ple is analogous to that of the civilian-rule era in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka'sSeason of Anomy (1973)12 extends the realist picture to include the period of civil war and the years immediately following it.As one can deduce from the title, it is a time of lawlessness, chaos and disorder. It is a period of national aberration whenrelationships between men and men (and men and nature) have been warped into destructive patterns of hostility. Soyinka'snovel, although dealing with ideological contradictions similar to those that are projected in Achebe's work, tends to be moreintense in its questioning of values, more desperate in its search for valid answers.The section-headings of Season of Anomy - from "Seminal" to "Buds" to "Tentacles" to "Harvest" to "Spores" - suggest ageneral movement from natural birth to fruition and then to a distributive rebirth. This arrangement has relevance on three levels.The first is on the level of ironic thematic comment, with the enforcement of the implied view that the process of nationalindependence has worked, in fact, in the reverse of a 'natural' order. The second is on the level of the protagonist Ofeyi,sometime head of the government's Cocoa Campaign (itself shown as being a most unnatural enterprise). The third andinterconnecting level is that of the communalist centre of Aiyero: the symbolic generator of fruitful values, an island of sanity inthe surrounding chaos, and the focal point of Ofeyi's search for definitive values. Turning to an examination of the ideologicalcontradictions that are under scrutiny in Season of Anomy, it is necessary to look closely at Soyinka's remarkable village ofAiyero.From the start, the text underlines the distinctive nature of Aiyero. It is a place quite different from the society that surrounds it.A "quaint anomaly" it is called, and much more besides. It is a village that has ... long governed and policed itself ... so singly-knit that it obtained a tax assessmen...
