Papa Davina is the religious guru, whose all-purpose spiritual ministry, Ekumenica, is an elaborate front for practices so sordid and monstrous that even when one learns what they are the mind still refuses to grasp them. Such, for instance, was his famous ‘perspective is all’.” This alerts us from the beginning that we need aesthetic distance to make sense of the twists and turns, the baroque engineering, the curious structure and the paradoxically exuberant tone of this strange novel. preferred to craft his own words of wisdom. But then no other writer has Soyinka’s unique positioning in the political and cultural life of his nation.Ĭhronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth opens with the sentence: “Papa Davina. No one else can write such a book and get away with it and still live and function in the very belly of the horrors revealed. It is the work of an artist who finally has found the time and the space to unleash a tale about all that is rotten in the state of Nigeria. This is a novel written at the end of an artist’s tether. It is a vivid and wild romp through a political landscape riddled with corruption and opportunism and a spiritual landscape riddled with fraudulence and, even more disquietingly, state-sanctioned murder.
It is a novel that explodes criminal racketeering of a most sinister and deadly kind that is operating in an African nation uncomfortably like Nigeria. This is essentially a whistleblower’s book. It details how the conspiracy and cover-up of this quasi-organisation affect not only the life of the nation but, more specifically, the lives of four friends. W ole Soyinka’s new novel tells the multidimensional story of a secret society dealing in human parts for sacrificial uses, whose members encompass the highest political and religious figures in the land.
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