It is possible that Wole Soyinka will now tell the tragedies of his life again as a farce. That it is all a satire of a certain Nigerian present, of selfish elites, the profiteering of spiritual quacks, the bigotry of their clients, the obstinacy of multiple dignitaries who lavish made-up prizes on one another and scheme in backrooms: a grotesque revue of corruption, vanity and abuse of power. But then it comes to a deadly serious outburst of anger.
One could hope so. His political biography and ability to suffer have made Soyinka at least as much of a legend as his plays, poems, essays and a few novels. Almost half a century has passed between the new, “The Happiest People in the World” and the last, “Age of Lawlessness” from 1973, if you don’t count his autobiographical books. So actually a sensation, this epic late work of an 87-year-old writer, who in 1986 was the first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and before and after that fought tenaciously and selflessly for democracy in Nigeria, found himself in prison several times and in exile. But also in the USA, where he taught at various universities for many years, he made his anger public after the Trump electioncut up his green card and moved back to Africa.
“Soyinka’s taciturn masculinity strikes me as alien and intriguing”
Soyinka was pushed from the throne of Nigeria’s most famous writer, also due to his success on the American book market, in 2013 at the latest, when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Roman “Americanah” was released and her TED talk “We should all be feminists” was sampled in a Beyoncé song. That feminism sometimes consists of paying tribute to the big old men can be seen in the See declaration of love, the Adichie 2021 in British Times wrote on Soyinka. Well over eighty, he is an impressive figure, it says, with “soft skin, lean energy, a sense for dramatic gestures and a rich voice that is aware of its sound”. However, his style sometimes acts as a protective shield to keep feelings at bay: “Soyinka’s taciturn masculinity strikes me as strange and fascinating.”
Taciturn would not be the term that would come to mind given the tediously presented scenarios and circling characterizations of Soyinka’s novel. A limitless form that readers of his political CV “Set off in the early dawn” from 2006 have already noticed. Oddly enough, Adichie’s thesis still holds, because so many chapters of “The Happiest People in the World” seem like huge, enormously elaborate expositions to stories that then don’t come.
Wole Soyinka was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, Nigeria. In 1986 he was the first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
(Photo: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP)
At the moment when, according to a usual dramaturgy, the conflicts should become painful, Soyinka often changes the subject. It’s about the comical saint of a sectarian megachurch, no, it’s about the PR-fed self-discovery of a relatively young nation, no, about the leadership style of fictitious Prime Minister Godfrey Danfere, known as Sir Goodie, which consists above all of always waiting for someone about an elite that basks in the privileges inherited from the former colonial masters, no, it’s a thriller about murder and organ trafficking.
Soyinka has said in interviews that the corona pandemic made it possible for him to write a novel again so late in life, he had time. The time regime of the lockdowns may also make its dramaturgy plausible: whenever you think you know what is happening, the conditions change. Everything is dragging on, even though it’s a world event. In any case, this novel is not easy to read. Especially for an international audience that lacks the knowledge to decipher the allusions to Nigerian politics and history. Soyinka’s novel also fails to satisfy the need of ongoing debates in the Global North to make clear assignments in the post-colonial struggle to distribute blame. That’s probably why this event of a book didn’t hit all the bookclubs and leaderboards with flying colors, even though it came out in English in the fall.
Hardly anyone remembers the meaning of independence
In the intricate expanses of this novel, there is also this concentrated, glowing moment in which one of the two main characters, the surgeon Kighare Menka, finally goes nuts after work in his colonial-style gentlemen’s club. During the day he patched together the mostly female victims of a bomb attack on a vegetable market in the city of Jos. Another guest reads the newspaper report about a murder committed by 13 men on a housewife, and the casual indifference of his peers, especially towards domestic violence against women and little girls, whose marks and wounds the doctor sees every day, leaves him forget the ironically guarded manners in this place: “All of us here,” he rants, “we’re talking our hearts out here in this palace of self-deception. That’s what I’m talking about!” At this point, the narrative voice also loses its ironic distance.
A senseless, physical violence that perforates the everyday life of the country told here interrupts the narrative play with displacement and distraction. Or at least makes it lurch. The political message of the novel arises from the contrast: as bitterly serious as it is at its core, Soyinka relishes the signs and symbols that multiply wildly around it as a motif and source of punch lines.
The potentates of the novel, for example, constantly change their names and fight pompous epithets such as “servant of the nation” or “carer of the people”. They replace the celebration of Nigeria’s independence from the British, won in 1960, with made-up events. Like the “Festival of the People’s Choice”, which is enriched by so many artificial rituals that it “encompassed the whole year, sometimes extending into the next one and thereby catching up and overtaking the new beginning with its various festivities”, while, like Soyinka adds, “hardly anyone remembered what independence was about.” “Branding” plays a major role, for example the rededication of the violent country to that of the “happiest people in the world”.
Wole Soyinka: The happiest people in the world. Novel. Translated from the English by Inge Uffelmann. Blessing, Munich 2022. 656 pages, 24 euros.
Papa Davina, the character of the sly preacher, goes through a journey of development, to a European university, through various Nigerian provinces, “a detention center for illegal immigrants in Newark, New Jersey”, Liberia, Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Ghana, where he experienced its epiphany, back to Nigeria. The chapter reads like a long, very informative joke about the floating signifier “Africa”. In parts, the novel is reminiscent of the level of humor that a postmodernist reading Gilles Deleuze copied from the greats of absurd literature, Lewis Carroll or Samuel Beckett.
At the very end, Soyinka sews the episodes together into a plot, and then you would have to start reading from the beginning to look for where you missed the traces of the story in the jumble of characters. When did surgeon Kighare Menka start to risk being drawn into a criminal business in body parts traded for ritual purposes across the country. He seeks protection and help from his college friend, the engineer Duyole Pitan-Payne, and his family. However, he is about to leave because he has been appointed to the United Nations as a specialist on energy issues. A circumstance that the government, in the guise of the vain Sir Goodie, accompanies with a threatening need for control.
The clique of the two aging friends originally consisted of four men, one of whom loses his soul under torture and the fourth remains missing. So the question is whether the friends will get back together, whether they will still achieve the goal of their early years of giving something back to their country, of shaping it. And whether they will solve the criminal case of the dismembered people business.