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  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin
  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 74 (2012/13)
  • Article

In this Issue

Studying Africa

  • Understanding Remittances as a Form of Social Protection: An analysis of Kinships and Transnationalism amongst the Zimbabwean Diaspora - Farai Michael Magunha
  • Definition and scope of Afro-pessimism: Mapping the concept and its usefulness for analysing news media coverage of Africa - Toussaint Nothias

Analysing Africa

  • The Language of Scholarship in Africa - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Reading Africa

  • Review of Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous / I Say to You / Pastoralism & Politics - Karen Cereso and Lionel Cliffe
  • Review of When a State turns on its Citizens /Zimbabwe’s Lost Decade: Politics, Development & Society - Lionel Cliffe
  • Review of The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe - Victor Ukaegbu
  • Review of Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money - Will Rea
  • Review of Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria - Martin Banham
  • Review of Sexuality and Gender Politics in Mozambique: Rethinking Gender in Africa - Simone Doctors and Chris Paterson
  • Review of German Colonialism: A Short History - Henning Melber
  • Review of The Front Line Runs Through Every Woman: Women and Local Resistance in the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle - Kate Law
  • Review of Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, The Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa. - Jack Mapanje
  • Review of Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author - Robert Fraser
  • Review of The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988 - Jane Plastow
  • Review of Luka Jantjie: Resistance hero of the South African frontier - Yvette Hutchison
  • Review of Slavery By Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique - Will Nyerere Plastow
  • Review of Globalization and Sustainable Development in Africa - Elizabeth Morgan
  • Review of Africanists on Africa: Current Issues - Ben Cislaghi
  • Review of The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade - James Gibbs

Remembering Africa

  • Ngũgĩ, Leeds and the Establishment of African Literature - James Currey

Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 74 (2012/13) Tuesday 23 October 2012

Review of Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria

By Martin Banham (University of Leeds)

Abstract

 

  • Article keywords:
  • Ken Saro-Wiwa
  • Martin Banham
  • Nigeria
  • Noo Saro-Wiwa

Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria. Noo Saro-Wiwa. Granta, 2012. Pp. 320. ISBN. 978 1 84708 030 1 (pb). £14.99.

‘In England, cheerful phone enquiries about the provenance of my name are occasionally met with silence when I tell them I’m Nigerian. The world judges me according to this mess, and looking at it made me feel rather worthless’.

‘According to the Bible, God made the earth in six days and took a rest on the seventh. But by creating Nigerians, he ensured that that was the last day off he’s enjoyed ever since.’

‘Suddenly, one of the tyres burst and we came to a stop in the middle of nowhere. I became an anxious speck in this vast semi-desert, But soon after, a man on a motorcycle travelling in the opposite direction stopped next to us. The nearest service station was 16 kilometres behind him, he told us, yet to my amazement, he turned around and rode back to fetch help, trundling towards the horizon without complaint. His altruism seemed motivated not by duty but by innate reflex. No mater how alien my surroundings in Nigeria, I always felt cushioned by this safety net of human decency.’

These extracts to whet your appetite!

This is a brilliant chronicle of ‘travels in Nigeria’ and one that could reasonably have been underscored with anger at the brutal killing of her father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, at the hands of the Abacha regime. His presence is everywhere in this sensitive chronicle, but serves to stimulate an almost innocent exploration of the nation to which the writer belongs but from which she has been so long estranged. The great cities of Nigeria – Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Maiduguri, Port Harcourt – are revisited by the writer in her travels often in the company of relatives or friends, but there are also solitary and intriguing journeys to the most remote parts of the country. She climbs up to Sukur, the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Mandara mountains on the Cameroonian border and down to the rainforests of the Rivers region of south-east Nigeria. The small asides of her commentary are both perceptive and moving: ‘Nothing is more beautiful than a rainforest in the morning mist. The sunlight shot through the towering trees, giving their greenness a dewy, sparkling translucence, which hinted at the possibility that spirits truly existed in the forest’. At Ibadan she recalls her father’s student days, ‘memories of him conversing with his friends: of loud intellectual gripes that hung in the tobacco clouds…’.

This is a remarkable piece of travel writing, but also a brilliant personal voyage of rediscovery.

Reviewed by: Martin Banham, University of Leeds.

[Published in Leeds African Studies Bulletin 74 (December 2012), pp. 100-101]

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