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A writer as the conscience of Africa
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Wole Soyinka, who will be 75 years on July 13, is the inheritor of the best of two worlds.
By Mary T. David
The bedrock of Wole Soyinka’s unwavering social commitment is his deep love for Africa.
"Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity". So said Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, in his book of prison notes titled The Man Died. By his own criterion, Soyinka, who will be 75 on July 13, has lived a meaningful life. Poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist and literary critic, his contribution to literature has been immense.
But Soyinka is more than a writer. An outspoken social critic, political activist and tireless crusader against tyranny, he is the conscience of Africa .
Born in a Yoruba family in Abeokuta, Soyinka is the inheritor of the best of two worlds. His family was Christian. In Ake: TheYears of Childhood, he recalls the influences of his Christian home. His father was a schoolmaster. In his well-stocked library where young Wole spent hours, the foundation of a literary career was laid. But it was his grandfather who initiated young Soyinka into the rituals and religious beliefs of his people.
After graduating from University College, Ibadan, Soyinka went to the University of Leeds. There, under the tutorship of men like Wilson Knights and Bonamee Dobree, he delved deep into the myths of various cultures.
This gave him profound insights into the traditions and ritual practices of his own people. No one writing on African culture and traditions has shown so profound an understanding of the subject as Wole Soyinka in his brilliant work, Myth, Literature and the African World.
Soyinka’s creative art is anchored in his culture. His recurring images and symbols are quarried from it. His favourite archetype is Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, patron of all users of metal, including poets and writers. The myth of Ogun which Soyinka celebrates in his poem Idanre shows how this god, alone among the Yoruba pantheon, ventured on a hazardous journey to bridge the gulf between the mortals and gods. In the dark terror-filled abyss he had to pass, Ogun was dismembered. But by exercising his gigantic will, Ogun reassembled himself and forged ahead. This aspect of Ogun made him Soyinka’s archetype for all those who undergo terrible ordeals and survive them by superhuman will. Many of Soyinka’s characters bear the stamp of Ogun. Soyinka has pointed out that the best example in the contemporary political scene of this paradigm of ordeal, survival and affirmation is Fidel Castro.
With all his pride in the culture of his people, Soyinka was no blind worshipper of Africa’s past. This was startlingly proved by his play A Dance of the Forests, written for the Independence celebrations of Nigeria in 1960. His countrymen expected a play glorifying their past; they got one which held up the past as tainted with corruption and evil. The purpose of the play, which was sadly missed, was to call his nation to a collective soul-searching and a penitent commitment to an ethical path.
As sadistic and megalomaniac dictators emerged in independent African nations, Soyinka’s moral fervour deepened. The first of his plays to expose the ugly and absurd face of despotism was Kongi’s Harvest. (Soyinka acted the title role in an early production of the play, which earned for him the nickname “Kongi” in university circles of Ife). More grim depiction of dictators and a morally depleted environment followed in plays such as Madmen and Specialists, and A Play of Giants. Soyinka has been severe also in his criticism of his countrymen. His hilarious comedies and brilliant political satires like Opera Wonyosi have brought to light evils and signs of decadence in Nigerian society.
During an interview Soyinka gave this writer in 1985 at the University of Ife, he was asked how he could move with such ease between these two dramatic modes of tragedy and comedy. He replied: “For me it is a reflection of reality that everything has a tragic and a comic phase at one and the same time… trying to entrap these two extremes of pathos and hilarity… is what makes for sanity.”
In the midst of the violence and chaos that marked the history of independent Nigeria, Soyinka kept his sanity. His deep moral outrage, however, drove him to take enormous personal risks. In 1965 a general election was held in West Nigeria, which was widely believed to have been rigged. On the day a speech by the corrupt establishment was to be broadcast to the public, Soyinka stormed the radio station at Ibadan and, with gun in hand, forced the tape to be removed and substituted a subversive one. Soyinka was arrested and tried, but was acquitted on a technicality.
Far more serious was the result of his intervention in the Nigerian Civil War. Soyinka campaigned actively in the West to prevent the sale of arms to the two sides locked in a tragic war — the federal government and the Ibos of East Nigeria who declared an independent state called Biafra. Soyinka was arrested and held in solitary confinement for more than two years. That he survived this ordeal with his sanity intact is proof of his Ogunnian will. He recounted how he made ink from a plant that grew near his cell. He called it ‘soyink.’ Using that to write on toilet paper, Soyinka produced in prison some of his best works. Yielding to international pressure, the military dictator Yakubu Gowon released Soyinka, but the writer chose to go on voluntary exile for a long period.
In more recent times his life was again put in jeopardy by his fearless criticism of Sani Abacha, the military head of state. Soyinka had to flee his country, cross over to Benin on a motorcycle and escape to the United States just before Abacha publicly denounced him for treason. After the death of Abacha when democracy was restored in Nigeria in 1990, Soyinka returned to a hero’s welcome in Lagos.
The bedrock of Soyinka’s unwavering social commitment is his deep love for Africa. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature before an international audience in Stockholm in 1986, Soyinka held out the Prize in the direction of the African continent. This touching gesture was an acknowledgment of his belief that the Prize was an affirmation of African culture, literature and art that had long been trampled by the colonial powers.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Soyinka eloquently affirmed the African values and reminded the world that African art had inspired great artists of the West like Picasso and Henry Moore. He called for the political will to dismantle all structures of racism and human inequality. The speech echoed his statement in The Man Died: “For me justice is the prime condition of humanity.” It was in recognition of this passionate commitment that UNESCO in 1994 made Soyinka its Goodwill Ambassador for the promotion of African culture and human rights.
In 1971, speaking at a meeting organised by UNESCO in Dar-es-Salaam, Soyinka spelt out his idea of the role of a writer in society. “The writer,” he said, “is the visionary of his people. …He anticipates, he warns". In the decades since then, Soyinka has lived the role he has prescribed for African writers. And he has done this with indomitable courage and unflagging will.
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