Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A macabre and savage satire about democracy; change the geography and names of the protagonists and it would read like India rather than Nigeria: venal corrupt politicians changing party loyalties for personal gain; self-edifying self-professed ‘god men’ – religious charlatans, and their mega-empires of blind followers donating their ill-gotten gains as tithes; two-bit political aspirants lobbying for gubernatorial posts or vying for sinecures in a dog-eat-dog fashion; divisions along tribal/caste lines, a North/South divide, a self-perpetuating self-laudatory bureaucracy; the all-pervasive ‘creative accounting’ – the euphemism for laundering of ‘black money.
Here are some examples: roads serving every purpose but what they were built for – transportation

It was an increasingly rutted dual carriageway of presumably two lanes on either side, sometimes three. Or four. Sometimes five – when last travelled, which was nearly a decade before, it had become impossible to count exactly how many lanes existed on either side. He could recall it only as serial death traps which progressively became home – on both sides – to competing spiritualities. It seemed as if a starting pistol was fixed on some day and a race commenced for the strangulation of traffic on days of religious feasts – Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Id after Id, birthdays of prophets and avatars, or simply revivalist sessions on the whim or on days dedicated to a National Day of Prayers against droughts, floods, diseases, corruption, locust invasion, epidemics, collapsed buildings, fires, exploding tankers, kidnappers, paedophiles, traffic carnage, ritual killers, etc., etc…

His belongings had finally arrived by road haulage, having survived the elephant-trap potholes, unchecked expressway market takeovers, military-assisted police extortion checkpoints, siren-heralded in-your-face motorcades, cattle occupation, and kamikaze drivers drugged to the gills on all brands of affordable hallucinogens, local, smuggled, or traded in…

traffic stopped as readily by truculent drivers as by roadside markets, vendors of all world commodities who had taken over the streets, haggles, negotiated, delivered change and goods at their own pace. If the activities delayed movement over half a dozen changes from red to green and back again, it did not concern them in the least.

This is vintage Soyinka

The peacock cries pursued him into the waiting room, short, sharp shrieks that grated on his preferences in the musical mode, more like the abbreviated bray of donkeys in heat. He marvelled – not for the first time – how Nature could have been so cynical as to unleash on humanity such disparate creations as donkey and peacock in any associative vocal register, surprised that no one appeared to have considered inventing a modulator. Hung around the peacocks’ necks – of course it would have to be decorative or the vain creatures would reject it – it would at least muffle the horrendous emissions from their vocal cords…

The party had done its “arithmetic, cashrithmetic, and thuggerithmetic,”

Greedy realtors who knew how to grease the wheels of bureaucracy to fix the system, as it were, and their shenanigans and the cliched crony capitalism at its corrupt worst

…what they had to shell out informally. Then undergo formally, to secure the specific patch of real estate they badly sought for specific business – forget even as basic domicile. Other voices screamed last-minute deprivation of allocated land – certificate of occupation issued, stamped over government seal, only to have excuses and offers of alternative acreage, most notoriously lagoon-side land reclaimed with public funds but shared only among the anointed.

Here is a flavour of a typical city – be it in Nigeria or India – crowded slums, mephitic garbage dumps, loudspeakers blaring out cacophonous music 24x7, religious discourses or diatribes, raucous political tirades; perennial power-outages and the subsequent polluting smoke-spewing diesel gensets

Godsown was barely halfway through a narrative before the descent of the huge, gloved hand silenced him and blotted out the neighbourhood. Huge, coal black, it snuffed out all things visible from one end of the earth to the other. Another blackout! It was always like that, Godsown reflected; one could almost feel the imprint of the diabolical plan on the forehead…

For those caught outdoors, a thin streak of residual light lingered over the distant rim of rooftops, treetops, and hilltops, the last being sometimes camouflaged mounds of multi-textured garbage jutting out between the glove’s widespread fingers and unseen ooze. The space permitted to its affected populace was circumscribed by that impenetrable shroud pressed down to frustrate recognition of familiar, domestic, companion landmarks of human transactions. As for sounds, the high-decibel medley of fuji rap, juju survivals, Afro-reggae, revivalist harangues, relics of international Top Twenty and the latest presumed new-generation, musical breakthroughs, crossover beat and exotic genres – all were abruptly silenced. The silence was not prolonged, though. It was replaced by the progressive orchestration of generator spurts, gearing up for extended runs. They drowned out the agonized and resentful shrieks that presumably reassured frustrated citizenry of signs of life under the sudden eclipse.

There are two differences between India and Nigeria – the latter being globally notorious for ‘on-line scams (Nigerian Prince etc)’ and having echoes of Make Room! Make Room!, loosely based on which was the film:

There was one glaring mistake - the gold-prospector Mukerjee is not likely to hail from Kochi, Kerala.

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