The presence of Wole Soyinka
God’s own country, Nigeria, has blessed the literary world with superb writers including Cyprian Ekwensi (1921 – 2007), James Ene Henshaw (1924 – 2007), Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013), Wole Soyinka, and lately the charming Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. At Mfantsipim School in the 1960s - Ekwensi, Henshaw, and Achebe provided reading entertainment through their books “Jagua Nana”, “This Is Our Chance” and “Things Fall Apart”, respectively.
Advertisement
In the absence of colour television, WhatsApp, Facebook, the Internet, and mobile digital devices, we were blessed to have had such authors come to our rescue.
Of the listed writers, I believe, none faced the wrath of dictatorships on a scale amassed by Soyinka. All anticipating the dream of peace, the dream was raised to an optimistic level by Soyinka (in his acceptance speech at the Stockholm Banquet for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986) that “that elusive bird – peace [must] triumph in our time.”
Political activism
It is the lot of saints to find foes even in their own households. Armed without a gun, Soyinka’s political activism as a champion of human rights and freedom brought him into deadly spasms with Nigeria’s military dictators. From one junta to another, he was variously imprisoned, exiled, sentenced to death in absentia, and attempts were made to silence him.
The following Biblical words could have come easily from Soyinka’s own lips: “I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war. My kindest words appear to provoke them, and they are at daggers drawn at once. Nothing pleases them; if I am silent they count me morose, and if I open my mouth they cavil and controvert.”
Many great writers sport appropriate personal experiences to make their presence felt. Episodes at the centre of their writing distinguish those who have survived to tell their stories. Living steadily on the brink, Soyinka has valid experiences. Such writers establish their personal authority on the subject through a fierce attachment to an ideal. As he put it, “It is not right to accept the unacceptable.”
In the late 1960s, Soyinka was imprisoned for two years, some of it in solitary confinement. In a book of his prison notes, titled, “The Man Died”, he wrote, “Unnumbered days of sitting in the yard, staring into nothing. A creak of the chair brings the gaoler ‘casually’ strolling round, his tread too heavy on gravel to be absorbed into the cotton-wool mind, too sharp, too hostile, too fearful of being caught in some ingenious trap, too nervous and pleading, apologetic and uncertain for one to sink peacefully into an interior landscape of repose. Yet hours pass, and days, and weeks.”
His Voice
Another way Soyinka established his presence was through his voice, through the poet in him: “Half-past six and still no Superintendent. It was now only half-hour to lock-up. I began to think next of the character of the Superintendent. Was he likely to accept the fact that my life was in danger? Background – a Mid-West Ibo. I considered if that placed him on my side or not. The answer was No … Buried alive? I must struggle free through the trapdoor of my mind. I must breathe, deeply … Of the many ghosts that haunt me here, the most frequent and welcome are the ghosts of dead relations, grand-father especially.”
In tracing life under dictatorships, he wrote, “To remain self-effacing, commuting between home and place of work, quietly, avoiding notice, carrying out orders implicitly and without question – this was the only way to retain a livelihood and to remain at liberty or alive.”
With an ingrown sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice, Soyinka takes Africa’s woes too much to heart. All said, the man may be conflicted by a clash of feelings. On one hand, he’s hurt deeply by the devastating experience of slavery and colonial European plunder of Africa’s human and natural resources. On the other, he’s realistic about the role of Africans themselves in the pillage. After decades of bungling dictators, corrupt politicians and judges, the homicidal warlords, outbursts of ethnic genocides, where or when does one start to heal?
Facing these deafening realities, what does one do? Those are the woes Soyinka takes too much to heart; and they keep him awake at night. As Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961), the writer of the classic novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, used to say, “No intelligent man can be truly happy!” Soyinka must be the living proof of that toll.
Let’s now dip into the bottom of Soyinka’s armory of gems:
• A tiger does not shout its tigritude; it pounces!
• One has a responsibility to clean up one’s space and make it livable as far as one’s own resources go.
• Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity.
• The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
• Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space.
• Yams do not sprout on amulets.
• The best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
• Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Advertisement
• I am convinced that Nigeria could have been a more developed country without the oil. I wished we had never smelled the fumes of petroleum.
• I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my conviction.