Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria in Around the World in 80 Books

Apr 20, 2013 Beverly rated it really liked it

My thoughts:
• I really enjoyed this book – it is part travelogue, part memoir, part history lesson, part commentary written in an engaging thoughtful informative manner.
• I have read several books on Nigeria but most of the books concentrated on one region or a specific conflict regarding a specific event or a specific ethnic group. But this book gave me a great introduction to Nigeria as a whole and as separate regions – it open up my eyes on how much more I have to learn.
• I especially liked h ...more

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Jun 25, 2020 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: a-reviewed, z-read-gelesen-2020, author-woman, gorgeous-cover, author-ofcolour, 5-star, europe-uk, world-nigeria, zchallenge-2020-bingo-reading-women, genre-travel

Dazzling. What a mesmerising, absorbing, interesting, at times funny, always well-written travel account. Noo Saro-Wiwa moved to England when young and was taken back to her home town in Nigeria every summer holiday by her father, an activist who was killed in a political assassination. She hated those holidays and wanted to go to the beach like her friends but this book documents her four-month trip back to Nigeria as an adult, on her own steam.

Saro-Wiwa is part insider, part outsider, and this Dazzling. What a mesmerising, absorbing, interesting, at times funny, always well-written travel account. Noo Saro-Wiwa moved to England when young and was taken back to her home town in Nigeria every summer holiday by her father, an activist who was killed in a political assassination. She hated those holidays and wanted to go to the beach like her friends but this book documents her four-month trip back to Nigeria as an adult, on her own steam.

Saro-Wiwa is part insider, part outsider, and this hybridity makes for an incredibly interesting and nuanced journey. Like all good travel books, this is as much about a personal journey as it is about a physical journey. But I also got to know the geography of Nigeria; I had to get an atlas to trace her path as my knowledge beyond "Lagos on south coast" is shamefully minimal. But that was OK as Saro-Wiwa, too, was discovering the place and held my hand throughout.

Towards the end of the book and the journey, the author writes:

"I'd been in the country long enough to take less proprietary pride in the Benin empire than I did when in London. I felt more Ogoni than ever, and Benin's history didn't seem part of my own any more. My ethnic minority status in Nigeria had grown almost as strong as my identity as a racial minority in England. My people, the Ogonis, had been bit-players in the drama of Nigerian history in which the Binis, Yorubas, Hausas and Igbos played a leading role." (256)

Phenomenal. I found this so powerful and interesting; opens up whole vistas of what it means to be a minority in different contexts and how one's identity can shimmy and shift in response to outer forces. Also, I had not heard of half of the linguistic and cultural groups that Saro-Wiwa mentions (and there are many more in Nigeria). It made me aware how something that seems homogenous from the outside -- the post-colonial state entity of 'Nigeria', let alone the continent of 'Africa' -- is a mosaic of ever more finely grained individual allegiances and us-and-thems when on the ground.

And then this, in the village of her grandmothers where she spent some days each summer holidays as a child:

"I was in a place where everyone could say my name properly. Having the name Noo (pronounced 'gnaw') is a heavy cross to bear. Not only is it the word for 'crude oil' in Khana - the most unpoetic of injustices - but the specific tonality of the name makes it impossible for foreigners and most Nigerians to pronounce correctly. Barely a day goes by when I'm not explaining my name to a new acquaintance, repeating it, spelling it, repeating it again, then resignedly accepting their mispronunciation. Finally, I was in the one place on Earth where everyone gets it right straight away." (288)

Anyone who is a hybrid child, an immigrant, a diasporan, a refugee, an expat, can empathise.

Speaking of 'crude oil': like some of the women in Queens of the Kingdom: The Women of Saudi Arabia Speak, Saro-Wiwa too makes a frustrated connection between the presence of oil and completely undistributed wealth in the country, and the absence of any money lavished on museums, cultural heritage, nature reserves, infrastructure, citizens' welfare. She contrasts this state of affairs with a neighbouring country she has visited, Ghana, that without oil had to spend more effort on, for example, tourism.

Nowhere does the book tell me when the author undertook her trip. It was published in 2012 but hints in the narrative suggest a date closer to 2008. And some of the way she writes does seem, in the wake of a post-2016 politicised world, dated in an interesting way. I think, for example, that the encounters with slave history would be angrier and more incisive today, and the critique of colonialism more searing, the temptation to attribute 'backwardness' to 'Nigerians' in general less glib.

Format: A gorgeous, gorgeous cover that made me buy it. Drawn by Rod Hunt, and delightfully, some of the drawn people reappear on the inside cover and on the title page. Granta Publishers, though, suffers from the British disease of stiff spine, requiring some effort to hold the paperback open. ...more

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