In contrast to Achebe, who is more like a sage, sombre, reticent and reflective, Soyinka is the Byronic rebel, restless, fiery, and fearlessly outspoken, just like the god Ogun whom he has made his patron god. With him the passion to change the world translates into direct, physical engagement. He is not one just to talk about tyranny, he must organize resistance against it, even at the cost of his own safety; he will not just denounce and ridicule corruption, he will lead a fight against it. It is not surprising therefore that under the various regimes our country has had since our Independence from Britain, Soyinka has spent his life either in jail or in exile; and under Abacha, who hanged Saro Wiwa, Soyinka was first declared a wanted man like a criminal, then sentenced in abstentia to death, and assassin squads dispatched to eliminate him wherever he might be.

But the adage goes, the pen is always mightier than the sword. As you can see, both of these writers outlived our dictators with all their awesome powers in the end. It was a cruel irony of fate indeed that Achebe, like his creation Okonkwo, was struck down at his supreme moment of success, and had to go into exile. Unlike Okonkwo, he did not even have the choice of returning to resume his career at home and had to live the rest of his life abroad. But even there, he never ceased to add his voice to those fighting against the deprecations at home—twice he rejected the offer of the country’s highest award, because he considered the governments that offered him the honour to be corrupt and anti-people, and said so in unambiguous terms.

I think this is why our literature in the end is so weighted with sad and tragic notes. About our leaders especially, the literature has been most unsparing, if not even vitriolic. Achebe has berated this leadership again and again in his books, and so has Wole Soyinka in his many fierce satirical plays and sketches.

But what about the people; or as we like to say, the followership whom most of us like to perceive as the victims? What do our writers think of them and of their contribution to history? Are they presented as less corrupt, more heroic, more promising of redemption? Achebe answers these questions somehow towards the end of his novel, A Man of the People, when the military steps in to displace the politicians from power. The unnamed narrator, who may well be the author himself, states as follows:

No, the people had nothing to do with the fall of our Government. What happened was simply that unruly mobs and private armies having tasted blood and power during the election had got out of hand and ruined their masters and employers. And they had no public reason whatever for doing it. Let’s make no mistake about that.

The rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over.

And it was not all. Listen as he continues:

….What I found distasteful however was the sudden, unashamed change of front among the very people who had stood by and watched him die.

Overnight everyone began to shake their heads at the excesses of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt government: newspapers, the radio, the hitherto silent intellectuals and civil servants – everybody said what a terrible lot; and it became public opinion the next morning. And these were the same people that only the other day had owned a thousand names of adulation, whom praise-singers followed with song and talking-drum wherever they went. Chief Koko in particular became a thief and a murderer, while the people who had led him on – in my opinion the real culprits – took the legendary bath of the Hornbill and donned innocence.

The followership then, in Achebe’s judgment, are the real culprits, the ones who egg on their thieving leaders. With him therefore, this failure to find a redeeming possibility even among the people cannot but produce a deep pessimism, and hence, a tragic view of life.

Repeatedly therefore in his books, you will find proverbs that state that the strong perish, while the meek and the weak survive: “It is from the compound of the coward that we point to the ruins of house of the brave.”

Thus Okonkwo, icon of the old traditional ideal of honour, dies tragically in Things Fall Apart, and in such an undignified manner that he cannot even be respectably buried, while by contrast the rational, pragmatic Obierika survives him; Akuebue the sensible down-to-earth friend is the necessary foil to Ezeulu’s zealousness in Arrow of God; and Ikem the visionary dreamer is the one who dies senselessly at the end of Anthills of the Savannah.

Indeed, it is not far-fetched to argue that it is Achebe giving us his philosophy of life when in the same Anthills… he makes the wise Old Man of Abazon tell us, as follows: