Wole Soyinka threw a party for my class on
graduation, declaring us the best class he has ever taught. Of course everybody
knows that praise from Soyinka does not come easily. His word is his sword!
This does not at
any rate qualify me as an exemplary student. Back then at the University of
Ife, I was with my Dramatic Arts classmates in Soyinka’s house for practical
lessons on television production based on Edith Uche Enem’s play. I did not
care a kobo about the lesson. I told Soyinka’s steward, the Ghanaian lad
Francis, to get me a cool Star lager beer from the refrigerator. I was nursing
my beer gloriously while Soyinka taught my classmates. Then he saw me drinking
the beer. He didn’t get mad at me. He asked why I was drinking beer and I
promptly told him: “Prof, sir, that’s how I get my inspiration.” Soyinka just
cast a fatherly benign look at me in the manner of “some fathers do have them”
and continued with his teaching.
After
my degree exams, I was totally out of cash. I needed money badly, and I ran to
the godfather in his office. I told him I had no money to go home. He gave me
all the money he had. In a show of bravado I told him I would pay him back his
money when I came for convocation. Soyinka had a healthy laugh and said: “How
am I sure you will not run through the money and come back with another sob
story?”
The
truth of course is that I only came to Ife because Soyinka was there. I did not
care for university education. I came to Ife in 1978, with Soyinka as my Head
of Department. Then there was Okot p’Bitek, the inimitable Ugandan poet of Song of Lawino fame, in the literature
department. Soyinka was always travelling all over the world while Okot was an
ever-present company. Soyinka’s Ghanaian boy Francis was of course around to
attend to my needs in Soyinka’s gods-festooned home. Soyinka’s sister, Folabo
Ajayi, was also around always wondering at my age on account of my multiform
high jinks whilst we were rehearsing Akinwunmi Isola’s play Madam Tinubu, directed by Femi Euba,
which we took on tour to Ibadan and Lagos.
Our
first experience of Soyinka as a teacher was, yes, very dramatic. He was to
teach us Shakespeare’s King Lear. We
had all come from secondary schools where Shakespeare was read line-by-line and
explained by the class teacher. In Soyinka’s case, we were all seated in the
Pit Theatre at Ife when he casually strolled in. He distributed sheets of
cyclostyled paper in which a speech taken out of King Lear was printed. Soyinka asked us to pick out the unnatural
word in the speech. None of us could understand this kind of teaching. He then
said we ought to have still been in high school. The West Indian lady Dr
Carroll Dawes had to come to our rescue by teaching us King Lear line after line at Oduduwa Hall for weeks and months on
end.
In
the course of our studies, we had to read up all the plays of Bertolt Brecht as
our Special Author. We found to our chagrin that Brecht was a rival of
Shakespeare in the large number of classic plays written. My classmates and I
had to confront Soyinka with the charge that he was making us read for a Ph.D
when we only applied to earn a bachelor’s degree! Soyinka asked us to arrest Dr
Yemi Ogunbiyi as the culprit who gave us more books to read than doctoral
candidates.
Soyinka
took us on a course in Humanism. It was class war all the way because most of
us in the class were Marxists. We asked Soyinka to join us in the bush of
guerrilla struggle instead of being an arm-chair humanist! He was never angry
with our youthful ebullition, only advising us that we would get to understand
society further as we grew in life. Soyinka has of course been borne out by the
turncoats all over the place. Interestingly, Soyinka asked a Polish lady who
barely spoke English to take us in the course of Aesthetics in his place!
Soyinka’s
professionalism and devotion became manifest to me whilst watching him acting
and directing Biko’s Inquest, a play
on the South African martyr Steve Biko, which he took to the United States. In
further demonstration of his largeness, he allowed the student actors to revel
in their own interpretations while directing his play Camwood on the Leaves.
His
intervention on road safety happened before our very eyes whilst at Ife. He had
no stomach whatsoever for dangerous drivers. He would bring his friend Femi
Johnson’s jeeps into the campus and we were even quite used to Bola Ige’s
vehicles as the Governor of then Oyo State. For Soyinka, a vehicle was just a
vehicle.
After
leaving school, I tried my hands at peasant theatre. I sent the play I wrote
then, A Play of Ghosts, to Soyinka
and it was only much later that I got to know that he forwarded the play to the
American director Chuck Mike for production. Soyinka does all these favours
without asking for any attention whatsoever.
Much
later, when I ran into Soyinka at poet Odia Ofeimun’s birthday party he
wondered aloud where I had been all these years. I replied him that I had all
along been in Nigeria “doing a great battle with Nigerian poverty”. Many of my
friends were surprised that Soyinka “knew” me and asked why I had not gone to
the man to ask for favours. I told them that Soyinka had done enough for me
such that it was now incumbent on me to at least repay a small part of the
favours.
When
the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) was celebrating a birthday of Steve
Rhodes, I was nursing my beer at OJEZ bar in National Stadium Surulere only to
suddenly look up and behold Soyinka. Surprised, I told him that I had just been
told he was in Germany. “That was ages ago,” he said. “I have been to other
places since then, but I can’t find where they are doing this thing for Steve
Rhodes.” I abandoned my beer and led him to Steve Rhodes inside the main bar.
At
the time Soyinka published his memoirs, You
Must Set Forth At Dawn, I learnt from Okey Ndibe in the heart of Victoria
Island, Lagos that Soyinka was to do a reading for an organization ran by white
ladies. When Okey and I got to the venue Soyinka asked me to select the passage
that he would read. I told him I did not have a copy of the book ready to hand.
He off-handedly told me that his publisher, Bankole Olayebi, was my friend in
which case I would not have much trouble getting a free copy!
Of
course I am very proud of my teacher, the very first black man to win the
coveted Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Back in time, my crystal ball did
not hide anything when it revealed to me that Soyinka would win the Nobel, a
first for Africa, in the year 1985. I told not a few friends that the Nobel was
definitely coming that year, and it was such a shocker when the prize went
instead to the French novelist Claude Simon. Well, it is remarkable that Claude
Simon’s first novel bears the very unfunny title, The Cheat. Little wonder the obscure French writer cheated us out
of the Nobel Prize in 1985!
There was no
denying Soyinka the very next year, 1986, when the Nobel Prize for Literature landed
in our shores. 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 quiet time at the apartment
of his cousin Yemi Lijadu. He found his cousin giddy with joy: “The news just
broke 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 circle of 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 was under strong suspicion of being behind the killing of ace
journalist and friend of Soyinka, Dele Giwa,
through a parcel bomb delivered to his home days earlier.
Soyinka’s Nobel
lecture entitled “This Past Must Address Its Present” was dedicated to the then
still imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Soyinka noted 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.”
For reasons no
one can really explain, the name “Kongi” has stuck with Soyinka amongst his
students and colleagues even though the character in question in the eponymous
play is highly detestable. Behind Soyinka’s back, some of us call him
“Langage”, pronounced as “Longage”, taken from his Inaugural Lecture at Ife
entitled The Critic And Society: Barthes,
Leftocracy And Other Mythologies.
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. Soyinka
autographed my copy of the book right under that famous tree. 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 the right mood for the Nobel Laureate to pay homage to
his great compatriot. It was at that event that I asked Soyinka the question
why he was not a born-again Christian. He duly replied me that he had his own
religion; thank you!
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.
It
is a matter of great joy that Soyinka still continues in the onerous task of
supporting younger writers. I have just received a
hardback copy of The Second Genesis: An
Anthology Of Contemporary World Poetry which features some of my poems
alongside those of my teacher Soyinka and my dear compatriots Ikeogu Oke and Obari Gomba. The book which
features poets of 60 countries from Albania to the United States is indeed a
heavy feast of comparative humanity, a cause to which Soyinka has dedicated his
venerated life.
Beyond all the seriousness
associated with the man, the Soyinka I know is at heart a jovial soul. From
teaching the art of wine to a young Italian girl to setting a trap for
wine-stealers in his then Ife home, Soyinka is the master of his universe.
Humour is never lacking in his forte. For instance, an Igbo classmate of mine
with a thick Igbo accent asked Soyinka a question in class only for Soyinka to
reply thusly: “Are you an Ibadan man?”
