“Just What Gods Do You Serve, If Any?”: Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles and the Destruction of Postcolonial Reason

This year, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka published his first novel in forty-eight years, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021). His previous novels were The Interpreters ([1965] 1978), and Season of Anomy (1973). Fiction is not Soyinka’s most favoured medium. He is a dramatist first as well as being a poet, essayist, and memoirist in a career whose creative energies have never waned. The fact that it has taken him half a century to return to the novel, specifically, creates an irresistible opportunity: to compare and contrast two quite different literary and historical moments in the career of one of Africa’s great writers.