Looking for Transwonderland

Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria is a memoir and travelogue by English-Nigerian author Noo Saro-Wiwa, following her journey to Nigeria, her father's home country and the place for which he gave his life. Saro-Wiwa struggled as a child to understand why she was always torn from her comfortable home in England to travel in Nigeria with her father; this travelogue is an attempt to come to terms with her father's country and the legacy he left there.

With a long record of travel and guidebook writing for Rough Guide and Lonely Planet, Saro-Wiwa brings this expertise to her family's country of origin. A central struggle in this narrative centers on Saro-Wiwa's Nigerian diaspora identity, the annual summer vacations she took to Nigeria with her father, and her lifelong recognition of Surrey, England, not Nigeria, as her home. Saro-Wiwa remembers those childhood trips to Nigeria as being hot, chaotic, and uncomfortable compared to the creature comforts and leafy trees of her home back in England. This was compounded later when her father was killed by the Abacha regime of the Nigerian government for his work as an environmental activist and writer in 1995. After that time, Nigeria became a haunted place for Saro-Wiwa, and thinking of it made her angry. In this way, the book, though on the surface a simple travelogue, goes much deeper than that at its core.

In her travels, Saro-Wiwa displays an adventurous spirit and sense of humor. She has an eye for the absurd, scoping out defunct amusement parks and strange newspaper ads to get to the heart and soul of, not an idealized Nigeria, but a more commonplace one. Though Saro-Wiwa travels to see the Chad Basin National Park (which is, she writes, rapidly being overrun by the ever-expanding Sahara Desert) and looks at Benin bronze sculptures, she also cruises around on poorly maintained motorbike taxis, stays primarily in low-cost motels with drunken managers and bizarre furnishings, and even attends a rather poorly managed dog show.



Saro-Wiwa is committed to bringing humor to her writing on Nigeria – she says in her book that though poverty is everywhere in the country, it is too simple to represent Nigeria only as impoverished. Nigeria, she says, is a place where it is impossible not to laugh, and her wry observations about life in this country are often incredibly funny. The amusement park of the title, Transwonderland, is advertised as Nigeria's Disneyworld, but when Saro-Wiwa arrives, the machinery is largely non-functioning and abandoned. At the dog show she visits, the announcer proclaims to a patron running from a dog gone rogue that if he tries to flee, the dog will only run him down. Yet, in all the madness, chaos, and corruption, Saro-Wiwa also reports that in Nigeria, you can leave your bag unattended on the bus and return to find it untouched. The culture is one of the contradictions. Everyone is begging for money or being bought out, the government is corrupt, but nobody will even think to steal your personal belongings. Saro-Wiwa relishes these contradictions, stating that when you grow up in two cultures, you don't buy into the clichés of either. For her, both England and Nigeria are inconsistent and strange places that don't fit within the popular narrative of what it means to live there.

By the end of the book, Saro-Wiwa has seen many sights, experienced considerable chaos and corruption, and despite her discomfort, visited the north, overrun by militant groups. Her last stop is the hometown of her father, and the place he died, Port Harcourt, a small coastal oil city. There, Saro-Wiwa truly comes into her own identity, writing that as part of the Ogandis, an ethnic minority in Nigeria, her father was an important figure and the first person to truly help break stereotypes about Ogandi culture. She considers this in light of her entire experience, making it clear that there is still change that needs to be made, both within the government and within Nigerian culture as a whole.

Noo Saro-Wiwa is a British-Nigerian author who grew up in Surrey, England. She is the daughter of writer, activist, and television producer Ken Saro-Wiwa and the sister of journalist and author Ken Wiwa, who died suddenly of a stroke in 2016. Looking for Transwonderland, Saro-Wiwa's first book, won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award and was listed as the Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year 2012. She has also contributed to a number of world-renowned magazines and travel journals.