The implication from all this should, I believe, be obvious by now—namely that any nation that is truly desirous of progress, that is concerned about its future, must listen to its writers. This is not merely a self-serving piece of advertisement. Right from the time of our traditional raconteurs to the modern era of scripted narration, all our story tellers have accepted it as their burden, that their works must not only entertain and celebrate the positive aspects of our life and our culture, but also go beyond to enlighten the audience, to speak especially for the voiceless and deprived. They hone their words into weapons against injustice and exploitation, and even if unconsciously, make prospective auguries about the future, in order to forestall impending grief.

So our work is no different or less important than that of the informed economists, the bankers, soldiers, agriculturists, educationists, and so on. Like them, we writers have always been just as engaged, if not even more fully engaged in fact, in enhancing the struggle of our people for freedom and fulfilment.

That is why it is so regrettable, as JP Clark often laments, that while the nation pays preponderant attention to politicians and others, writers are given relatively scant regard. Sadly few people read our works; fewer still heed our words.

And it is the nation that loses by so wilfully condemning itself this way to nonchalance and amnesia, and consequently to a continuous cycle of tragic repetitions.

This recurrent “cycle of stupidity”, as Soyinka called it, plus our seeming inability to break out of it, is a powerful theme that one finds in the works of Soyinka and Achebe, and it is to these authors I will turn now for a concrete illustration of the close link I am exploring between literature and national life. The choice of the two is not fortuitous. Not only are they the most prominent among our writers—and therefore the ones whom you in this assembly are most likely to be familiar with—but they have also been the most influential on our literary tradition; because like all gifted pioneers in any field, they are the ones who more or less established the paradigms for what those of us who came after have set out to be and achieve, or, on the obverse, to contradict and refute.

Whatever our stance, there is no gainsaying the fact that their glorious achievements inspire us; and serve as catalysts in our own parturition—by their talents as well as the contradictions in their profiles.

I can list the major points of these contrasts quickly: One of them for example is the most read universally; the other the most known and perhaps the most universally un-read. One is the most popular of all our writers; but the other is without dispute the most prolific and the most profound.

Achebe’s enormous reputation is built mostly on one book; but that one book, Things Fall Apart, has sold several million copies and been translated into some fifty different languages.. But Wole Soyinka won the prestigious Nobel Prize; and it would be the exceptional critic indeed who can cite all his works, which have continued to pour out in virtually all the genres (including film and LP record), not to talk of reading them all.

For the purpose of this lecture however, the principal link between them that interests us is their ideology, that is, the prime purpose behind their writing, this ideology with which they have infected the rest of us. This is the conception of their role as spokesmen for the people and the culture, with the mission, as Achebe puts it, to explore “where the rain began to beat us.”

Much has been written about this already, so I need not strive to prove it. Certainly the good writer for them is not the one who shies away from the pressing problems of the day, and refuses to identify with the longings and aspirations of his people. He is the one who, on the contrary, chooses to be “the conscience of his people”. For both of them, one can say, “The man dies in all who choose to be silent in the face of tyranny.”

That was no doubt why, quite early in the life of the nation, Soyinka was among the first to warn—in The Dance of the Forests—against the excessive optimism bubbling all around about the independence, and to point out the dangers latent in the inherited and still-unresolved transgressions of the past.

In No Longer At Ease Achebe followed with a depiction of the moral weakness of the new intellectual class, flaws so overwhelming that this otherwise enlightened elite would rather sacrifice its principles to survive than pay the painful price needed to lead us to a new dispensation.

But it was in A Man of the People that Achebe really surpassed himself, when his warnings about the spreading corruption and ineptitude of the politicians and the possibility of their being overthrown by soldiers actually coincided with real life, when our first military coup in Nigeria occurred in the very week of the book’s publication. The writer found himself arrested on suspicion of complicity in the coup, and only escaped from persecution by sheer providence!

This is to show how dangerous it can sometimes turn out to be for the writer in the course of simply pursuing his work. With WS, as we know, this danger has virtually been a permanent companion all his adult life, at least since he chose his writing career.