a thriving “supermarket” business is no less obscene than the genocidal Nazis making soap from Jewish bones. The atrocities committed by the likes of Boko Haram and other African war lords pale into statistical insignificance when tallying up the numbers elsewhere. As Stalin is reputed to have said: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Wole Soyinka’s alarming novel reminds us that ignorance or denial of these dreadful matters of life and death is a fateful “bliss” that will haunt all the Happiest People on Earth for eternity. Sad to say it but thank you for that!
