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Soyinka and temporal power
Continued...
The fact, of course, is that Soyinka only allows himself to be rubbished by a ‘country yokel’ who is
‘pathologically in need of proving himself – preferably at the expense of others’ because it flatters
his own craving to rub shoulders with power. So we are regaled throughout this narrative of
continuous one-upmanship with a long list of the great and the good who, as he rightly surmises,
desire acceptance as intellectual equals. But the relationship can only ever be one-sided: the
intellectual is flattered by his proximity to power; the man of power is amused that a writer feted the
world over should imagine that he has any advice worth listening to when it comes to how best to
steal the oil money that is the raison d’être of Nigerian politics. Soyinka himself justifies his supping
with the various devils that have plagued the ‘giant of Africa’ on the grounds that ‘a temperament
such as mine...has never been able to shunt aside…a sense of rebuke of how much is
lost…through a position that confers the self-righteous comfort of a purist, non-negotiable
distancing,’ which sounds suitably high-minded (if somewhat convoluted) but is belied by the
evidence. So, for instance, he claims that it was ‘inevitable’ that he should be drawn to Babangida,
a man who ‘intrigued me far more than Olusegun Obasanjo,’ but to what end? Certainly not to
save the life of Mamman Vatsa, Babangida’s childhood friend and erstwhile poet, who is accused of
coup-plotting and sentenced to death. Soyinka carries himself off to Dodan Barracks in company of
Achebe and Clark to beg the dictator to spare Vatsa’s life, but IBB, who pretends to lend a
sympathetic ear, kills him anyway. Not that he had a choice, as he later gives Soyinka to
understand. He remonstrated as best he could with his colleagues on the Armed Forced Ruling
Council but to no avail. They were adamant that their fellow general must die and he was bound to
accept the democratic decision. Soyinka contrives to believe him, readily entertains him to dinner at
a moment’s notice, and subsequently pronounces his government ‘a listening government’ even as
the evil genius perfects his plans to scupper the popular will that would pave the way for the trauma
of the Abacha years that saw our Nobel laureate fleeing on an okada through the bush into
neighbouring Benin Republic in fear of his life.
As in the previous Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, part of which it overlaps, this latest attempt at
memoir betrays a certain degree of hubris on Soyinka’s own part. Elsewhere he has written about
his continuing ability to shape events in his own country; in this book he wonders at ‘[j]ust how
much was required of any individual in his lifetime,’ as if Destiny itself had called on him to lay down
his pen from time to time in order to engage the generals on the battlefield on behalf of a populace
which never asked him to do so. And while it is true that he has always lent his name to the cause
of justice, which he famously sees as ‘the first condition of humanity,’ matters are not helped by the
craven willingness of his local and foreign acolytes to deify him, as witness, for instance, the
opening paragraph of a review by Neal Ascherson in the New York Review of Books:
Wole Soyinka is a titan, not only in Nigeria and not only in Africa. Playwright and poet, novelist and
pamphleteer, editor and autobiographer, cultural impresario and unofficial diplomat, democratic
conspirator and ferocious, unappeasable warrior for justice, he has earned his Nobel Prize many
times over. The world’s good and great beg him to drop in for lunch. The people in the streets and
villages of his own country call out to him as ‘Prof’ or ‘Kongi’, and feel for a moment proud to be
Nigerian.
In the same review, we also learn that ‘[n]o Nigerian ruler could afford to overlook an intellectual of
Soyinka’s stature,’ although the late, unlamented General Sani Abacha, who didn’t give a toss for
intellectuals of any stature – witness the gruesome hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa - might have had
something to say about that. Be it as it may, this is not helpful to anyone - not to Nigerians, not to
the object of such hero-worship, and certainly not to the cause of literature. At bottom, Soyinka has
fallen for his own myth: that of the writer as more than just the chronicler - or, better, witness - of
their times but as a shaper of events in the life of post-colonial Nigeria, which is the time-scale of
this book.
In the process, he is also apt to uncritically repeat received ideas that do violence to the facts on
the ground. This is evident, for instance, in his ill-advised escapade to rescue the Ife head. The
looting of Nigeria’s ancient treasures for the greater glory of the British Museum is undoubtedly a
crime against the people who produced them, and there can hardly be an argument to justify such
plunder, but to further argue that those who claim that ‘the Nigerian nation lacked the means, will,
or sense of value to preserve its previous heritage’ is condescending and requires ‘no comment’ is
unhelpful for the simple reason that it happens to be true. This may be unfortunate but it is a fact,
as I discovered when I toured some of the national museums to find out for myself. The museum in
Owo, for instance, has been closed for the last few years because all the artefacts have been
looted by Nigerians acting in concert with foreign buyers. Until its closure, the museum’s only
security was an elderly man armed with a bow and arrow, such was the premium placed on a
unique tradition of terracotta heads that was a bridge between Ife and Benin. The same can be
replicated in almost any of the other national museums. Why the modern state should be so
careless of a tradition that should otherwise be defended to the death if necessary is outside the
scope of this review but would provide an insight into the mores of a society that has brought us to
what Soyinka himself calls ‘the present point of collapse,’ and with it his own political engagement,
in this case at the expense of his art.
The pity of it is that the average reader is in danger of losing sight of the real heart of this book,
which is the author’s lifelong friendship with Femi Johnson, the Ibadan-based insurance magnate
famous for his lavish entertaining:
‘Awon iyá ndi árò’ – and his eyes would sparkle, surveying the field of the busy women – ‘just the
sight of them all over the compound, bent over the fires and cooking pots, vegetables being
washed and sliced, meats being cut up and slapped into the huge básiá of oil, all day long – yes,
that’s the best part of it. The festive atmosphere of preparation, even more than the result.’
Femi Johnson it is who, when the author is in police custody accused of holding up a radio station
following the rigged elections in the Western Region (the details of which are provided in full), visits
him everyday without fail in order to ensure that he eats properly. Later, when it appears that
Soyinka is in danger of a long prison spell, he offers to spirit him to freedom with the help of his
driver as long as he is kept ignorant of the details because, ‘If I don’t know anything, then I can’t
give anything away. I can’t imagine torture, I tell you. I’ll break before a hand is even laid on me, so
it’s better for me not to know.’ Later again, he takes time off from a conference in Nairobi to visit the
wife of the imprisoned Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, at Soyinka’s insistence and in the face of
real danger:
Our insurance broker carried out his mission to the letter, and then some! He undertook a long,
roundabout journey to meet Ngugi’s wife, delivered the funds – to which, needless to say, he had
added his own generous contribution, unasked. Instead of joining on the organised safari tours with
his colleagues, Femi spent tow days in Kenya awaiting the contact that had been sent to penetrate
through to Ngugi in prison. He met other contacts, wrapped up his mission and landed in Lagos still
wreathed in the high state of euphoria that only commenced – on his own admission – once his
plane had left Kenyan airspace.
The tribute to the man who has since died is fulsome and a welcome relief from the endless round
of nobodies in power with whom Soyinka is intent on rubbing shoulders. Only here does the author
fade into the background and allow the story to breathe. For the rest, his insistence on taking the
starring role in his own production, a quip attributed to J. P. Clark, is simply tiresome.
Adewale Maja-Pearce
Wole Soyinka: You Must Set Forth at Dawn, Ibadan: Bookcraft
ISBN: 978-2030-40-6 (hardback), 978-2030-33-3 (paperback)
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