Arts & Books
Kongi at 90: A celebration of literary excellence
Prof. Wole Soyinka, Africa’s First Nobel Laureate in Literature, is a difficult subject to write about for many reasons. One, his life and his many causes are intertwined like the proverbial Gordian knot.
Second, his literary works are emblazoned, deeply embedded in the nuanced, deep cosmology of the Yoruba, and above all written to fashion out a drama of existence, a drama that is about the Yoruba world – spiritual and cultural – and delivered in cryptic writing style, showing his mastery of not only the form but the language he has chosen to convey his thoughts.
Without any argument, Soyinka is one of Africa’s greatest and most influential writers. Soyinka’ zeitgeist and ouvre are reflected in his many outings as a cultural, political and social activist, breaking conventions and setting up new meanings of understanding our being, thus making him one of the early iconoclasts of the African world.
Early stirrings
Soyinka has had the luck of best education in great schools around, starting from the famous St.Peter Primary School in Ake, Abeokuta, then Abeokuta Grammar School and Government College Ibadan. He moved to the University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds, where he acquired a degree in English.
Upon his return to the country in 1959, on the verge of independence, he quickly put together a play: A Dance of the Forest, which was used in 1960 as official play for independence celebration.
At the University of Ibadan, he quickly reorganized the cultural and literary atmosphere of the institution with able colleagues like Geoffrey Axworthy, Martin Banham, Joel Adedeji, Dapo Adelugba, Jimi Solanke. He quickly expanded his circle of friends of like minds, to include others, such as Olumuyiwa Awe, Bola Ige, Femi Johnson, Francesca Perreira, Wale Ogunyemi and more; with their cooperation, he transformed University of Ibadan into the cultural centre of importance.
He was later to transpose the cultural revival to University of Ife and University of Lagos. Ibadan then was under the vice chancellorship of Professor Kenneth Dike, eminent historian and first indigenous VC of the institution. Dike supported the blooming cultural renaissance being spearheaded by Soyinka and his circle. It’s not possible to look at the entirety of Soyinka’ ouvre in a piece like this, given its eclecticism, depth and sweep.
After graduating with an upper second-class degree, Soyinka remained in Leeds and began working on an MA. He intended to write new works combining European theatrical traditions with those of his Yorùbá cultural heritage. His first major play, The Swamp Dwellers (1958), was followed a year later by The Lion and the Jewel, a comedy that attracted interest from several members of London’s Royal Court Theatre. Encouraged, Soyinka moved to London, where he worked as a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre. During the same period, both of his plays were performed in Ibadan. They dealt with the uneasy relationship between progress and tradition in Nigeria.
In 1957, his play The Invention was the first of his works to be produced at the Royal Court Theatre. At that time, his only published works were poems, such as “The Immigrant” and “My Next Door Neighbour”, which were published in the Nigerian magazine Black Orpheus. This was founded in 1957 by the German scholar Ulli Beier, who had been teaching at the University of Ibadan since 1950.
Soyinka received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship from University College in Ibadan, his alma mater, for research on African theatre, and he returned to Nigeria. After its fifth issue (November 1959), Soyinka replaced Jahnheinz Jahn to become co-editor for the literary periodical Black Orpheus (its name derived from a 1948 essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée Noir”, published as a preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, edited by Léopold Senghor). He produced his new satire, The Trials of Brother Jero in the dining-hall at Mellanby Hall of University College Ibadan, in April 1960.
That year, his work, A Dance of The Forest, a biting criticism of Nigeria’s political elites, won a contest that year as the official play for Nigerian Independence Day. On 1 October 1960, it premiered in Lagos as Nigeria celebrated its sovereignty. The play satirizes the fledgling nation by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past. Also in 1960, Soyinka established the “Nineteen-Sixty Masks”, an amateur acting ensemble to which he devoted considerable time over the next few years.
Soyinka wrote the first full-length play produced on Nigerian television. Entitled My Father’s Burden and directed by Segun Olusola, the play was featured on the Western Nigeria Television (WNTV) on 6 August 1960. Soyinka published works satirising the “Emergency” in the Western Region of Nigeria, as his Yorùbá homeland was increasingly occupied and controlled by the federal government. The political tensions arising from recent post-colonial independence eventually led to a military coup and civil war (1967–70).
With the Rockefeller grant, Soyinka bought a Land Rover, and he began traveling throughout the country as a researcher with the Department of English Language of the University College in Ibadan. In an essay of the time, he criticized Leopold Senghor’s Négritude movement as a nostalgic and indiscriminate glorification of the black African past that ignores the potential benefits of modernisation. He is often quoted as having said, “A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.” But in fact, Soyinka wrote in a 1960 essay for the Horn: “the duiker will not paint ‘duiker’ on his beautiful back to proclaim his duikeritude; you’ll know him by his elegant leap.”
In Death and the King’s Horsemen, he states: “The elephant trails no tethering rope; that king is not yet crowned, who will peg an elephant.”
In December 1962, Soyinka’s essay “Towards a True Theater” was published in Transition Magazine. He began teaching with the Department of English Language at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ifẹ. He discussed current affairs with “négrophiles”, and on several occasions openly condemned government censorship. At the end of 1963, his first feature-length movie, Culture in Transition, was released. In 1965, his book The Interpreters, “a complex but also the vividly documentary novel”, was published in London by André Deutsch.
That December, together with scientists and men of theatre, Soyinka founded the Drama Association of Nigeria. In 1964 he also resigned from his university post, in a protest against imposed pro-government behavior by the authorities.
A few months later, in 1965, he was arrested for the first time, charged with holding up a radio station at gunpoint (as described in his 2006 memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn) and replacing the tape of a recorded speech by the premier of Western Nigeria with a different tape containing accusations of election malpractice. Soyinka was released after a few months of confinement, as a result of protests by the international community of writers.
This same year, he wrote two more dramatic pieces: Before the Blackout and the comedy Kongi’s Harvest. He also wrote The Detainee, a radio play for the BBC in London. His play The Road premiered in London at the Commonwealth Arts Festival, opening on 14 September 1965, at the Theatre Royal.
At the end of the year, he was promoted to senior lecturer in the Department of English Language at the University of Lagos.
Soyinka’s political speeches at that time criticized the cult of personality and government corruption in African dictatorships. In April 1966, his play Kongi’s Harvest was produced in revival at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. The Road was awarded the Grand Prix. In June 1965, his play The Trials of Brother Jero was produced at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London, and in December 1966 The Lion and the Jewel was staged at the Royal Court Theatre.
Civil war and imprisonment
After becoming Chair of Drama at the University of Ibadan, Soyinka became more politically active. Following the military coup of January 1966, he secretly met with Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military governor in Southeastern Nigeria to avert the Nigerian civil war.
He was later arrested by federal authorities and imprisoned for 22 months as civil war ensued between the Federal government of Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra. He wrote a significant body of poems and notes criticizing the Nigerian government while in prison.
Despite his imprisonment, his play The Lion and The Jewel was produced in Accra, Ghana, in September 1967. In November of that year, The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed were produced in the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. Soyinka also published a collection of his poetry, Idanre and Other Poems, which was inspired by his visit to the sanctuary of the Yorùbá deity, Ogun, whom he regards as his “companion” deity, kindred spirit, and protector.
In 1968, the Negro Ensemble Company in New York produced Kongi’s Harvest. While still imprisoned, Soyinka translated from Yoruba a fantastical novel by his compatriot D. O. Fagunwa, entitled The Forest of a Thousand Demons: A Hunter’s Saga.
Two films about this period of his life have been announced: The Man Died, directed by Awam Amkpa, a feature film based on a fictionalized form of Soyinka’s 1973 prison memoirs of the same name; and Ebrohimie Road, written and directed by Kola Tubosun, which takes a look at the house, where Soyinka lived between 1967, when he arrived back in Ibadan to take on the directorship of the School of Drama and 1972 when he left for exile after being released from prison.
It’s not possible to do a critical survey of Soyinka’s literary achievements in this short tribute, but I will give a chronological listing of his work. One thing stands out. As of today, he will be accounted among the three living most influential playwrights globally.
In all, Soyinka along with other pioneers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa’ T’ongo( James Ngugi), Ayi Kwei Armah, Mongo Beti (Alexander Biyidi), Ferdinand Oyono, Cheik Ahmidou Kane, Naiguib Mahfouz, and others dispelled the wrong impressions created by Western scholarship and literary writings on Africa which sought to portray Africa as a continent without history and civilization. Their works form a body of post colonial scholarship that put to rest racism in Western scholarship on Africa.
Soyinka’s Politics
Soyinka, a restless soul has been on the sides of, what Franz Fanon referred to, as the wretched of the earth, the downtrodden, the masses, the dispossessed right from his university days. It was this activist consciousness that led him to found Pyrates Confraternity along with Professor Olumuyiwa Awe, the late physicist at the University of Ibadan to fight for justice for students. However, in recent years, he has compelled by association to support bad government, such as former president Buhari.
He took an active role in Nigeria’s political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections.
In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian (and African at large) governments, especially the country’s many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of Soyinka’s writing is concerned with “the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it”.
During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the Benin border. Abacha later proclaimed a death sentence against him “in absentia”. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned there.
Since the late fifties, he has been a thorn in the flesh of successive leaders in Nigeria. He and Chinua Achebe occupy a position of eminence in African literature and global literary firmament.
