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THE VOICE OCTOBER 2021
Lifestyle
Books
Long time in the making Author Wole Soyinka gives a personal insight into his new novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, which he admits has taken him decades to write and to publish BY JOEL CAMPBELL
W
E HAVE COVID to thank for the Bloomsbury published Wole Soyinka novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, the author’s first book for 48 years. Talking to lifestyle, Soyinka said that this book had been brewing inside him for decades, but he’d never had the time to pull it together, until lockdown.
ACTIVIST
In fact, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate, author, playwright, poet and political activist said there were three separate instances over the last few years that have allowed him to focus his thoughts enough to get it done. He explained: “This book has been with me for quite a while, I’ve expressed the contents in various forms. “One or two instances in poetry, in plays, dramatic sketches and the real motivation is just watching the environment decay and people getting lost, so you virtually fantasise what is the next, which direc-
“I was at the point where I must move from playwrights, poetry etc into a diffused exposition of my environment” tion of the development of the present actualities blossom, and that’s where fictionalising comes in. “So it was not a new book as such, it’s been with me for quite a few decades and I was at the point where I must move from playwrights, poetry etc into a real compact yet diffused exposition of my environment.” He added: “When I say I have been writing this book for decades, I mean the book has been summoning me, and from time to time I have been contemplating something along those lines. “I should explain that one of the ironies of the book is that I needed a period of concentration outside of the environment that gave birth to it, and I didn’t have it. “If I was outside of the country it was either I was fighting some dictator, mobilised all over the world on all levels, I’m talking about Sani Abacha, for instance, but I never really found time to sit down and say I am excluding everything else, until a couple of years ago. “ T h a t was when a young
RESPECTED: Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka; inset below left, Soyinka reads an original poem written for children at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2019
colleague of mine lent me his cottage in Senegal, just outside Dakar, and I was able to sit down and really concentrate and focus my mind on this fictional twin. “I was there about eight days and then there was a long break again until I found another sanctuary, this time it was Ghana, marvellous, luxurious, where I was able to expend about eight to ten days of absolute concentration. “Then there was another break and then came COVID which locked me down in Nigeria, and that’s how I was able to finally deal with these demons which had been taunting me and clouding my existence and others too, but I am talking personally, when I use me as the receptacle of all this negative, but it’s general.”
HORROR
In the book, much to Doctor Menka’s horror, some cunning entrepreneur has decided to sell body parts from his hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Already at the end of his tether from the horrors he routinely sees in surgery, he shares this latest development with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer and Yoruba royal, Duyole Pitan-Payne, who has never before met a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Neither realise how close the enemy is, nor how powerful. Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is at once a savagely witty whodunit, a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s political elite and a provocative call to arms from one of the country’s most relentless political activists and an international literary giant. Born in Nigeria in 1934, Soyinka’s prolific body of work includes debut novel The Interpreters and play Death and the King’s Horseman. Soyinka fought in the Nigerian war of independence and has subsequently been one of the greatest critics of the Nigerian government. Having trekked to South Africa with a view to joining the
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army of voices opposed to the apartheid regime earlier in his life, Soyinka explained that there was a moment of realisation that issues in his own country of birth were far more important to him. “Upon returning home we found that the problems internally were quite serious. The
participated in, as the whole world did at that time, but along the way our problems became greater, more immense, deeper, more profound than it’s reached in more recent times, to skip some generations, to us watching our humanity deteriorate. “Until now, today, as I keep
“In the book, a cunning entrepreneur has decided to sell body parts from hospital for use in ritualistic practices” first-generation leaders saw themselves quite literally as neo-imperialists in black skin.” He added: “They conducted themselves worse sometimes than what we had been fighting. “So the problem, the fight, become internal. We watched ourselves deteriorate and we watched the problems of apartheid in South Africa that we
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stressing, virtually a new slave era has been inaugurated and the commodity of that is largely youths, school pupils. “I see no difference, for instance, in taking kids, kidnapping kids for ransom from schools along a road for commercial transportation and holding them until they are bought back by their parents, by
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their institutions and sometimes by their states, I see no difference between that and our experience of the slave trade of being enslaved as people. “I’m summarising, of course, I’m talking about what most depresses me as a human being, as a citizen, as a parent and that is what Chronicles is about.”
CONFINEMENT
Twice jailed, he wrote part of his memoir on toilet paper in solitary confinement. Soyinka still isn’t completely sure about how the longest of those stints affected him, but talking about how he coped, he said: “It was a strange and of course unique experience for me at the time. “To be shut away from humanity except of course those who come to feed you who were under orders not to talk to you, to be shut away like that,
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