By Kola Tubosun
The photo of a young man, 35, on the front page of Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years had fascinated me for years. The man, then an acclaimed playwright Wole Soyinka, sits with his hands crossed on the steps of a house. He wears leather sandals, one that wraps around his big toe. He is flanked by two gnome-like sculptures. The one to his left — and to the right of the photographer— sports a Yoruba cap, likely put there before the photo was taken. The one to his right seems to be firmly rooted in the ground beside the steps, but is tall enough to show up in the photo as if it’s placed right behind the man, to the right.
Something about the way the writer appeared, his eyes cast slightly askance towards his left, but gently avoiding staring at the camera, is striking. When it appeared on the cover of his 1994 memoirs, the writer had become world-famous not just for his Nobel Prize but also for his handsome grey Afro. So seeing the writer so young, so confident, so full of intensity and in such a casual look and environment invited strong interest.
There are other details in the photo — the hedge that intrudes slightly into the shot from the photographer’s left hand, the position of the writer’s legs (one foot lower than the other on the steps), the slight view of the open door of the house behind him, and the crack in the concrete at the top of the step, placed in the photo approximately near the writer’s left shoulder.
Perhaps because history is made material only by what we see, I had depended on photographs to aid my memory reconstruction of events and places I had never seen but only heard about. And every time I came across my copy of the book, which got progressively worn over the years, I stared at the photo and noticed one new detail or the other. My first copy had been brought by my brother. I don’t know if he ever read it. He admired Soyinka from afar as a political activist, read all the essays he wrote in the newspapers. This was during the military regime of Sani Abacha during which time Soyinka was either in exile or was about to begin one. I was just about to leave high school so I depended on him for guidance as to what was happening in the country, beyond what we could already see, and what role Soyinka played in them. I had, by then read maybe one or two of Soyinka’s works, mandated by the school. But my contact with Ibadan the Penkelemes Years gave me a deeper insight into a time I did not inhabit.
I had grown up in Ibadan after all, son of an Ibadan writer/poet and an Ij¹bu woman. There was, to some degree, a sense of affinity with the writer’s particular double heritage. But here was a book that had my city in its title, and whose content took me to a time and place filled with political and social intrigues some of which had shaped the direction of the country. I stared at the photo on the cover of that book every time I could. I would flip to random chapters when I was bored and enjoyed the playful rascality of the author as a young man. At a time when I was growing into myself, figuring out how to exist in a country whose political and social life mirrored some of those detailed in the book required often going back into the past to see how others navigated it.
One day, many years later, I found out that the photo had been taken at the University of Ibadan, my alma mater, and my interest became more intense.
This was about a decade ago. I had graduated from UI, gone to and returned from the United States for a Fulbright program, and completed my masters in Linguistics and teaching English. It was during one of my visits to the University of Ibadan Staff Club when a colleague mentioned, during a conversation, that the house where that famous Soyinka photo was taken, was in the university. Not just that, that it was still habitable, and accessible. I couldn’t believe my ears.
The more I listened, the more I learnt about the circumstances behind the photo. It had been taken in 1969, shortly after the subject, Wole Soyinka, was released from his prison detention for participating in activities that the Nigerian military government found unacceptable during its conduct of the civil war against a breakaway region then called Biafra. Soyinka had not only visited Biafra in the early days of the war, he had collaborated with a few rebels who had broken away from the breakaway region, and who were now on their own cause to create what was called a “Third Force” to allegedly neutralize both the Biafran rebellion and the Nigerian state aggression. On return from Biafra, Soyinka was arrested and locked away without trial for almost thirty months, much of which he spent in solitary confinement. On his return, he granted a few interviews to journalists, one of which was with the journalist who likely took that photo. In a few years, Soyinka resigned his job at the university, embark on a voluntary exile, during which he wrote his seminal prison pamphlet/memoir The Man Died.
All this history converging on my presence in the University of Ibadan stimulated me. Soyinka had been employed here as the first indigenous Director of the School of Drama. His appointment began in 1967 shortly before the war began, and ended shortly after his release and resignation. So the details of his productive presence at the university was always a matter of conjecture. How long did he stay after his return from prison? What was it like when he was gone? Why did he resign, beyond the issue of the war? As a student of this university, I had heard stories, none of which was conclusive. Some said he was pushed out because of his involvement with politics. Some said it was his temperament. Others said it was his personal decision, which he himself had written about. But in each of these writings, there were different reasons. On one, his marriage had been strained and he wanted distance. In another, his carvings collection, which beautified and decorated his house — and that famous photo — had been stolen one after the other while he was gone, so he no longer felt welcome. In another narrative, the political situation on campus after his return made it hard to remain there. And in yet another, corroborated by some of his colleagues, the decision of the university to not officially confirm him as a full professor got him upset, and led to his exist.
That evening when I confirmed the location of the photograph, I walked there. The hair on my neck stood still as I approached the bungalow from the quiet junction at Landers Road. Ebrohimie Road, on which the house lay at its farthest end, was gently wooded and — during evenings — was sparse of people. The sign at the beginning of the road read “Ebrohime”, missing an ‘i’, but it was also crooked and almost obscured by the overgrowth. The house was there alright, sturdy and almost unrecognizable. A few changes in the facade had been made, reflecting the security concerns of today’s Nigeria. When Soyinka lived there, the verandah was open. Now it was boarded up and locked. There didn’t seem to be anyone at home, but the frontage looked almost exactly as it did in the photo. I was pleased.
I would return there a few more times, every time I was in Ibadan, discovering a new detail each time. On one of my later visits, I took along a copy of that original photo from 1969, which I had bought on the internet. And then I met the current occupant of the house, also a professor in the Department of English, and a playwright. And on this day, for the first time, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a crack on the concrete near the top of the steps had remained there since that 1969 interview, as it was on the photo I held.
So that one day a few weeks later when I excitedly emailed Soyinka himself an idea that had been bubbling in me since I first saw that photo, the crack would prove useful.
It turned out, I found, that Soyinka himself had lost memory of where the original photo was taken. He was absolutely sure that it was somewhere else in town much before he came to the University of Ibadan. The mistake made sense, when I thought about it, because the book Ibadan the Penkelemes Years on which the image was first used, covered an earlier period between 1946 and 1965 when Soyinka first lived in Ibadan as a Rockefeller Fellow, wrote some plays, and got into trouble with the Western Nigerian political establishment. It was easy to associate a cover image with the events of the time. There was a house in Agodi where he lived during the turbulent time of the 1964 elections when he held up a radio station. Before I discovered the house myself, I had assumed that this was the house in front of which that photo was taken. He, apparently, had thought the same, as did many people who read the book. But when I showed him the crack on the concrete, and — something else I had also found — a short video from Reuters showing him on the steps answering questions from the same journalist, he finally acquiesced.
The idea I shared with him, however, was met with stone-cold rejection. How great would it be, I mused, to have the great writer himself, now in his old age, return to the steps of that building to retake the famous photo just like he did in 1969? For historical or even mere sentimental value, that would be a beautiful idea, I said, half in jest, and half retaining some hope that this writer with whom I had no personal relationship would agree.
“Interesting proposition,” he replied tersely, “but not a ghost of a chance.”
This was around 2018, when I was working on an unauthorised biography, still unfinished, of the Nobel Prizewinner. Every year since then, I retained a hope that he would change his mind, or forget about my request and one day choose to return to Ebrohimie Road, either with me or with any other film crew to retake a photo on the steps. Something about recreating history always fascinated me. What I often forgot was that there was another human being involved whose life experiences, memories, and history intersected with that venue in ways that may not always be complementary.
In the many conversations I’ve had since then, on and off camera, with Soyinka, members of his family, his friends and colleagues, acquaintances, readers of his work, etc, his decision to never return to that spot is connected to a number of painful memories connected to those times, the people, the events, and other personal matters.
But I didn’t know it then. It was going to become obvious over time, especially when, in the summer of 2022, I shared the idea of a documentary film about this location with Open Society Foundation, who immediately took to it and provided funds to create it. I returned to Soyinka with the same request I had shared in 2018 and his response was the same, almost to the letter. The only concession he gave, which I immediately embraced, was that he would grant an interview to speak about his time at Ebrohimie Road and what he remembered. But he would not return there. That was enough.
Making the film took me from Lagos to Ibadan, Abekuta, Osogbo, Kansas City, Maryland, and New Orleans, through the memory lane of friends, acquaintances, relatives, children, spouse, and students of Wole Soyinka. We examined not just his time in the University of Ibadan and Ebrohimie Road, but also the circumstances of his exit from the house and the university, his time in jail, the influence of his presence in UI, and the role of that home in Nigerian history. The circumstances of Soyinka’s employment and exit from the University of Ibadan was also one subject that had intrigued me for many years. When was he employed? When exactly did he leave? 1971? 72? 73? Why did he leave? The situation of the arrest? His family? His carvings? His fellowship at Cambridge? For how long was he at UI after his release from prison? What was that time like? And, most importantly, what became of the house on Ebrohimie Road after Soyinka left, until around 1989 when his ex-spouse, Mrs. Laide Soyinka finally left the place? These, I realized, were not details that were in the public domain, but which, if well told in a screen documentary, can help us better understand our illustrious writer and his growth from a Nigerian lecturer into a global icon and internationally celebrated artist.
Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of History is an intervention in this space of documentation and memory. We don’t have many films of this nature in Nigeria and we should, considering how many stories are floating around us which can help illuminate our society in fundamental ways. With the cinematography of ace photographer Tunde Kelani and many other collaborators, we have created something that I hope can keep us from forgetting important aspects of our history. But more importantly, making the film has helped fill certain gaps in my own knowledge of Soyinka, of the University of Ibadan, and of a time in Nigeria which I’ve only understood from the words of others.
(Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory will debut in July 2024 in venues in Nigeria, United Kingdom, and the United States, to mark Soyinka’s 90th year on earth.)
- Kola Tubosun is a writer translator and film-maker.