Some writers are content to be mere witnesses to their
age; some would rather be faithful chroniclers of events as they unfold; others
have chosen to be praise singers, and suborned griots in the courtyard of
transient power. But Soyinka is as much part of the reality of his age as he is
a possibility of its dream…
My friend and
brother Steve Arnold has decided to subject me to trial by ordeal. For, asking
me to present a citation on Wole Soyinka in five short minutes, is like
requesting me to write the history of the world on a postage stamp, or trap the
Atlantic Ocean in a teacup! But what duty can be more ennobling, what honour
more befitting than having the privilege to say a few words about one of the
most engaging writers and thinkers in the world, a dauntless, relentlessly
transformative spirit whose aspects defy facile categorisation, whose one tree
is large enough to make a forest? There is certainly so much to say about
Africa’s first Nobel Laureate, poet, dramatist, biographer, actor, director,
composer, essayist, Human Rights activist, road safety marshall …. and hunter
who once lost his way while hunting in the Nigerian bush, resurfacing later on
the temperate shores of a bewildered Europe!
There is certainly so much to say about Africa’s first
Nobel Laureate, poet, dramatist, biographer, actor, director, composer,
essayist, Human Rights activist, road safety marshall …. and hunter who once
lost his way while hunting in the Nigerian bush, resurfacing later on the
temperate shores of a bewildered Europe!
That miraculous
happenstance compels a flashback to 1995, the year of its occurrence; and this
gathering brings back resonant echoes of a similar assembly that year at the
Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, Nigeria. The
occasion was a British Council literary exhibition in celebration of Soyinka’s
60th birthday. I was invited as one of the two keynote speakers. A simple
enough assignment, you might say. But those were far from simple times. His
life increasingly in danger from Abacha’s death squads, Soyinka had sneaked
across the borders (sorry, had lost his way while hunting in the Nigerian
bush!), a couple of months before. And the Abacha junta, in a classic case of
if-you-miss-the-man-don’t-miss-the-shadow, descended with beastly vengeance on
anything, anybody that smelt of Soyinka and his associates. The mere mention of
the name had become something of a treasonable offence. It was in these very
uneasy circumstances that my invitation to the exhibition arrived. Against all
pressure from different quarters, I embarked on that “suicide mission” to
Lagos. For obvious reasons, attendance at the celebration was low, but those
present were defiant and in high spirits. My address on that occasion gave
voice to the question on every mind: “Behold the Feast, but Where’s the
Guest?”.
But that was for
another gathering, in another country, in another century. The Stone Age despot
who wanted Soyinka dead at that time has since “committed death” or committed
to death (though we must watch out for offshoots from his deadly stump!).
Fortunately, the feast is not only here today, the guest is also present. And
our garland is waiting for his valiant chest.
Soyinka is an exceptionally lucky person. This may sound
like a rather bizarre statement about a man who has snatched success, sometimes
bare-handed, from the furnace of social and political adversity. But it is
true: Soyinka is a lucky man: lucky enough to have come out of nearly three
years of solitary confinement in a Nigerian prison system notorious for its
dehumanising condition and high mortality rate, his head still standing
complete on his shoulders; lucky ― and fast ― enough to have outsmarted
Abacha’s hitmen, and wandered into that bush where he lost his way!; lucky to
be still here, his beard on his chin, his patented silver mane still in full
bloom…
“Justice is the
first condition of humanity”: this has been Soyinka’s motto and abiding
philosophy; the legend which breathes through every letter of his prodigious
ouvre, the organising principle of his social and political project.
Unfortunately that virtue is in lamentably short supply everywhere in the world
today. The struggle against its denial, the crusade for its restoration, the
fight for those institutional provisions which would guarantee its permanent
protection ― these have been the defining goals of Soyinka’s career as a writer
and social being.
And he possesses
the tools and capabilities for the struggle: enormous courage and daredevilry
(the type that can, in one instance, trigger the takeover of the radio station
of a roguish government and hurl imprecations at its governor, and, in another
(about 30 years later), set up its own “pirate” radio station and mine the
airwaves with lethal bulletins against a self-imposed despot; a vigilant
visionary impulse that can spot a burgeoning dictatorship even at a seminal
stage (thus he saw early enough the “anti-Man” dagger behind Idi Amin’s antics
at a time many of his colleagues regarded that murderous dictator as a Black
nationalist and liberator; a literary/artistic and intellectual acumen which endows
every line with staunch memorability and lends a measure of gravitas to the
most off-hand statement; a prodigious versatility which enables an adroit
change of strategy in the fight against evil: if tv comments, radio
interventions, newspaper essays and interviews, agitprop/guerrilla theatre
methods, etc. do not seem to be achieving their goal, cut a music record or cd,
and let amplifiers and loudspeakers fill every corner of the land with
subversive lyrics, sensitising the people to the “unlimited liability” that is
the government which keeps mismanaging their lives; a personal charisma, a
magic of presence, which flings doors open in important places (worried sore by
the success of Soyinka’s diplomatic offensive against Abacha, the despot’s
hirelings were rumoured to have complained to their boss: ‘dat man terrible,
Sir. Everywhere we reach oversea, he don reach dere before us. Na strong strong
juju i de use, Sir’).
…I know of no other African writer today that embodies
and typifies the ideals of the aesthetic and social accountability of art the
way Soyinka so impressively does. And apart from Christopher Okigbo and Ken
Saro Wiwa who paid the supreme sacrifice, no other Nigerian writer has risked
so much, suffered so repeatedly in daring the behemoth of evil and misrule in
Nigeria, that promising but cruelly misgoverned country. No Nigerian writer’s
works capture more sensitively, more audaciously, the vicissitudes of Nigerian,
nay African existence.
Last, and by no
means the least, Soyinka is an exceptionally lucky person. This may sound like
a rather bizarre statement about a man who has snatched success, sometimes
bare-handed, from the furnace of social and political adversity. But it is
true: Soyinka is a lucky man: lucky enough to have come out of nearly three
years of solitary confinement in a Nigerian prison system notorious for its
dehumanising condition and high mortality rate, his head still standing
complete on his shoulders; lucky ― and fast ― enough to have outsmarted
Abacha’s hitmen, and wandered into that bush where he lost his way!; lucky to
be still here, his beard on his chin, his patented silver mane still in full
bloom, in spite of those unmentionable scurrilities and virtual assassinations
by a reprobate sector of the Nigerian press (a very tiny sector, we must
concede, for on the whole the Nigerian press deserves the highest commendation
for its role in the struggle against Nigeria’s recalcitrant anomie). Lucky
enough to be able, still, to wet his throat with the best wines, and nurture his
being with the sweet things of life. And, oh yes, lucky to have lived long
enough to be this century’s first recepient of the ALA’s distinguished honour,
the Fonlon/Nichols Award.
But distinguished
enough to have deserved it. For I know of no other African writer today that
embodies and typifies the ideals of the aesthetic and social accountability of
art the way Soyinka so impressively does. And apart from Christopher Okigbo and
Ken Saro Wiwa who paid the supreme sacrifice, no other Nigerian writer has
risked so much, suffered so repeatedly in daring the behemoth of evil and
misrule in Nigeria, that promising but cruelly misgoverned country. No Nigerian
writer’s works capture more sensitively, more audaciously, the vicissitudes of
Nigerian, nay African existence. Soyinka’s is the excoriative, admonitory,
regenerative vision: witness the shocking augury of Half-Child at the Gathering
of the Tribes in A Dance of the Forests,
an augury more potent for Nigeria’s assortment of tribes today than it was at
the dawn of independence when the play made its first appearance; the power
tantrums of Kongism and the madness of dictatorial rule in post-independence
Africa as depicted in Kongi’s Harvest;
the existential wilderness and cannibalism of war in Madmen and Specialists; the
corruption and lunatic profligacy of military dictatorships in Beatification of Area Boy. And
most recent, the interrogation of the virtue ― or vice ― of Forgiveness, its
problematic cohabitation with Memory, the dangers in the kind of forgiveness
uninformed by active Remembrance. Undoubtedly an enabling plank in the current
campaign for reparation for the historic wrongs against Africa, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness brings
forcibly into focus the need for remorse and atonement on the part of the
perpetrators of historic wrongs, and the perils in the granting of mindless
indemnity by the wronged and exploited. For in the “millennial reckonings” that
of necessity must be exacted, Restitution, the missing link between Truth and Reconciliation
must be called back to duty. Only then can Justice be seen to have been done.
Only then can the process of healing begin.
Here, then, is the machete-handed one; pathfinder who
dares the forbidding jungle; Arole Ogun whose prowess confounds the gods, and
whose frailty is just as human; Atunda whose boulder shatters a monolithic
godhead into a thousand legends…
Some writers are
content to be mere witnesses to their age; some would rather be faithful
chroniclers of events as they unfold; others have chosen to be praise singers,
and suborned griots in the courtyard of transient power. But Soyinka is as much
part of the reality of his age as he is a possibility of its dream; his life
itself a configuration of events, he cannot just wait and watch, and witness. A
“profoudly rooted cosmopolitan” (Steve Arnold, 2000), he is an active part of
the propelling engine of that age; his hand rests poised on the rudder of its
ship; his eyes far beyond its horizons. An emboldening courage, a tough,
combative temperament, a fire which reddens the forge of regenerative change, a
consistently accomplished artistry… these are the virtues which have placed the
jewel on the Lion’s crown. Always, Dialogue draws its fire from Outrage in a
crucible humanised by Art. Soyinka is to Africa’s literature what Mandela is to
its politics.
Here, then, is
the machete-handed one; pathfinder who dares the forbidding jungle; Arole Ogun
whose prowess confounds the gods, and whose frailty is just as human; Atunda
whose boulder shatters a monolithic godhead into a thousand legends…
Here, our own
W.S.
Niyi
Osundare, one of Africa’s foremost poets and essayists, is a Distinguished
Professor of the University of New Orleans, where he teaches in the English
Department. He was recipient of the Nigeria National Merit Award in 2014.
“The
Lion and His Many Jewels (Toasting Wole Soyinka for the Fonlon/Nichols Award,
Lawrence, Kansas, USA, 2000)” was written in celebration of Professor Soyinka
at the 2000 Fonlon/Nichols Award, which is the most prestigious recognition by
the African Literature Association (ALA), for “Excellence in Literary
Creativity Combined with Significant Contributions to Human Rights in Africa”.
This piece was published in TheNews magazine in 2014.
