Season of Anomy

Ofeyi works inside the machinery of the Cartel, a cabal of businessmen and politicians running the country's cocoa industry as a private fiefdom, producing the very propaganda that keeps its corruption invisible to the public. His assignment to promote Aiyero, a small fishing community organized around genuinely communal, noncompetitive principles, as a marketing image for the Cartel's products backfires on its sponsors: Ofeyi falls for the real thing Aiyero represents rather than the sanitized advertisement he was hired to make of it, and starts trying to seed its cooperative model in towns the Cartel would much rather keep passive and divided.

Soyinka builds the novel's second half around the Cross-river massacres, a wave of ethnic killing targeting people of Aiyero descent that draws directly on the real pogroms preceding Nigeria's civil war, and lets the violence overtake the novel's earlier idealism almost without warning, the way it overtook the country's own recent history. Ofeyi's lover Iriyise, a performer the Cartel has also used as a promotional face, is swept up and imprisoned during the killing, and Ofeyi's search for her across a landscape of mass graves and displaced survivors gives the second half of the novel the shape of a descent, deliberately echoing Orpheus going down after Eurydice, into a country's own underworld.

Ofeyi's uneasy alliance with the Dentist, a precise, ideologically committed assassin waging his own private war against the Cartel's enforcers, forces the novel's idealism to reckon with the violence its opponents have already normalized: Aiyero's noncompetitive ethic looks increasingly insufficient against men willing to organize massacres, and Soyinka never lets Ofeyi, or the reader, settle comfortably on either the Dentist's methods or the alternative of standing by while more Aiyero descendants are killed.

Soyinka keeps returning to the literal mechanics of the cocoa trade, plantations, processing, Ofeyi's own advertising copy, to insist that the Cartel's violence and the nation's ordinary commercial life are the same system rather than separate spheres, one criminal and one legitimate. Ofeyi's job selling cocoa and his later search through massacre sites are not two different plots but one continuous supply chain, and the novel's dense, incantatory prose keeps forcing that continuity back into view whenever the story threatens to let it fade into background.