The Essential Soyinka

The Essential Soyinka


By: Uzor Maxim Uzoatu





The presentation of the book, Journeys around and with Kongi: Half a

Century on the Road with Wole Soyinka written by the ebullient German

journalist, translator and cultural activist Gerd Meuer provoked my

own memories of my encounter with the Nobel Laureate as humanist and

writer. I had personally chosen Soyinka as my own teacher; that was

why I ended up at the Dramatic Arts Department of University of Ife

(as it then was) where Soyinka was the Head of Department, leading the

cast of lecturers such as Kole Omotoso, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Femi Euba, Olu

Akomolafe, Segun Akinbola, Bankole Bello and others. The ambience

provided by the presence of Soyinka made for a joyous engagement with

his works.





The greatest discovery I made back then was Soyinka’s refrigerator,

which was always well-stocked with cold beer and wine! One evening

when Soyinka was teaching my classmates in his house, he found me

otherwise engaged in a corner. Aghast, the great man asked why I was

drinking beer while my classmates were busy getting educated. ‘Well,

sir, beer is how I get my own inspiration!’ I told Soyinka. He only

laughed, before continuing to teach the other more serious students.

Any other don would have rusticated me for such behaviour but Soyinka

was much larger than them all. My best friend in the school was of

course Soyinka’s Ghanaian houseboy, Francis, who left the fridge and

its multiform artworks at my mercy even as the legendary playwright

taught my classmates at the department or travelled all over the world

directing his plays.





Another boon companion of those days was the great Ugandan poet Okot

p’Bitek, author of Song of Lawino and a formidable tippler as well! My

time with Okot is material for another day, however. My subject today

is my mentor Soyinka, whose life and times one is hard-pressed to come

to terms with in this offering. Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka, universally

known as Wole Soyinka, was born on July 13, 1934. His father Ayodele

whom he fondly calls ‘Essay’ in his acclaimed book Ake - The Years of

Childhood hailed from Ijebu-Isara town while his mother Eniola or

‘Wild Christian’ came from Abeokuta of the selfsame Ogun State. With a

father from the Ijebu section and a mother from the Egba zone Soyinka

refers to himself as an ‘Ijegba’ man. His father was a primary school

headmaster who rose to become a school supervisor. His mother was a

trader who ran her shop with an iron grip that spared no debtor.





A precocious child, Soyinka began his elementary education at the age

of four, attending St. Peter’s School, Ake, Abeokuta, one of the elite

primary schools in colonial Nigeria under the headship of his father.

He was a brilliant, if rascally, pupil who played a lot of practical

jokes. He had little interest in sports. In Standard III he performed

the role of The Magician on prize-giving day. Thus was the early

beginning of Soyinka as a dramatist. He was always the prankster

amongst his mates, witty, inventive and unstoppable.





Aged 10 in 1944, he was admitted into his secondary school, Abeokuta

Grammar School, popularly known as AGS, where the maverick musician

Fela’s father, Rev. A. O. Ransome-Kuti, was the principal. Fela was of

course Soyinka’s cousin. Soyinka was the youngest student in the

school; most of his classmates could even pass for his teachers in

age! Soyinka’s early grooming by the principal Ransome-Kuti whom

Soyinka fondly addresses as Daodu was matched by the mother-care

offered the young lad by his famous wife Olufunmilayo whom Soyinka

fondly refers to as Beere.





Even in his early years Soyinka had started building his stature as an

activist by serving as a go-between between his own mother Wild

Christian and Fela’s mother Beere in the Women’s Movement that

demanded the abolition of the tax on women from the District Officer,

the Alake of Egbaland and his Council of Chiefs.





Soyinka’s father wanted his son to have the best of education

available; in the young boy’s second year at AGS he sat for

examination to win a scholarship into the prestigious Government

College, Ibadan (GCI). He passed the exam and was summoned for an

interview in Ibadan. For the first time in his life he had to make a

long journey without his parents or any elders. He was on his own, as

it were. He eventually got admission into GCI but did not win a

scholarship.





The students of GCI were drawn from all parts of Nigeria. Most of

Soyinka’s classmates were ‘men’ just as in AGS though a good number of

the lads were nearer his age bracket. Some 24 students were admitted

and they were divided into two groups to occupy either Grier House or

Swanston House. Soyinka was allocated to Swanston House. One of his

mates was Olumuyiwa Awe who recalls that even in Class Four Soyinka

was so small in size that he was appointed the Captain of ‘Mosquito

Football Eleven’, a team made up of Class One or Two students! He was

a scorer for the cricket team, touring with the squad to such far-

flung schools as Government College Umuahia, Kings College Lagos, Edo

College Benin and Government College Ughelli.





Soyinka excelled in drama at GCI, being a prominent member of the

dramatic arts society. He excelled in English and Literature while

Mathematics was never his strong suite even though he surprised all by

taking a credit in the subject. He left GCI in December 1950, and was

in January of 1951 appointed a stores assistant in the medical stores

of the Government Medical Department in Lagos.





Soyinka wanted to start a career in journalism. He applied to the

Daily Times and took a written test with the other wannabes. The

applicants were asked to imagine a market fight and report the

incident for the newspaper. The other applicants wrote up their

reports and left while Soyinka stayed on, writing furiously, filling

up eight lined foolscap pages as though intent on writing up the

entire newspaper. He was indeed expansive, giving the detailed

histories of the market fighters and their extended families, their

ill-assorted businesses etc. The exasperated white invigilator could

not but snatch the foolscap sheets from the irrepressible young

writer! This may well have been a blessing in disguise. Given the

addictiveness of journalism, one wonders what would have become of

Soyinka if he had not failed the Daily Times test. He quit the job at

the medical department in September 1952 following his admission into

University College, Ibadan (UCI).





Soyinka talks of his great excitement sometime in 1951 at having one

of his short stories broadcast on the Nigerian Broadcasting Service.

He mastered typing and bought his first typewriter. A major highlight

of his UCI days was the founding of the Pyrates Confraternity aimed at

abolishing convention, reviving the age of chivalry, ending elitism

and tribalism. After reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island

Soyinka and his mates were struck by the lives of the pirates as

narrated by young Jim Hawkins. The original seven founders of Pyrates

Confraternity are Wole Soyinka, Muyiwa Awe, Ralph Opara, Pius Oleghe,

Ikpehare Aig-Imoukhuede, Ifoghale Amata and Nat Oyelola.





The critic Bernth Lindfors has traced Soyinka’s first poem published

in UCI to The University Voice, the official organ of the Students’

Union, in January 1953. The poem of 98 lines is entitled Thunder To

Storm and, to say the truth, was a very bad effort indeed. He was

politically active on campus, belonging to the radical Progressive

Party that opposed the policies of the Dynamic Party. He edited the

cyclostyled newsletter The Eagle. His acting prowess was immediately

recognized on campus, and he played the part of Tobias in the play

Tobias and the Angel by James Bridie while his friend Ifoghale Amata

played Raphael, to wit, the angel. He starred in other plays such as

The Devil’s Disciple by George Bernard Shaw. He was the source of

admiration of the few young ladies around then.





He was of course very brilliant in his academics as a student of

English, History and Greek. He led the class in English, competed with

Gamaliel Onosode in Greek and slugged it out in History with Ifoghale

Amata. It was back then that Soyinka read Bacchae by Euripedes in the

original Greek, a play he would later write his own version of as The

Bacchae of Euripides. He left Ibadan for Leeds University, England, in

October 1954 but continued to send articles to the campus publications

The Eagle and The Criterion edited by his friends Pius Oleghe and

Ralph Opara respectively as ‘Epistles of Cap’n Blood to the

Abadinians’. In one of the articles he wrote of a white girl who kept

staring at him until he felt he had won the girl’s heart only for the

girl to retort that she was only wondering how many average noses

could be made out of Soyinka’s big nose! In yet another article he

wrote of the strong winds blowing in England which pushed his hand so

sharply that he ended up shaking the person behind him when he had

actually wanted to shake the hands of the man in front of him!





His short story ‘Keffi’s Birthday Treat’, broadcast on the children’s

programme of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service was published in the

Nigerian Radio Times magazine of July 1954. Soyinka was awarded second

prize in the Margaret Wong Memorial Fund writing competition of 1956

for the short story ‘Oji River’. He wrote poems such as ‘The Other

Immigrant’ and two of his short stories were published in the

University Of Leeds magazine The Gryphon. The first story, ‘Madame

Etienne’s Establishment’, appeared in the March 1957 edition of the

magazine. The next story was, like Charles Dickens novel, entitled ‘A

Tale of Two Cities.’





He graduated from Leeds with an Upper Second Degree, and there is no

truth whatsoever to the fable spread in certain quarters that Soyinka

managed only a Third Class degree at Ibadan! Soyinka initially

enrolled for graduate studies but soon turned his back on further

university degrees. He fell in love with the young English girl

Barbara who gave birth to his first son, Olaokun, born in November

1957. Soyinka eventually formalized his union with Barbara into his

first marriage.





The Royal Court Theatre, London, was all the rage for all theatre

wannabes in the Britain of those days. It was the golden age of

British theatrical revival that was built on the success of John

Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. The great director and theatre

manager George Devine held court at the Royal Court Theatre and young

playwrights like Harold Pinter, John Osborne, John Arden, Edward Bond,

Arnold Wesker, Ian Johnstone, Anne Jellicose earned their breakthrough

under Devine’s direction. There was the Sunday night innovation in

which new plays were tried out and fledging playwrights earned ten

shillings a script as play-readers. Soyinka was attached to the Royal

Court Theatre as Play Reader between 1957 and 1959. He acted in the

Royal Court production of Eleven Men Dead at Hola, dealing with

colonial repression in the British detention camps, a production he

made significant contribution to. His unpublished play The Invention

was performed in the theatre on a November 1959 event ‘An Evening

without Decor’ alongside excerpts from A Dance of the Forests and the

much-anthologized poem ‘Telephone Conversation’.





His play The Swamp Dwellers was produced in 1959 for the Sunday Times

Students Drama Festival. In the same year, the earliest version of his

comedy The Lion and the Jewel was produced in Ibadan alongside The

Swamp Dwellers. Soyinka was building quite a reputation for himself

even as he had not broken into print with a major publisher. Literally

all his plays had not been published then. It was not until 1963 that

plays like The Lion and the Jewel were published for the critical

industry to dissect the written texts. Soyinka was a total man of the

theatre who wrote, acted and directed plays. He could build the set,

and knew so much about costuming. Many theatre enthusiasts at the time

learnt at his feet.





Soyinka returned to Nigeria in January 1960. He had been awarded a

Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to travel all over Nigeria to study

and record traditional festivals, rituals and masquerades rich in

dramatic content. He bought a Land Rover with which he made his many

journeys.





Soyinka’s writing began to get some international attention with the

1960 publication of the great African-American poet Langston Hughes’

African Treasury that contained some of the fledgling writer’s poems.

He formed The 1960 Masks, a drama company, to kick-start theatre

activities in the country. His entry for the independence playwriting

contest, A Dance of the Forests, won the first prize. After winning

The Encounter Award, Soyinka discovered that after a thorough reading

of the play some of the officials were not comfortable with the

subversive nature of the play, and it was officially turned down as a

part of the independence programme. The 1960 Masks produced the play

at Ibadan to sold-out audiences. The speech of Forest Head, acted by

Soyinka, himself underscores the relentless pessimism of the play.





It was in the selfsame 1960 that Soyinka earned the distinction of

writing the first play produced on Nigerian television. The Western

Nigeria Television (WNTV) reached the milestone at 8.45 pm on Saturday

August 6, 1960 with the screening of the first full-length play

produced in the Ibadan studios entitled ‘My Father’s Burden’ by Wole

Soyinka and directed by Segun Olusola.





The year of independence was indeed remarkable for the artistic

exploits of the young Soyinka. He served as a Master of Ceremonies at

the independence ball where he literally chased off the stage the

boring opera singer flown into the country at the special request of

Governor-General Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, ‘Zik of Africa’. He made

contributions to The Horn, a magazine founded at the University of

Ibadan by J. P. Clark and Martin Banham. His critical essay, ‘The

Future of West African Writing’ published in the magazine in 1960 made

the case for novelist Chinua Achebe as pointing the right direction of

future African writing. Of course Soyinka would later charge Achebe of

‘unrelieved competence’ in his writings.





When eventually Soyinka made the famous statement on negritude that ‘a

tiger does not have to proclaim its tigritude; it pounces’, it has to

be understood that it harked all the way back from the ‘duikeritude’

article he had published in The Horn in 1960. At the turn of the year

in March 1961, Soyinka had done enough on the national stage to earn a

major illustrated feature article in Drum, easily the most popular

magazine in the country then, entitled ‘Young Dramatist is earning the

Title of Nigeria’s Bernard Shaw.’





His early comedy, The Trials of Brother Jero, was produced at Ibadan

in March, 1960. The respected theatre director and teacher Dapo

Adelugba informs that the play was written at his request in three

days! He would later in October of that year act the part of Yang Sun

in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan at Ibadan. The next

year, he again directed a production of his The Trials of Brother

Jero, alongside R. Sarif Easmon’s Dear Parent and Ogre, in which he

played the part of Dauda Touray. Soyinka was fast winning a reputation

for himself as a leading member of the emerging writers in the new

nation. It was little wonder that he was well represented in the

anthology of the new Nigerian writing, Reflections, edited by Frances

Ademola. His works published in the anthology include the small play

The House of Banigeji, poems like ‘Telephone Conversation’ and the

essay on Yoruba culinary overdrive entitled ‘Salutations to the Gut’.





With the troubles in the Western region rearing up, the activist in

Soyinka began to manifest in earnest. He wrote ‘Emergency Sketches’ in

1962 - press lampoons on Dr Majekodunmi who had been appointed

administrator of the troubled region.





After serving as a Rockefeller Research Fellow mainly attached to the

University of Ibadan up to 1962 Soyinka took appointment as a lecturer

in English at the University of Ife. He waged consistent wars with the

goons of the Premier of the Western Region, Ladoke Akintola, who had

fallen out with the party leader Chief Obafemi Awolowo. He raised a

dust of controversy over the world middleweight boxing title fight

staged at Ibadan between Nigeria’s Dick Tiger and America’s Gene

Fullmer, dismissing it as amounting to a misguided sense of national

priorities. He put up the satirical revue, The Republican, in 1963,

and it was followed up in the year with a performance ofThe New

Republican.





The year 1963 marked Soyinka’s major breakthrough into mainstream

publishing. A Dance of the Forests and The Lion and the Jewel were

published by Oxford University Press. Soyinka’s poems were well

represented in the Anthology of Modern Poetry from Africa edited by

Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier and published by Penguin.





Soyinka felt that his theatre group The 1960 Masks was not

professional enough to drive his drama revolution. He therefore formed

the Orisun Theatre drama group in 1964. His highly-charged one-act

play The Strong Breed was adapted and filmed in Nigeria for American

television by Esso World Theatre. To round off the year, The Strong

Breed and The Trials of Brother Jero were produced at Greenwich Mews

Theatre, New York. A collection of his plays, Five Plays, was

published by Oxford University Press.





By 1965 the crisis in the Western region was getting to boiling point,

and Soyinka stood up to be counted. His satirical revue depicting the

mood of the times, Before the Blackout, was produced in Lagos and

Ibadan in September, 1965. His play The Road was directed by David

Thompson at Theatre Royal, Stratford, East London.





Soyinka, as a crucial part of his activist intervention in the

politics of the day, moved into the Ibadan radio studio to switch the

tape of Premier Akintola’s broadcast. The aghast public, instead of

hearing the Premier’s voice, heard another voice hectoring the Premier

to ‘Get out!’ Soyinka was immediately fingered as the ‘mystery gunman’

who had done the damage. He was declared wanted. He went into hiding,

traveling to the Eastern region to be with Sam Aluko, who had taken up

an appointment at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, after he had been

hounded out of the University of Ife by Akintola’s administration.

Soyinka met with the Premier of the Eastern region, Dr Michael Okpara,

who promised to back the activist-playwright.





It was eventually decided that Soyinka should submit himself to the

police, that is, after making a round of the newspaper houses. He went

around in the company of Dapo Fatogun, the leftist ideologue. He

submitted to arrest in October 1965. He was acquitted in December by

Justice Kayode Esho on a technical error of the prosecuting team.

Soyinka’s bosom friend Femi Johnson, who had provided his driver and

car for the forceful evacuation of the activist-playwright from the

court in the event of a conviction, had to settle for a victory party.





Even so, Soyinka knew that the government, which had lost face, would

resort to extra-judicial choices to deal with him and his compatriots.

Instead of enfeebling his resolve to fight the regime, this

paradoxically emboldened him as several activists rallied behind him

in the arduous task of saving Nigeria from the iron grip of the

thieving political class.





From 1963, the publishing of Soyinka’s plays became an almost yearly

affair. Early plays such as A Dance of the Forests and The Lion and

the Jewel were published by Oxford University Press (OUP) to wide

critical acclaim. Soyinka raised the standard of Nigerian drama from

the standard fare of This is Our Chance by James Ene Henshaw. The Road

as a play text was published by Oxford University Press in 1965.





Soyinka directed his new play Kongi’s Harvest in Lagos. His radio play

Camwood on the Leaveswas broadcast by the BBC, London in 1965,

depicting tragedy of an authoritarian father and his stubborn son who

put a neighbour’s daughter in the family way.





He gained appointment as a Senior Lecturer in English at the

University of Lagos in 1965 and was soon made the Acting Head of

Department. A major highlight of the Dakar, Senegal, Festival of Negro

Arts in 1966 was the performance of Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest. Back at

the University of Lagos, Soyinka celebrated what he tagged Rites of

the Harmattan Solstice. In June of that year, The Trials of Brother

Jero was produced at Hampstead Theatre in London. In December, The

Lion and the Jewel was produced at Royal Court Theatre, London. The

opening lines of The Trials of Brother Jero are some of the most

quotable lines in the annals of Nigerian theatre.





Kongi’s Harvest was eventually published in 1967. For reasons no one

can really explain, the alias ‘Kongi’ has stuck with Soyinka amongst

his students and colleagues even though the character in question in

the eponymous play is highly detestable.





Soyinka’s reputation is largely based on the poetic nature of his

drama. To that extent, he is seen in most critical circles as the

world’s most poetic dramatist. Even though he had been well

represented in many anthologies of poetry it was only in 1967 that he

published his first collection of poetry,Idanre and Other Poems. It is

remarkable that Soyinka did not include his most popular

poem‘Telephone Conversation’ in the collection. Instead what would

later become the title of his 2006 memoirs, You Must Set Forth at

Dawn, was limned in one of the early poems ‘Death in the Dawn’.





As a part of the global recognition of his writing prowess, he was

awarded the John Whiting Drama prize in 1967. It was in the same year

that he was appointed Head of the Department of Theatre Arts at the

University of Ibadan, succeeding Geoffrey Axworthy.





The country was teetering on the edge of Civil War following the

controversial January 1966 coup carried out by the young majors led by

Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu. The revenge coup of

July, 29 1966 undertaken by Northern soldiers in which the Head of

State General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi was murdered alongside his host

Adekunle Fajuyi in Ibadan somewhat worsened matters. The genocide

meted out to the Igbo in the North led to a mass movement of the

people back to the Eastern region. Col. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu decided

to pull the Eastern region from Nigeria, declaring the sovereign state

of Biafra. Amid the confusion, Soyinka took it upon himself to visit

the Eastern region to see what he could do in stopping the descent to

war. He led a group he called the ‘Third Force’. He outrageously

countered the mantra formed with Gowon’s name, to wit, ‘Go on with one

Nigeria,’ with his own dictum: To have one Nigeria justice must be done!





He met with major figures in the war effort such as Ojukwu, Victor

Banjo and Olusegun Obasanjo. He was promptly locked up by Gowon for

his efforts, an imprisonment that Soyinka writes about in his prison

notes, The Man Died. He spent most of the prison term in solitary

confinement, stubbornly resisting his captors’ efforts at breaking his

mind. While in prison confinement he was awarded the Jock Campbell New

Statesman Literary Award. Soyinka’s translation of D.O. Fagunwa’s

novelOgboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irumale was published as The Forest of a

Thousand Daemons in 1968.





The prison walls certainly did not still his voice. His Three Short

Plays was published in a volume in 1969. Poems from Prison was equally

released and he was eventually set free from detention in October

1969. He thereafter assumed his position as Head of the Department of

Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan. Soyinka was immediately

thrust into the mainstream of the theatre circuit as he staged his

play Madmen and Specialists at the Eugene O’Neil Theatre Centre,

Waterford, USA in 1970. He would produce the same play in 1971 at

Ibadan and Ife. He also published his revues,Before the Blackout. He

traveled out of Ibadan to Britain in July 1971, ostensibly for the

long vacation, but it turned out to be a four-year self-imposed exile.

He sent in his letter of resignation to the university authorities in

1972.





He published his prison notes, The Man Died, in 1972, decrying the

massacres that led to the war, the alliance of the corrupt military

and civilian mafia, the repression of trade unionists and organized

labour, and championing the cause of the triumph of the human spirit.

His collection of poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, which includes Poems

from Prison was also published in 1972, giving voice to Soyinka’s 25

months of solitary confinement.





The British publishing house Methuen would in 1973 publish his The

Jero Plays in one volume made up of The Trials of Brother Jero and

Jero’s Metamorphosis. The charlatanism overwhelming Christianity in

The Trials of Brother Jero is given a greater bite in the sequel

Jero’s Metamorphosiswhich begins with Jero dictating,





in time of trouble it behoves us to come together, to forget old

enmities and bury the hatchet in the head of a common enemy





It ends with Jero promoting his followers in the manner of the

military, only to appoint himself a General because ‘After all, it is

the fashion these days to be a Desk General.’





Camwood on the Leaves was also published by Methuen. Oxford University

Press publishedCollected Plays 1. His second novel, Season of Anomie,

was published by the London-based publishing house Rex Collings in

1973. This very difficult novel follows Ofeyi into the commune of

Aiyero in the search for egalitarian community. Soyinka undertook an

adaptation of the ancient Greek play The Bacchae by Euripides which he

entitled The Bacchae of Euripides and it was performed at the National

Theatre, London.





When he was appointed a Visiting Fellow at Churchill College,

Cambridge University in 1973-74, he wondered why he should be assigned

to do his lectures in the Department of Social Anthropology, rather

than Literature. ‘African literature’ was not then recognized; but

Soyinka and his colleagues in the intervening years have done enough

work for the world to take requisite notice. It was at Cambridge that

Soyinka helped to supervise the work of a certain young man named

Henry Louis Gates who had since become a lifetime friend of the master

dramatist.





His beloved father, Essay, died while he was in exile and he was

warned by his mother, Wild Christian, not to come home for the burial

as the military regime was still out to deal with him because of his

damning prison memoirs The Man Died. His mother warned him to be

prepared to bury mother and father, should he risk coming home at such

an inauspicious time! In 1974, Soyinka edited the epochal Poems of

Black Africa published by Secker Warburg, which gave the needed break

to younger African poets such as Odia Ofeimun and Richard Ntiru.





He would later in 1974 return to Africa, to Ghana, to edit the

influential magazine Transition (later renamed Ch’Indaba) and served

as a Visiting Professor at the University of Ghana, Legon. He used the

magazine to launch a no-holds-barred attack on the evil regime of Idi

Amin of Uganda. He was in 1975 elected the Secretary-General of the

newly formed Union of Writers of the African Peoples (UWAP).





Soyinka’s arguably greatest play, Death and the King’s Horseman, was

published by Methuen in 1975. In the play, the King’s Horseman has to

follow tradition by dying with his King, but he hesitates and there is

the intervention by the colonial officer, only for the Horseman

Elesin’s Europe-trained son, Olunde, to kill himself instead. His

father eventually kills himself so that there are two deaths instead

of one.





His Collected Plays II was published by Oxford University Press in

1975 and the radio play The Detainee was broadcast by the BBC, London.

His play Jero’s Metamorphosis was performed in Lagos, that year.





The regime of Yakubu Gowon fell in a July 29, 1975 coup. Gen. Murtala

Mohammed became the new military Head of State with Soyinka’s townsman

Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo as the second-in-command. Soyinka felt safe

enough to return to Nigeria to take up appointment as Professor of

Comparative Literature at the University of Ife. He produced Death and

the King’s Horseman at the University in 1976. Soyinka’s longest poem

Ogun Abibiman that lauds Samora Machell’s bold decision to lead his

Mozambique in the damning of apartheid South Africa was published in

1976.





Cambridge University Press published Soyinka’s collection of essays,

Myth and the African World, in 1976, containing the lectures he gave

as a Churchill Fellow at Cambridge and an early essay, ‘The Fourth

Stage’ that juxtaposed Yoruba gods with Greek deities in the study of

tragedy. Soyinka’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera

was performed in 1977 at Ife as Opera Wonyosi with the author as the

director. The play, set in a Nigerian expatriate colony in Jean-Bedel

Bokassa’s Central African Empire, is a classic parade of mass-

murderers, fools, clowns, prostitutes and villains.





From the date of the performance of the play in December 1977 to its

publication by Rex Collings in 1981, deadly African dictators such as

Idi Amin of Uganda and Emperor Bokassa of Central African Empire were

chased away from power while Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea not

only lost power but ended up being hanged.





On the home front, Soyinka in 1977 resigned from the International

Secretariat of FESTAC, the second Black and Arts Festival staged in

Lagos, Nigeria. He became the Head of Department of the newly

established Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Ife in

1978. He formed the UNIFE Guerrilla Theatre, the troupe with which he

performed satirical revues against the regime of the day.





Even while at Ife his commitments abroad remained high, and he

directed Death and the King’s Horseman at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago

and the J.F. Kennedy Centre, Washington. Between 1979 and 1980 he

served as a Visiting Professor at Yale University, USA.





The ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) regime of President Shehu

Shagari got several knocks from the pen of Soyinka. The party’s

politics of rice was satirized by Soyinka in his 1980 satirical

revues, Rice Unlimited, performed at Ife, Ibadan and Lagos. Soyinka

helped the Oyo State government run by his bosom friend Governor Bola

Ige to organize the road safety corps of the state. He worked with the

likes of his childhood friend Prof. Olumuyiwa Awe.





His childhood memoirs, Ake, The Years of Childhood, which more than

any other book extended the frontiers of Soyinka’s reception all over

the world, was published in 1981. The New York Timesnamed it one of

the year’s best books. Soyinka gave his inaugural lecture at the

University of Ife entitled The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy

and Other Mythologies, which was later published by the University of

Ife Press in 1981. The radio play Die Still, Dr Godspeak was broadcast

by BBC, London in 1982. The play was later put on stage as Requiem for

a Futurologist at Ife in 1983 and it undertook a countrywide tour. His

satirical revues, Priority Projects, also undertook a tour of the

country that year.





The general elections of 1983 in Nigeria was massively rigged, which

eventually led to the return of the military through a coup in the

last day of the year. Soyinka waxed an LP, Unlimited Liability

Company, to lampoon the politicians, and the songs written by him were

performed by Tunji Oyelana and the Benders alongside Jimi Solanke.





The injustice in the country is what maddens Soyinka no end. He had

stressed in The Man Died that ‘For me, justice is the first condition

of humanity.’ Soyinka even shot a film, Blues for a Prodigal, to

depict the shenanigans of the politicians. He had earlier turned

Kongi’s Harvest into a movie in which he acted the part of Kongi under

the direction of the Hollywood great, Ossie Davies, and the production

of Francis Oladele’s Calpenny Films.





The return of the military, especially the emergence of the iron rule

of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and his partner, Tunde Idiagbon, drew the ire

of Wole Soyinka. The military regime’s refusal to announce a date for

a return to democratic rule met with the opposition of Soyinka and

sundry activists. The draconian decrees on detention and gagging the

press alongside the retroactive conviction and execution of three drug

couriers further confirmed the unpopularity of the administration.

Gen. Ibrahim Babangida took over through a palace coup, and Soyinka

felt that the new man who addressed himself as a Military President

was a ‘listening’ leader as opposed to the dour Buhari.





Soyinka eventually fell out with Babangida even as he had volunteered

to set up the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC). Soyinka’s

‘international conspicuosity’, as the village teacher Lakunle would

put it in The Lion and the Jewel, was growing in leaps and bounds,

such that his name started being mentioned in enlightened circles as

odds-on favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. A celebration

of his 50th birthday by his colleagues at the University of Ife in

1984 underscored the pull of the Soyinka mystique. He published A Play

of Giants in 1984, sending-up dictators such as Idi Amin of Uganda on

the hallowed floors of the United Nations. Requiem for a Futurologist

was also published that year. Soyinka directed The Road at The Goodman

Theatre, Chicago in April of that year.





He won the Enrico Mattei Award for the Humanities in 1984, run by the

ENI (Agip) group. In 1985 there was so much speculation in Nigeria

that Soyinka would be announced the winner of the coveted Nobel that

year. When it was eventually given to the French writer Claude Simon

there was acute depression in the land.





Then came 1986. Soyinka had just made the flight from Cornell

University, New York where he was then teaching, to the International

Theatre Institute (ITI) in Paris to attend the executive meeting of

the world body, which he headed. His plan was to spend a quiet time at

the apartment of his cousin Yemi Lijadu. He found his cousin giddy

with joy: The news had just broken that Nigerian playwright Wole

Soyinka had won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, thus becoming the

first African to win the coveted award.





Even in the anonymity of his cousin’s apartment Soyinka could not hide

away from the invasion of the world press. He therefore made quick

plans to return immediately to Nigeria. He wanted his entry into

Nigeria as quiet and uneventful as possible, but his friends were

quick to sniff out that he was on his way back home. His bosom friend,

the insurance magnate Femi Johnson sent a car and driver to ferry him

from the airport. Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi and other close friends ensured

that the goldfish had no hiding place.





The government of Babangida provided a presidential jet for the

ferrying of Nigerians to the Nobel award ceremonies in Stockholm,

Sweden, even as the government continued to deny accusations of

orchestrating the killing of Dele Giwa, ace journalist and friend of

Soyinka, through a parcel bomb delivered to his home days earlier.

Soyinka’s Nobel lecture entitled ‘This Past Must Address Its Present’

was dedicated to Nelson Mandela, who was still imprisoned at the time.

Soyinka was conferred with the high national honour of Commander of

the Federal Republic.





Soyinka notes that George Bernard Shaw had said that he would readily

forgive Alfred Nobel his invention of the evil dynamite but not the

diabolical Nobel Prize for Literature. The aura of the prize

overwhelmed Soyinka soon after the award such that he could do no

other work. He hoped that the din of the Nobel would end after the

crowning of the next winner only to be reminded in Cuba by novelist

and 1982 Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One

Hundred Years of Solitude, that ‘It never ends, my friend. It never

ends.’





He published a collection of poems, Mandela’s Earth, after winning the

Nobel and celebrating the triumph of the human spirit as exemplified

by Nelson Mandela of South Africa after his epic sojourn in the

dreadful Robben Island Prison. A bemused Soyinka would later discover

that the next three years would amount to ‘three lost years.’





The vagaries of Nigerian military politics also took its toll on

Soyinka. Babangida’s interminable transition programme to civil rule

had enough twists to overwhelm a faddish fiction writer. Politicians

were banned and un-banned while dates were fixed and cancelled.





Even amid the merry-go-round in Nigeria, Soyinka was able to premier

his play From Zia with Loveat the Dionysus Chianti World Festival in

Contemporary Drama in Italy in 1992. The London publishing company

Methuen published A Scourge of Hyacinths in 1992.





Nigeria’s political troubles got out of hand with the annulment of the

June 12, 1993 Presidential election, an election generally accepted as

won by Chief MKO Abiola. The annulment of Nigeria’s freest and fairest

election by Babangida threw the country into turmoil. Abiola insisted

on affirming his mandate while Babangida was forced to step aside in

disgrace on August 26, 1993. The lame-duck Ernest Shonekan Interim

National Government was put in place only to be displaced by General

Sani Abacha who unleashed a brutal dictatorship on the country.

Abiola, was arrested jailed.





With a price on his head, Soyinka escaped into exile on a life-and-

death ride on a motorbike. Abroad, he mounted a sustained campaign

against the regime of Abacha until the dictator suddenly dropped dead

in June 1998. Abiola, curiously, died the very next month.





General Abdulsalami Abubakar who took over power discussed with

Soyinka on the possibility of the Nobel Laureate inheriting the mantle

of leadership of the country from him! Gen. Obasanjo was eventually

talked into taking power through the elections held in 1999. He won re-

election in 2003 and canvassed for a Third Term in power which was

stoutly opposed by Soyinka, the National Assembly and the vast

majority of the Nigerian people. President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua took

over the mantle of leadership after the worst elections ever organized

in the history of the country. Soyinka is currently calling for the

convocation of a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) to find lasting

solutions for the problems of the country.





The activism within the annals of Nigerian national politics has not

dulled Soyinka’s creative enterprise. His play, The Beatification of

Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope, was published in 1995 by the Ibadan-

based Spectrum books. On August 6, 2001 Soyinka’s King Baabu was

premiered at the National Theatre, Lagos. A loose adaptation of Alfred

Jarry’s Ubu Roi, the play depicts the murderous exploits of Basha Bash

who to all intents and purposes is modeled after Sani Abacha.





Soyinka’s latest collection of poetry, Samarkand and Other Markets I

have Known, was published by Crucible Publishers Limited, Lagos, in

2002, and was launched at the National Theatre under a tree that is

now known as the Samarkand Tree. In the poems he celebrates departed

friends such as Femi Johnson, Kudirat Abiola, former French President

Francois Miterrand, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nobel Laureate Naguib Mafouz, and

‘the dead and maimed of Kenya, Tanzania.’ He pillories Abacha in the

poems ‘Exit Left, Monster, Victim in Pursuit (Death of a Tyrant)’ and

‘Where the News Came to Me of the Death of a Tyrant.’





The long poem ‘Elegy for a Nation’ dedicated to Chinua Achebe at

Seventy is quite striking. Soyinka had wanted to read the poem at ‘An

Evening With WS’ sponsored by Globacom, but there was too much noise

at the Golden Gate, Ikoyi venue such that it did not provide a

conducive environment for the Nobel Laureate to pay homage to his

great compatriot.. Soyinka was a notable presence at Bard College, New

York, in 2000 where Achebe celebrated his 70th birthday. Both writers

shared the stage at the celebration of the Christopher Okigbo Festival

in September, 2007 at Harvard University, USA.





Critics of Soyinka’s works charge him with willful obscurantism.

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, in their acerbic

book Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, argue that

Soyinka’s art suffers from a total embrace of Euro-modernist

obfuscation that does not lend itself to clear meaning. Soyinka always

replies his critics in kind, publishing his hot exchanges with the

critics in the 1988 book Art, Dialogue and Outrage, and likening

Chinweizu to the mythical Ghanaian bird Chichidodo that hates shit yet

only eats worms, as depicted in the novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not

Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah. Critics of the socialist bent argue that

Soyinka does not depict the class divide in his plays and would not

let the oppressed triumph in their struggle.





At the last count, Soyinka is the author of some 17 plays, six

collections of poetry, two novels, eight non-fiction books and the

ongoing intervention series he publishes on burning national issues.

Soyinka appears to be in no hurry to depart the scene of Nigeria’s

national events. Although he had previously been Special Guest at the

Inaugural Edition of the Nigeria Literature Prize, which was organized

annually by the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd (NLNG), Soyinka

called for a total boycott of the 2007 awards ceremony by the

Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) because former Military

President Ibrahim Babangida was appointed the Keynote Speaker. The

call created a lot of controversy in the media, with some of

Babangida’s associates such as Godwin Daboh taking full-page

advertorials in the newspapers to attack the Nobel Laureate.





Soyinka’s argument against the choice of Babangida was anchored on the

fact that the former Head of State did nothing for literature during

his tenure even as he ended up executing soldier-poet, General Mamman

Vatsa, despite the pleas of Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and J.P. Clark.

Most of Nigeria’s notable writers such as ANA President Wale Okediran,

past presidents of the writers’ body Olu Obafemi and Femi Osofisan

boycotted the awards night in Lagos. Babangida was supported at the

ceremony by former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon and Head of the

Interim National Government (ING) Chief Ernest Shonekan.





As the never-flinching conscience of the nation, Soyinka takes on all-

comers with uncommon gusto. His many demands across the globe have in

no way dimmed his appetite for participation in Nigeria’s national

affairs almost on a daily basis. It is in character for the playwright

to fly into the country at short notice from Emory University,

Atlanta, where he has tenure, to address a press conference in Lagos.





These days, a major concern of his is the drafting of a people’s

constitution for the country. The call for the convocation of a

Sovereign National Conference (SNC) has his unalloyed support. He is a

major promoter of the People’s Representative National Conference

(PRONACO). Even amid all his engagements, Soyinka remains a family

man, married to Adefolake Wole-Soyinka, who at times calls the

peripatetic master ‘visiting husband’. He is blessed with children.





But beyond his biological children, Soyinka is a father-figure and

mentor to multitudes. Nobody comes into the Soyinka presence without

being moved. During the PEN conference in Toronto, Canada in 1989, I

told a venerable Roman Catholic reverend sister and writer to look

forward to Soyinka’s reading. She was in a tizzy after witnessing the

performance. While attending the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing

in England I laughed when one of my fellow nominated authors was being

touted as a student of South African Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee. The

house came down when eventually it was revealed that I was a student

of Soyinka as opposed to some ‘eaglet’ Nobel prize-winner!