Last Tuesday marked the 76th year of existence of one of Africa’s most brilliant yet controversial minds, and in our bid to remember him, as one of Africa’s literary giants and Pan- Africanist, we explore who the man Wole Soyinka really is.
Soyinka is no doubt an African enigma. While it is difficult to put a definition to the man known for his bravery and outspokenness especially in the face of injustice and what he sees as the oppression of the just man, Soyinka has established himself over the years as a person who is also known to favour ‘two sides of the coin’, who wants people to know the story.
While it would be simplistic to say Soyinka is flatly an activist, it would be on the safer side to say, he is a writer, an idealist yet realist. This much of Soyinka could be glimpsed from his interactions with the forces of the society (his realism), and his desire for what is ideal as expounded in a number of his books.
Not to confuse him with Chinua Achebe, with whom he has often been compared, Soyinka is an optimist, who sees a measure of good in his characters, and constructs them to achieve a deeper purpose in life. The differences between him and Achebe would further be played out in real life situations: Soyinka believes in Nigeria and Africa; he believes that things could be put aright if certain measures are put in place. This, among many other reasons, was why he had chosen to live in Nigeria despite his being world-wise like Achebe. Achebe, however, seem to believe that everything is lost; and nothing could be done to redeem the black man.
Soyinka’s activism is pronounced. He had wanted to serve in the Second World War, even at age 10; but his height, which was way too below what was required, fouled him. He was one of the Original Seven who founded the Pyrate Confraternity, now the National Association of Seadogs, to oppose the Westernisation of African students at the then University College, Ibadan, and to defend the minority female students. He opposed the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970, negotiating with Western powers not to support any of the warring factions. He was imprisoned for close to three years for this ‘treasonable felony’. While in prison, and denied access to a paper and pen, he invented the Soy-ink, and was scribbling away at edges of newspapers, and other scraps he could lay his hands on. All these were in his youth.
Even in his old age, Soyinka has never for once left his activism, or may be his activism never left him. Last year, he branded a BBC documentary on Lagos set in the slum areas of the once Nigerian capital as both condescending and colonialist. He had months earlier called Britain a ‘cesspit of religious extremism’ while responding to the case of the Christmas bomber, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab.
The series of three programmes, titled ‘Welcome to Lagos’ follows groups of people living in three impoverished areas: a rubbish dump, a Lagos lagoon and the city’s beach area.
In an interview with The Guardian about the series, Professor Soyinka said that the BBC2 observational documentary was ‘the most tendentious and lopsided programme’ he had ever seen. Although the series was well received in UK by most critics, Soyinka is not at all at home with the message portrayed by the series. He said the programme displayed “the worst aspects of “colonialist and patronising” attitudes towards Africa.
“There was no sense of Lagos as what it is – a modern African state. What we had was jaundiced and extremely patronising. It was saying ‘Oh look at these people who can make a living from the pit of degradation’. He lambasted the BBC which has over the years built a close relationship with him.
Where did Soyinka get his activism, and his views of everyday human society?
A re-reading of his autobiographical books, Ake and Ibadan, which document his youth, upto the age of 10, and his growing up, attending the University, both in Nigeria and London, and his eventual emergence as a teacher of Drama and Literature, help reconstruct the septuagenarian’s activism. Most recently, his memoirs You Shall Set Forth At Dawn brings to fore his hindsight of events, and either a justification or rebuke of these.
Born in 1934 in Abeokuta, Western Nigeria, Soyinka tells us in Ake of being an emissary in the Women Riots of 1949, where his mother took an active leading role. That was the breeding grounds of Soyinka’s activism. A son of a teacher whom he refers to as Essay in his book Isara: A Journey Around My Father, (apparently, a factionalised biography of his father) Soyinka was always beside his disciplinarian father, listening to elderly comments on current realities, and possible solutions. Right from this young age, the stage was almost set for young Soyinka to evolve into an activist that we now celebrate.
In Ibadan, Soyinka recollects his experiences at the Government College Ibadan, a colonial school at the time; and how he stood up on many occasions to the teachers. He recounts instances where he daunted all odds and dug out a juju supposedly buried by a Bini boy. In all these, it was evident that Soyinka was not at all getting prepared for a passive adult life.
It may be said, without much contradiction, that Soyinka’s writing is a way of giving vent to his activism. He has participated in a number of road walks, campaigning against one form of injustice or the other; yet this could not really distinguish his voice from the million others that also agitate along with him; thus Soyinka takes the pen.
Soyinka is credited as one of the best users of the English language in the world. How does it happen? An answer is still present in his upbringing as a boy in a purely Yoruba culture, where the mastery of language is encouraged. The truth is that Soyinka mastered his own culture, and falls on it in writing. This is probably the answer why his play Death and the King’s Horseman though written in English could be translated into Yoruba almost word for word.
Soyinka is an organiser, and a thinker. While he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature, he founded the theatre group, "The 1960 Masks" and in 1964, the "Orisun Theatre Company", in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He was also known to have composed a lot of music most of which were performed by his theatre group. Notable among this was I Love My Country, composed in pidgin. Not to forget, he has also been touted as only second to the late Ken Saro-Wiwa in the use of pidgin.
Soyinka has also been known to be a very astute critic of the Nigerian government. He has also written and performed celebrated plays and satires of African colonialist attitudes and on African dictatorships. He has even spoken out against the regime of Zimbabwean leader Mugabe.
Amongst his birthday wishes, Soyinka has been called ‘one in one hundred and forty million’, and he has also been called the ‘untainted soul’. People world over, and Nigerians view Soyinka as a fruit without blemish who has inspired a lot of Africans world over to do the right thing and criticize their government when it seems to be heading the wrong way.
A case in point of Soyinka’s views is captured in his critically analysed work ‘The Interpreter’. ‘The Interpreter’, set in post colonial Nigeria, revolves round the lives of six friends, who have returned to the country with foreign degrees, and high hopes of snagging rewarding jobs. First things first however: they have to fit into the system. The book tells of each of their experiences in their quest to achieve their dreams. It also tells of the then corruption which has not still left Nigeria; ‘Sagoe, the somewhat cynical journalist, faces corruption as he discovers that his American degree is not all he needs to attain a good job. Following an interview with a newspaper over a possible position, a member of the paper's board demands for a bribe and explains, "... degree is too plenty... so everybody is rushing to fill all vacancy."
According to writer Amina Maikori, The Interpreters' as a cocktail of sorts, laced with humour, social realism and giving an insight into the neo-colonised system that used to and still pervades the Nigerian society.
Associated with the post-colonial movement in writing, Soyinka is one of the most prolific writers ever to emerge out of Africa, having published plays, poetry collections, novels, autobiographies, reviews, essays and critiques, speeches as well as children story books. No doubt that Africa’s first literary Nobel laureate deserves to be celebrated, not just as a fanfare on every July 13, but as an open-ended subject of Africa’s social realities and literature.
