Soyinka’s Chronicles and the epidemic of ritual killings

Fawning, mediocre, comical, utterly unserious, and chronically thieving politicians. Boring, uncreative, cynical bureaucrats and scandalously sycophantic political aides in hypocrisy-draped corridors of power. Unscrupulous, notoriously unethical newspaper publishers and media barons who are also ruthless masters of the art of blackmail. The ubiquitous religious entrepreneurs, fraudulent merchants of miracles, and pretentious, supposedly prescient prophetic futurologists. All of these and more come remarkably alive as Nigeria’s literature Nobelist, Professor Wole Soyinka’s latest novelistic offering casts a mirror on the post-colonial Nigerian state and society of the 21st century. The massive corruption, brazen misrule, moral decay, and the resultant elite opulence existing side by side with mass immiseration, urban decay, and virtual collapse of critical social services are some of the features of the fictive societal stage on which Soyinka’s unforgettable characters in this novel fashion out the variegated dramas of their existence.

It must have been over three and a half decades ago when I can recall myself struggling as a teenager to comprehend a number of Soyinka’s works. Most remarkably, as a secondary school student in Ilorin, capital of Kwara State, at the time I was able to buy quite a good number of the author’s books such as the novels ‘The Interpreters’ and ‘Season of Anomy’ as well as the collections of Poems such as ‘Idanre’ and ‘A Shuttle in the Crypt’ at the more popular local bookshops in town. Besides, the state library, then located in the Sabo Oke area of Ilorin not far from the Kwara State Secretariat was stocked with virtually every title in the African Writers Series (AWS) and we were able to borrow copies for at least two weeks at a time. That was in the early to mid-seventies. Yes, even then there was still, to a reasonable extent, a country.

I can remember myself lying on my bed struggling to make sense of ‘The Interpreters’ and not being able to go much beyond the first sentence: “Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes”. Although the novel proved largely impenetrable for me at the time, I found some of Soyinka’s plays like ‘The Lion and the Jewel’, ‘The Trials of Brother Jero’, ‘Jero’s Metamorphosis’ as well as poems like ‘Telephone Conversation’, ‘Night’ and ‘I think it rains’ quite fascinating and enjoyable. Years later, when I was older and mature enough to savor and comprehend some of the Nobelist’s memoirs such as ‘The Man Died’, ‘Ake-Years of Childhood’ or ‘Ibadan: The Penkelemesi Years’, I have eagerly sought in vain to lay my hands on the earlier novels. While his dramas, poetry, essays, and memoirs are readily available in the various bookshops that are my regular haunts, not a trace have I been able to find of ‘Season of Anomy’ or ‘The Interpreters’.

It was thus with a heightened sense of expectation that I first read in Sam Omatseye’s column sometime in 2019 I think that WS was coming out with a new novel over four decades after his last offering in that genre. The writer had reportedly utilized the period of the forced lockdown as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic to pen a memorable novel that continues to receive rave reviews. Once ‘Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth’ hit the book stands, therefore, I made it a point of duty to seize the earliest opportunity to grab a copy. Even though the exquisitely designed hard copy I obtained made a heavy dent on my purse, it has been well worth the price! Once I began reading ‘Chronicles’, I could hardly put down the book till the stunning end when the real identity of one of the main characters, Teribogo, is revealed. Of course, there is the elegant, ornate, and extravagantly delightful deployment of language that one can always expect in a Soyinka work. But there is also a thrilling, haunting, detective quality to the storytelling that is endlessly captivating.

The novel centers around four friends Duyole Pitan Payne, a brilliant and enterprising engineer, Dr. Menka, a medical doctor, and two of their other schoolmates who had dreams of making a success of their professions as well as contributing their quota to the development of their country. Their noble aspirations were however largely aborted partly by the depredations of a dependent, neo-colonial society, partly due to the polity’s delinquent leadership and the resultant crisis of underdevelopment it spawns and partly, at least in two cases, as a result of individual moral and character failings. Interestingly, the earlier novel, ‘The Interpreters’ also revolves around the experiences of five professional, middle-class friends among whom was Sagoe, the engineer, seeking to make meaning of their lives in the years preceding Nigeria’s independence.

My interest in this piece, however, is Soyinka’s prescience in exploring in exhaustive and revealing detail, the phenomenon of ritual killings presumably for purposes of becoming wealthy, which has become quite an epidemic in our contemporary society. In the novel, some morbid entrepreneurs backed by powerful business and political elements are into the extensive, organized practice of obtaining body parts from hospitals and other sources which are sold to those who utilize them for purposes of rituals. Dr. Menka and his friend, Duyole Pitan-Payne are on the tracks of the masterminds of this business, who had sought to obtain body parts from Menka’s hospital,  but this results in tragic consequences for both friends.

Apparently piecing together the nearly everyday news reports of gruesome murders and cannibalized bodies in different parts of the country, Soyinka’s dramatic mind reasons that the business of murder, mutilating bodies, and harvesting human parts for ritual purposes may be an extensive and well organized multimillion Naira venture after all.

From all that is happening all around us on a daily basis, the descent of society to primitive cannibalism with the rape, murder and seemingly insatiable hunger for human parts across the country, Soyinka’s conclusion cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. The country is still reeling, for instance, from the horrific killing of the 22- year- old fashion designer, Oluwabamise Ayanwole, on a BRT bus in Lagos two weeks ago. Her badly mutilated body was discovered nearly a week later and, luckily, the absconding driver of the vehicle has been arrested. With an enraged populace insisting on Justice for the slain girl and her family, the Lagos State government and the police as well as judicial authorities have promised that the perpetrators will be apprehended and brought to book.

For instance, reflecting on this barbaric trade on page 302 of the novel, Soyinka writes, “The infant’s head remained in a special category of its own, worth a thousand mea culpa in its restoration of innocence invoked and conferred through the cycle route of infanticide, the sublime irony that mandates commission as guarantee of immunity. Otherwise – liver, lungs, kidneys, genital, spleen – all vital organs – female breasts, fingers etc etc…nothing is wasted, all come under prescription, but the head now, even a fragment of the skull moved to join the rhinoceros horn as guaranteed enhancer of male libido, and metaphysical control of the rest of humanity, come rain, come sunshine, come reckoning on judgement day…”.

And even more frighteningly, Soyinka goes on to envisage what more gruesome barbaric possibilities may lie ahead of us when one of his characters ponders, “Unthinkable? Just when was it last deemed unthinkable? When did abnormalities cease to be the norm? Difficult to set a date. Mail order of disposables of morbidity – yes, that much Menka had grimly predicted – orders via Internet – it was bound to be the next stage- I bought it on eBay! Blood and Brain Spatter As Retrieved. Certificate of Authenticity by the XYZ Police Patrol, Attestation by Selfie. Like fast-food takeaway restaurants where you could view a menu complete with itemized descriptions rendered near irresistible by luscious photography.” In this work, fiction is certainly far ahead of reality as regards society’s descent to cannibalism. This book should be compulsory reading for all those involved in investigating and curbing violent crime in contemporary Nigeria.