Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria

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.” (Sept.)