BY AKIN ADESOKAN
“…since to intervene is to be guilty of contradiction, and yet to remain altogether unfelt is to make my long-rumored ineffectuality complete…”—Forest Head, A Dance of the Forests
1
In the final chapter of You Must Set Forth at Dawn, the fulsome account of his leading role in the struggle against the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka constructs a detailed narrative of his return to Nigeria in 1998, following the tyrannical soldier’s death and the impending return to civilian rule. The crowd of admirers that received him at the Lagos airport is overwhelming, most eager to touch him or avoid being crushed in the stampede. Then comes a critical moment when his concern for the crowd deliriously morphs into anxiety about his own safety:
“A fear that my arm might be torn out of its sockets—Haven’t I been here before?—is soon submerged under the greater fear that some of the crowd might get knocked down or be trampled upon. The scene seemed primed for inevitable disaster, and it’s only now a matter of what form of injuries many would sustain. Then again I find myself compelled to direct my concerns to myself—it has become obvious that this very idiot, fast losing his balance while worrying over others, would prove the likeliest casualty.”
This passage in Soyinka’s memoirs is as good as any a place to start a reflection on his interventions in the Nigerian political space, particularly during the Fourth Republic that dawned with that tumultuous return. Whether the issue was President Muhammadu Buhari’s disastrous performance in office, or the electoral loss of candidate Peter Obi in the 2023 general elections, Nigerians usually found a way to hold Soyinka primarily responsible, trundling out weapons of all kinds and sizes to try on the target. Taking to social media, they would go after the writer with ad hominen attacks. When things do not go according to their desires, the critics aver, someone must be dragged out to account for the disaster. Better that that individual be recognizable from his head of white hair, and it matters little that white hair is proof of old age!
The occasion for the “dragging” (to use a social media term for merciless attacks) for Buhari’s sins was the public statement Soyinka issued in early 2018 in response to the then-current fuel shortage in the country, asking the populace to own up to its failures and take responsibility for them. In response, the online gladiators held the writer liable because of his endorsement of candidate Buhari in the 2015 presidential elections. For Obi’s supporters, so-called “Obidients,” it was enough that the Nobel laureate was perceived as an associate of Bola Tinubu, another presidential candidate, in ethnic terms no less, and that he was not slow to characterize their bellicosity as a form of fascism. It didn’t matter than Soyinka neither opposed Obi nor supported Tinubu. He might have said something critical of Obi months ago but he would get pilloried with fresh anger if a news outlet chose, for its own click-baiting ends, to publish the statement as if new.
We are thus returned to the import of the italicized question in the passage quoted above, the recurrence of a lifetime of finding oneself at the mercy of a community in need of cleansing but too complacent to ask itself to do the cleaning.
He has been there before, yes. In thinking about Soyinka’s political interventions, one image fastens itself to the screen of memory: the character in Greek mythology torn into pieces by the hands throwing and catching him in a dance of appreciation of his courageous acts.
But for the vigilance of Providence resolved to repay the morality of the self-sacrificing by keeping that self intact, Soyinka would have perished in the 26-month ordeal of his imprisonment during the Nigerian civil war. As he went from hand to hand, to the prison in Kaduna from a jailer in Lagos, Nigerians died helplessly on both sides of the war, and Nigerians lined their own pockets with cash and gold because, to that latter group, the war was just another opportunity for acquiring spoils.
2
How does one spend twenty-two months in solitary confinement without losing one’s mind?
Several years before his arrest in 1967, Soyinka wrote a play titled The Strong Breed, about the ritual of the carrier—identifying someone, often a stranger, to use as the bearer of the ills of one’s community. In the play, the carrier is a character named Eman, who is picked upon because he stands up in defense of a child both orphaned and disabled. Rereading the play recently, I was stunned by a statement that the protagonist makes to his girlfriend: “A man must go on his own, go where no one can help him, and test his strength. Because he may find himself one day sitting alone in a hut as round as that.”
The writer of those words would find himself sitting alone in a tiny cell for months on end, with thoughts and imaginings as his sole companions. One might say that he understood his responsibilities well enough to seem to have prepared for them. Self-sacrifice is ultimately about enhancing one’s personality, and this may explain why self-sacrificing individuals tend to triumph over adversity. A society’s need for carriers is a different matter, a pretext for the deep desire to hide the inability to look critically at itself.
Soyinka’s repeated act of standing up and speaking out is merely an exhortation to Nigerians as a community to take personal responsibility seriously, “to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit…[and] torture awareness from their souls,” as that character, Forest Head, in A Dance of the Forests puts it. Honoring the memory of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa in Lagos in August 2000, Soyinka performed a small ceremony of symbolically passing a baton to the younger generation. The message was unambiguous: “It’s Your Struggle Now.” Eighteen years later, he felt compelled to rouse himself to action…
The same is true of his interventions in defense of the secular ideal in the face of various kinds of religious intolerance, from all indications an extension of his opposition to political tyranny. The author of The Credo of Being and Nothingness and The Seven Signposts of Existence, both responses to expressions of religious intolerance in Nigeria circa 1991, meets the author of the 2023 public statement in defense of Ìsese (an inclusive Yoruba word for indigenous religion practice) and quips, “Haven’t we met before?”
In 1991, it was an Islamic cleric and honored scholar, Sheikh Gumi, who dismissed Christianity as “nothing,” a polemical statement on the war of religious positions that concealed as much as it disclosed. Far from a Christian himself—lapsed, nominal, or birth-gifted—Soyinka responded, not by quoting Biblical passages or citing authorities from the Synoptic Gospels, but with explorations of the ethical precepts laid down in other non-proselytizing faiths, including Ifa. For the rest of that decade, he used every platform—a public lecture at Wake Forest University, a Christian institution; during an honorary doctorate event at the University of Alberta in Canada—to instill the philosophical idea of tolerance in his audiences. In 2023, the spur was the controversy surrounding a proposed Ìsese Festival in Ilorin, the hostile response of an Islamic group, and the Emir of Ilorin’s reported intervention that, obviously enough, amounted to siding with the latter group.
The point of this recall is that Soyinka, a self-described glutton for tranquility, would rather not put himself in the position of the sole carrier of the collective mess—and not out of lacking the liver. Those who speak up at moments of seeming collective paralysis do so as a way of nudging society out of complacency. Those who share Soyinka’s views on these matters must feel doubly troubled that a man pushing ninety continues to fight battles that they should have taken up, to relieve him.
3
October 1994. Two African writers took the stage in Lagos to deliver major lectures, within a week of each other. The Ghanaian writer and diplomat, Kofi Awonoor was a guest of the Center for Black and African Art and Civilization, CBAAC, speaking on the effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the continent’s psychological and material well-being. Quickly on his heels came the writer Chinweizu, author of The West and the Rest of Us, out to condemn the military intervention of the United States and the United Nation in Haiti as yet another imperialist undertaking. Chinweizu’s lecture, at the University of Lagos, was given as part of a series sponsored by Moshood Abiola, the Nigerian business tycoon-turned-politician.
In October 1994, Abiola had been in detention for four months, undergoing a treason trial for declaring himself president—after futile attempts to claim his mandate as the undeclared winner of the June 12, 1993 elections. In October 1994, Saro-Wiwa and several other members of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP, had been arrested and were facing murder trial in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. In October 1994, Soyinka was in self-imposed exile as part of a group determined to resist the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. In October 1994, Rwanda festered in blood and gore…
It is possible to read these apparently unconnected details as fragments of a morality tale. The Atlantic Slave Trade was a sustained hemorrhaging of the African continent’s human resources over the course of four centuries. Yet the role of Africans in this episode did not merit a mention in Awonoor’s impassioned lecture. Let alone the prevalent state of things at the time of the speech: the widespread regimes of violence as wars (Liberia, Sierra Leone) dictatorship (Nigeria), genocide (Rwanda), and much else elsewhere. Those were instances of Africans taking control of their affairs, for better or worse, and an ethically aware position would be to demand responsibility from the people themselves, ruler and ruled. Chinweizu wielded a platform created by Abiola but had nothing to say about the man’s ordeal at the hands of the military regime. The thematic focus of public lectures became the unvoiced, taken-for-granted pretext for shirking responsibility. In moral terms, however, Soyinka opting for exile in the wake of military crackdown in 1994 was reminiscent of his sojourn in solitary detention as the civil war got underway in 1967.
4
On the occasion of his eightieth birthday anniversary in 2014, I wrote a tribute to Soyinka which ended unintentionally on a downbeat, being critical of what I saw as his susceptibility to entertaining power-mongers, a drawback that cannot be separated from his choosing to endorse Buhari in 2015, and which was later exploited by his critics during the 2023 general elections. I have often wondered if this shortcoming is the flip side of what he is often praised for—his acceptance of the role of communal championing habitually forced upon him. Let the critiques do battle with the relentless acts of self-accounting, for both are cut from the same cloth of psychic endowment. Soyinka is ninety years old, and reluctant as he may be to accept the divine mantle of a deity, a messiah, or a scapegoat, it is always time to hymn his humanity.
Such as his indignation at a review of his film, Blues for a Prodigal (1984), which is unfavorably compared to the worst of filmmaker Eddie Ugbomah. The reviewer pays the director of the panned film a visit, and innocently wonders if he can get a shot of scotch as a gesture of friendship long taken for granted. Whereupon the host, crabbing about, at length handles his guest a filled tumbler, then adds, “And may it burn your throat! How dare you compare me, me, to Eddie Ugbomah?!”
Such as his self-admitted “embarrassing gaffe” of publicly announcing the obituary of French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet in 1982, only to meet said dead writer in the flesh the following year, an error that must remain forever “too interesting to correct.”
Such as his counsel to fellow-traveler Tai Solarin, so beloved of students, youths in general, that he swore to die for them, making the author of Madmen and Specialists caution, “Look, Tai, you can’t continue to say that! Among these same students there are killers…,” the same caution he extends to a group of young radicals planning to rob a bank to fund a revolution: “If your plans fail and you’re being marched off to the firing squad, the same people you want to liberate will gather to boo you!”
Such as his frustration with Nigerian photo journalists who, unable to resist his impressive appearance, train their weapon at him at every sighting, using camera flash even in broad daylight, at which point the object of the flash seizes on the weapon closest to hand, a broom in each hand, to swat off the irritants, without of course escaping the recording of that moment of writing with sneaky light…
Such as his tendency to read Yoruba like a poet and thus to sometimes misread, a healthy attitude of seeing a metaphor in print and translating it as an act at variance with the intention of the original, communal author: “omíyalé—the flood that tears home apart”?! Well, not quite, but that also sounds canny and spectacular. Does “ewénlá kò níí’rú wewe” really mean “the big leaf shall not crush the little one”? Or, just the near opposite, the prayerful wish of the blessed never to experience diminution?
And so shall such moments be continuously unearthed, for humanity is frail and fluid, an individual is but a body of multitudes, and those who give of themselves, even if reluctantly, will be endlessly replenished, since that paradoxical exercise of the will to give is less a sign of parsimony than of a desire to embrace total awareness in solitude the better to honor their bequest.
His oríkì, the ones already forged and those still in the fire, shall live on when he shall have moved on, for such are the manifestations of a life unlike any other. Even more so his creations, the many-splendored things pouring out of him, endless, fathomless, brimful of life of eternal presence.
May the truth ever triumph,
The sentient gain the world!
- Akin Adesokan is Professor of Comparative Literature and of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.