‘Nigeria is my Playground’: Pẹlu Awofẹsọ's Nigerian travel writing

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium a crop of travel books by Africans or Africans in diaspora describing their travels within Africa have appeared to assert a fresh African self-representation in travel writing. Noo Saro-Wiwa's travel book Looking for Transwonderland (2012) tells the story of British-Nigerian journalist and travel writer Saro-Wiwa's travels around Nigeria for the first time since the death of her father Ken Saro-Wiwa. Looking for Transwonderland describes Saro-Wiwa's journey all over Nigeria, from Lagos to the north via the east and southwest, including a stop in her father's village in Ogoniland. Saro-Wiwa represents herself as a pioneer, one of the first travel writers of western-published, tourist-oriented travel writing about a country which in global tourism terms is “this final frontier that has perhaps received fewer voluntary visitors than outer space” (p.8).