Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa
311 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 10 to September 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I know next to nothing about Nigeria. I know of Shell Oil's corruption and the pollution in the Niger Delta. I have a simplistic notion of Delta natives struggling against an all-powerful international corporation to save their homes, their livelihoods, and their health. I have an even sketchier picture of a long series of corrupt presidents and dictators and military coups going back to independence from the UK. Before the British, all I have to go on is a series of barely remembered masks and statues and bronzes seen in the Met, all blurred together under a mental "West African" label. In short, I know much more about Nigeria than most White Americans do, but my store of knowledge has never inched above pathetic.
Looking for Transwonderland is a hybrid between the memoir of a woman raised in England revisiting Nigeria many years after the political murder of her activist father, and a comic tourist narrative of the frustrations and hidden charms of traveling the country. For the most part, Saro-Wiwa tends to avoid digging deep into the economic and political complexities of Nigeria, offering a general gloss on its system of profiteering and kickbacks, opportunities and potential lost to greed and cronyism, but I feel like I only gleaned about an article's worth of geopolitical and humanitarian insight from this entire volume. The tourism sections were interesting in their own right, and introduced me to locations and historical events that I enjoyed reading up on via Wikipedia. But never having read much in this genre (and that mostly limited to the internet), I don't have anything to compare it to, and not much to say about it.
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