As Happy As Can Be

In his latest novel, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka shows us how Nigeria came to find itself stuck in a cycle of recurring despair

- Latha Anantharaman

CHRONICLES FROM THE LAND OF THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE ON EARTH

by Wole Soyinka

BLOOMSBURY

₹699; 464 pages

Wole Soyinka, playwright, poet, novelist and activist, has always connected the dots between the colonial presence in Nigeria and the present horrors that plague his nation. The British, as he puts it, go out through the front door and come in again through the back door— though it is not so much the colonisers themselves, but their structures and systems that become inescapable. Soyinka’s part in the Nigerian freedom struggle does not blind him to the authoritarianism and deathly religious fanaticism perpetrated by leaders on their own people. In Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, he squarely faces the worst of those realities.