Nigeria, Sept. 7 -- Sir Henry Wotton, the Renaissance-era politician and diplomat from Kent in England is credited with the line that an ambassador is "an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." What he did not quite capture was what the situation was at home from where the ambassador acquired the habit of dissembling.

In her just-published memoir, retired career diplomat, Ambassador Lilian Onoh, fills that gap or, at least, the Nigerian version. In the pantheon of diplomatic memoirs out of Nigeria there's been nothing quite like this. Her title, Diplomatic Bedlam, is a giveaway. Her sub-title makes clear that this is a story of "interactions with humans, mutants, variants and quadruple variants."

While diploma...