‘To some of us the Owner of the World has apportioned the gift to tell their fellows that the time to get up has finally come. To others He gives the eagerness to rise when they hear the call…and go to the boundary of their town to engage the invading enemy boldly in battle. And then there are those others whose part is to wait and when the struggle is ended, to take over and recount its story.

‘The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards—each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you hear me? Now, when I was younger, if you had asked me the same question I would have replied without a pause: the battle. But age gives to a man some things with the right hand even as it takes away others with the left……

‘So why do I say the story is chief among his fellows? The same reason I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters—Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives that sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters….The story is our escort; without it, we are blind…

That is Achebe. But the surprise is that Soyinka, so quick to action and so uncaring of his own personal safety in the cause of freedom, is in fact no less a pessimist than his late friend. (Perhaps it was no surprise in fact that both joined the PRP of Mallam Aminu Kano in their only reported case of political party activity—it was, frankly, a party doomed right from the start to failure, on account of its quixotic aims but practically limited means…)

Like Achebe, this vision of the tragic haunts almost all of Soyinka’s works. And I believe it is for the same reason—that is, the failure to find a reliable ally either among the leadership or the followership. Soyinka remorselessly satirizes the former, but his contempt for the submissiveness of the rule is no less mortifying. The educated class in particular he sees as conniving and cowardly, and so complicit in the misrule of the country. The evidence is there in the caricatured portrait of Lakunle in The Lion and the Jewel, of the Faseyis in the Interpreters; or the fawning members of the so-called Reformed Aweri Fraternity in Kongi’s Harvest.

“You’ve been bribed,” shouts Kongi’s Organizing Secretary at them when they seem to corner him. But it is Basha Bash’s wife, Maariya, who best expresses Soyinka’s anger when she turns on the audience at the end with a fierce denunciation, accusing them of sly and shameful complicity:

Maariya: Don’t you dare touch me! (Appealing.) General Potipoo…(He turns his back to her.) Oh, so that’s the way it is? (Spins round with sudden ferocity.) And what are you all looking at? You think this is a freak show do you? Well, don’t you dare think it’s over, oh no, by no means. It’s much too soon to crow. I know you’re going to start lying to the people, lying, lying, lying, you fake redeemers. You want to settle accounts but your accounts are safely stashed away you know where. And so do I. Now he’s gone you’ll all become butter-won’t-melt-in-your-mouths latter-day saints. No, of course you never knew him, you never embraced him or sucked up to him, never used him when it suited you, you lying sycophants you stinking collaborators, you slimy accomplices … lying, lying, lying with your sanctimonious denials laundering your past so you continue without shame in the public eye, shameless, shameless, shameless, yes you kidnappers, torturers, murderers, of course now it was he who did it all, single-handed, no help from anyone, you never knew anything, just like the three brass monkeys, see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil just pour stinking petroleum on the flames so you’ll be sure to keep going on and on and on like the battery in the commercial with your little tin drum oh yes you know how to renew yourselves so people begin to wonder if their memory has failed them, if you’re not the same people who drove them into the winds of wilderness but oh yes you’ll keep going and going and going on and on and on . . .
[p 107 – Act Two, Scene Five.]

For all such people then, the ‘slimy’ collaborators who find a way to accommodate oppression or are too cowed to protest their enslavement, there can be no sympathy from the writer’s pen. When such abject complicity and surrender are the common fare, as it repeatedly turns out among us, one can understand that a fighting spirit like Soyinka’s will be plunged from time to time into despair and despondency, as we see in his major plays. In Madmen and Specialists, which is perhaps his most pessimistic play so far, this despair is even developed into a powerful trope named “AS”, the expression of an immutable and implacable terror from which man will never escape.

This is the summary then of our literature so far, a chronicle, almost unbroken, of woe and horror, a constant parade of madmen and specialists, with no enduring heroes. As some have said, it can be a heartbreaking experience indeed reading many Nigerian or African authors in succession.

In book after book, play after play, poem after poem, most of what you read is about unedifying things, corrupt leaders, both civilian and military, and a hapless citizenship not just in perpetual torment but also pitiably incapable of saving itself.

Almost unrelentingly—at least until the current crop of authors who seem to have decamped from local issues to focus their gaze on the vicissitudes of exile—the characters featured in our works are invariably the tyrants and tormentors of our people, the murderers and robbers, the fake messiahs, all the negative people and their victims. The positive dreamers suffer a quick and brutal end; the idealists quickly come to grief. Poverty and suffering, disease and disaster are the commonest ingredients. After one book, you could predict the next. Anomy is everywhere, on every page.

But then, ladies and gentlemen, I have not finished with my tales. Please listen to the following:

…During the course of his duty, [my grandfather] had to discipline a local beauty called Ajayi. Ajayi was the daughter of the then Ogboni of Esa Oke, second in rank to the Owamiran, the Oba of Esa-Oke. Her parents wanted her to marry someone, but she did not fancy him. Now, in those days, that was a most heinous crime. In Ajayi’s case, it was as if she was cocking a snook (sic) at Esa-Oke authority….

Ajayi said the person she would marry was from Ila, Adesina. The immigrants from Ila were just being integrated into Esa-Oke society although they were quite numerous and good cocoa-farmers and therefore prosperous. But they did not belong to Esa-Oke aristocracy which occupied Oke-Esa. Adesina was of good Ila lineage, true, but an Ila was Ila. Ajayi stuck to her guns.