Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth Read online

  “Drink,” Papa D. ordered.

  The Seeker hesitated only briefly, recollecting herself on the instant. To hesitate was to betray a lack of faith and jeopardize her mission. She smiled happily. She had come this far—she drank. She felt light-headed, buoyant. Papa Davina offered her a small perfumed cloth with which to dab her lips. A huge load floated upward from her shoulders. Suddenly the future opened out before her, a gleaming spreadsheet of infinite possibilities. Already she felt fulfilled. She stretched out the serviette to the apostle, but he waved it back.

  “Keep it. Beginning from tonight, keep it under your pillow. For the next two weeks, let no one into your room.”

  The Seeker nodded rapidly, increasingly elated.

  The voice cut into her euphoria. “This year’s approaching festival, do you plan to attend?”

  The woman hesitated. “I had not thought of it, Father Davina.”

  “It is a Festival of Joy—be part of it. It is promised that you shall receive news of interest at that event, and signs in your search for fulfillment.”

  “Of course, Father Davina. Once you command it.”

  Davina placed a hand on the Seeker’s forehead. “Seek, and ye shall find. Be at peace. Across the archway to the coming Festival of Joy, I read your name writ large, in golden letters. Happiness is on the horizon.”

  The Seeker fell on her knees, praise-giving, her eyes shut in rapture. Tutored in the protocols of the Ekumenika audience, she did not prolong her prayers unduly. Lighted arrows—plain this time, not in Technicolour—pointed her way to the exit.

  The Seeker had hardly passed through the gates of Ekumenika and stepped onto the peak known as Oke Konran-Imoran—the Hill of Knowledge and Enlightenment—when Papa Davina, known also as Teribogo, pulled out his mobile, dialed a number. The voice at the other end drawled, “Ye-e-es?”

  Papa Davina responded, “She has just left. You can take it from here, Sir Goddie.”

  2.

  The Gospel According to Happiness

  That the nation known as the Giant of Africa was credited with harbouring the Happiest People in the World was no longer news. What remained confusing was how such recognition came to be earned and, by universal consent, deserved. Aspiring nations needed to be rescued from their state of envious aspiration, a malaise that induced doomed efforts to snatch the crown from their head. The wisdom of elders counsels that it is more dignifed to acknowledge a champion where indisputable, thereafter take one’s place behind its leadership, than to carp and wriggle in frustration. As the Yoruba are wont to admonish, Ti a ba ri erin igbo k’a gba wipe a ri ajanaku, ka ye so wipe a ri nka nto lo firi. When we encounter an elephant, let us admit that we have seen the lord of the forest, not offhandedly remark that we saw something flash across our sight.

  Not many nations, for instance, could boast a Ministry of Happiness. Yet this was an innovation that came from one of the most impoverished states within that federated nation. Its pioneer minister, known as commissioner, was the spouse of the imaginative governor, while other members of the family and relations filled the various positions generated by the unique cabinet installation. Lest that first family alone be credited with this feat of a unanimous jury decision across the world, however, it must be mentioned that, among other credentials, the love and liberal distribution of titles played their role. Often overlooked was the fact that the celebration of a single title by the people was often sufficient to implement the annual budgetary plans of other nations. There were other, often overlooked, yet monumental credentials. Need one cite, for instance, the constant, exponential distensions of the line of traditional rulers at the stroke of the pens of state governors, across histories and cultures?

  An ancient Yoruba city known as Ibadan, a formerly self-sufficing monarchical domain without any visible sign of pregnancy, was delivered of twenty-four new kingdoms one day in an era of rampaging democratic attestation. That feat did not remain uncontested. It was soon matched—or nearly thereafter—from the opposite end of the national axis by the parturition of fourteen emirates from another historic entity, known as Kano. The new kings/emirs were presented with their staffs of office and scrolls of royal enrollment by their presiding governors, generating colourful massed ceremonies amidst popular jubilation. Individual crowns/turbans, evidently tailored and fabricated to suit each royal skull, were set on/wound round the heads and jowls of the new monarchs—formerly mere village heads and petty chiefs. And so on and on; the professional nay-sayers of the world remained incapable of the imaginative feat of projecting the massive cross-country festivities that would naturally inundate such a liberal state of elevations, the guarantee of carnivals almost as a daily event, enabling the growth of tourism and a boom in the complementary industry of kidnapping for ransom.

  Many, many salient contributory factors were often overlooked by competitive nations, largely owing to vested interest and an obsession to wrest the happiness crown from the head of the richly deserving. Unfortunately such partisan, self-interested attitudes merely sowed confusion over even the routine year-round festivals—religious, secular, memorialist, etc.—to which any sovereign nation, with the slightest modicum of traditional respect for the world of the living, the unborn, and the ancestors, was surely entitled.

  Typical of such misunderstandings by fun-seeking tourists—and indeed some careless nationals themselves—was the tendency to confuse political carnivals with people’s fiestas. This was a burden of mistaken identity that was borne most notably by the Festival of the People’s Choice. Admittedly political and cultural fêtes shared a number of similarities. Most notable among these was a habit of occupying nearly the entire year round, year after year, despite being allotted specific dates, clearly delineated even on the national calendar. The two were, however, two distinct entities. Variously known as the Bash of the Year, People’s Concordia, Night of Nights, etc., etc., the Festival of the People’s Choice, a distinct people’s fiesta, under strict compliance would be celebrated annually on the weekend that followed Independence Day. That last named was unambiguously a political event. This proximity created yet another source of confusion, but only a minor one, of no consequence, since hardly anyone still remembered what independence was all about. A military parade, a listless address to the nation, calls for patriotism, recital of an insipid National Honours List, and the nation quickly returned to business, awaiting the real event of the year—and its night of awards—by popular acclaim!

  Some cynics and revisionists tended to insinuate that that festival was a creation of the People on the Move Party. That again was far from the truth. Of course that party also preened itself as a model of democratic practice, but there all associative notions ended. POMP—the obvious party acronym—claimed credit only for its liberalism, which enabled such a festive, all-embracing, nonpartisan celebration not only to take root and thrive but to steadily distend on both sides of its advertised dates until it filled out the rest of the year and sometimes spilled over into the next, its events stretching to catch up with the new beginning. No other festival in the world could boast such a constant backlog. It became not just a moving feast but a festivity constantly in event arrears, the residue carried over into subsequent editions.

  What the People’s Choice achieved went beyond burnishing the image of the government or the party in power; it vastly improved the battered profile of the nationals in the eyes of the world. The festival, veteran of numerous editions, proved that despite the contrary testimony of political elections, the citizenry, if only given a chance, could teach the world a thing or two in that political culture so wrongly attributed to the Athenians. If the government was guilty of any form of intervention, it was only that it formally decreed its climaxing Night of Nights Fiesta, with its maximum-intensity Yeomen of the Year Awards, a National Heritage. The government took the unprecedented step of forwarding the enabling resolution to UNESCO—with no less than t
wenty-five million signatures from across the nation, computer verified, a feat that had yet to be attained by three National Census editions. If we had failed to do so, we would have failed in our duty, and of course stand accused of indifference to patriotism, art, and creativity. Now that we have done what we should, we are pilloried for furthering some sinister government agenda. There is simply no pleasing our people!

  The Festival was routinely timed for the weekend that followed Independence Day, that manifest expression of the triumph of a people’s will, a historic day on which the former imperial masters were peacefully voted out of office without the shedding of a drop of blood—independence on a platter of gold, it was trumpeted by a foremost nationalist, later the nation’s president. That the nation proceeded to more than make up for that lapse through a civil war that lasted more than two years could not be laid at the feet of POMP, which did not even exist at the time of independence, much less at the time of the war commonly known as the war of Biafran secession. What mattered for the people was the phoenix of splendour that rose from the ashes of colonization.

  This festival was indeed unique. It ended in a plethora of awards, catapulted into public prominence a new class of citizens known as Yeomen of the Year—YoY—a people’s recognition of public service over and above the call of duty, gain, or praise. And what a contrast it offered to the annual Independence Day Honours List, rather like alternative Oscars. The Independence Day list was administered by a secretive National Commission of Grace whose existence and composition were known to hardly anyone. It had no input from man, woman, or child beyond the behind-doors conspiracies of a secret cabal. YoY, by contrast, established its place as the one genuine, authenticated, open democratic balloting the nation had known since she embarked on her voyage of independence. YoY rose to become the barometer of the public pulse. It stamped the foreheads of its winners with that rare, indelible stigmata of primal humanity before the Fall, moved to paralyze all competition, and became known as the 21st-Century Reality Show. It vanquished even Big Brother Africa and other voyeuristic favourites of virtual audience participation.

  For a music-loving people, whose loyalties oscillated largely between the polarities of soccer and song, even the Grammy Awards and Venice Biennale Global Song Contest were eclipsed by YoY. Africa Can Dance developed two lumpen left feet. The famous Cannes Film parade of fashion, glamour, and hopefuls lost its global rainbow spectrum with the disappearance of Nigerian contingents—known with stunning originality as Nollywood—that had once dominated the Mediterranean beachscape with textural exotica. YoY induced a massive haemorrhage and turned the famous film festival scene pale and anaemic. Betting houses alone survived, even proliferated—who would emerge in the various categories of YoY?, variously pronounced “Why oh Why” or simply “Yoy,” as in a lisper’s Joy—with which it was soon nearly totally conflated. Not one aspiring film or video starlet or hip-hop dance athlete could afford to miss the dominant national extravaganza—Yeomen of the Year. An attempt to pander to gender equality and establish a rival Yeowomen of the Year ended in predictable collapse—the women informed such proponents that YoY was gender-inclusive, demanded a straightforward contest on a level playing ground, not a token concession that only degraded the female sex even further. Such was the universality of its acceptance.

  The buildup to the award gala began with calls for nominations at least four months before the Night of Nights. Online platforms changed authorship overnight. They were bought or rented under aliases within the umbrella transnational known as Be the First to Comment, an open-house platform of subscribers of marginalized—some preferred to call it marginal—humanity. Some of these subscribers became overnight semi-millionaires. Image-making companies on the verge of collapse became solvent; many took their profits and branched into allied consultancy operations, specializing mainly in a spinoff that grew in range and enterprise to become celebrated as Fake News. Opinion formulation became synthesized, distilled, and digested in a trice. YoY swallowed Gallup polls and other indicators of human trends and preferences. It was consulted before the opening of the foreign exchange markets, listed on the stock exchange, swapped data with at least two-thirds of the continent’s ministries of finance, culture, and development. It spread its wings beyond the continent and extended its influence over quite a few members within the EU and Asian nations. Yet it all started as no more than a shrewd understanding of social values within just one nation, undoubtedly a unique piece of real estate widely celebrated as the Giant of Africa.

  Originator, sponsor, sole organizer, and one-man jury (despite a formal thirteen-member panel which met, was wined and dined, and collected honorariums on the night of awards), Chief Modu Udensi Oromotaya, proprietor of The National Inquest, possessed an astute business mind which accurately assessed the market value of vanity and limelight, single-mindedly invested in them, and ensured their access to all citizens in average financial standing. His given name, Udensi, was adjusted to read Ubenzy, an ingestion of the Benz in Mercedes Benz, the status symbol after independence, before the motorcar was displaced by the private jet. This initiative of the private sector was consecrated in one ritualized but gargantuan event, the Yeomen of the Year Awards, a brilliantly elastic concept. It applied to any human activity, from exposing a paedophile ring to assisting an elderly woman across the road, simply ensuring that the event was captured on camera. Each year the Awards Jury received additional categories—at the latest count, this stood at thirty-seven. It all depended on what new entrant into the public arena had been sighted, targeted, and netted.

  Chief Oromotaya was a man of inventive vision. When the public—the aspiring elite, that is—presumed that they had reached the ultimate in titular desire, he simply upped the ante, thus creating an ever-rising peak of aspiration—not unlike the National Independence Day Awards, another source of confusion! The discerning, however, easily recognized a crucial difference—the latter were set in stone. As for the rare confusion with traditional honorifics, even the most casual observer recognized that the latter were largely slapdash, localized, promiscuous, and horizontal. Chief Ubenzy’s creations were vertical and autogenic. He thus instigated a competitive spirit which sometimes resulted even in returns to new starting blocks for the already honoured. The condition became a cultural feature captured so vividly in the title of a work by—naturally—a son of the soil, Nkem Nwankwo’s My Mercedes Is Bigger Than Yours. It created a condition not too dissimilar to the emotions experienced in that state of rapture undergone by the religiously possessed. However, of the expanding award categories—each of which logically developed concentric circles of subsidiaries of its own—none ever came close to displacing the crème de la crème that rose by common consent—at least at the time of these chronicles—to its destined place as the ultimate crescendo of the annual ceremony: the People’s Award for the Common Touch, PACT. (Predictably: We make a Pact with the Common man—National Inquest.) No one expected that climax to be reached till daylight was seen breaking through the silvered louvres of the main bowl of the events venue, but not one single seat in that packed arena remained vacant for long. The queue in the standing room section swiftly released a waiting occupant, already armed with a numbered tag. They stayed the course, excitation at palpable fever pitch as the moment approached for the ultimate prize. And there was a traditional and international breakfast spread that made the endurance worthwhile—another source of confusion with political carnivals, which ensured the feeding of thousands before, during, and after the electoral contests, after pledge, act, and proof of fulfillment of the voting pledge.

  Hardly surprising, because for the professionals of the political trade, the prestige and electoral returns were palpable—possibly exaggerated; but PACT was a coronet to wear—no, a halo, more accurately, a band of sanctification that winners felt could be seen around their brows in no matter what situation, ready to be evoked as character testimony, including, as sometime
s happened, when they ended up in a criminal dock for unsaintly practices. To be able to place YoY after one’s name on a calling card—Chief the Dr. Sunmole, M.Sc., Dip. Ed., YoY—was already status enough to open doors, but to be able to add the once-a-year-only PACT tag was to enter the nation’s Hall of Immortals, with a commissioned portrait in the National Gallery, side by side with those of members of the Council of States and a select line of national Founding Fathers. And it entitled any such winner, by public consent, to the right of generous plea bargaining, a pre-sentence mitigation plea, and then, if all else failed, a secured benefice of the exercise of the prerogative of mercy, all sometimes in place even before the passing of a sentence. The right of permanent immunity for life for any crime was still a proposition of public controversy.

  It was only to be expected, therefore, that this category was tensely contested. No endorsement from the public was too small to be courted, none too blotchy to be scorned. Each division equally extracted and maximized its own significance, potential, and recognition zone for its winner, be it in professional, business, or mere extended family circles. There were voiced misgivings about the inbuilt factor of unlimited sub-categories, their escalating tiers of unmerited privilege, most especially the slide towards comprehensive immunity for undeserving categories of winners, but these were easily resolved under the doctrine of popular condonation. Precedents were not lacking, or parallels, among them the reign of paedophiles and extortionists in legislative chambers and governors’ lodges, immunized by religious attributions. Were they not expanding the happiness boom among even minors?