Looking For Transwonderland

I lived in Lagos for four years in the early ‘90s and have struggled ever since to describe the strange energy and appeal of this troubled, oft-maligned country.

Noo, a British-raised Nigerian, takes us to 12 Nigerian locations in a quest to understand her roots. Her childhood memories of visits to the homeland weren’t great, and she’s highly attuned to the widespread corruption that afflicts almost every aspect of Nigerian life.

Still, she travels with an open mind, asking questions, seeking mini-adventures, and falling in love-and-exasperation with the loud, outspoken, resilient residents of Africa’s most-populated country.

Her lively account, packed… show more.

This book has everything that makes travelogues great windows to new worlds.

The author is the daughter of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa who was hanged by the military dictator in 1995.

This book describes her first visit back to her native country after many decades abroad during which she (re-)discovers the beauty, chaos, and hard edge of a country few people will ever have the chance to visit.

I lived in Lagos for 6.5 years, and greatly appreciated the way this book cuts through clichés by showing the decency, humour, impressive resilience, and undauntable energy of its people. 

Noo Saro-Wiwa was born in Port Harcourt, 'a tense oil city" in the south of Nigeria, and raised in Surrey.

Wondering why the land of her birth, "stretching from the tropical rainforests of the Atlantic coast to the fringes of the Sahara," rarely features on a tourist itinerary, she went home as a tourist. In these pages she shows – and this is why I so enjoyed her book – that a function of travel, and one more important than ever, is not so much taking pictures of lions but uncovering layers of history we don’t know.

Transwonderland represents an… show more.