Obi Nwakanma
10 February 2008
Lagos — WOLE Soyinka, one of Africa's leading modernist voices excites a following that is both cultic and diffuse.
The reason is fairly simple: Soyinka's life spans a bridge as magnificent in its length of involvement with the imagination as it is broad in its complex engagements with civic life.
Of his generation of writers, Wole Soyinka occupies the broadest space in an engagement with life and letters, which touches upon every genre and every experience, and each with intensity.
Wole Soyinka has given insight into the spectrum of his lived experience in many autobiographical works, starting with his memoirs of childhood, Ake, his recollection of young adulthood in Isara which was also in part a tribute to his father S. Ayo Soyinka - "Essay" and in two others, Ibadan: the Penklemes Years and the latest, You Must set Forth at Dawn, a vast tour de force of his very active years as artist, intellectual, and man of action - l'homme engage.
Soyinka's indeed exemplifies the quintessential form of the cosmopolitan imagination, which is still rooted within a definable cosmogony, in Soyinka's case, the mythic world of Yoruba ritual and aesthetics.
He has produced a body of work that sustains his claim as one of the most ingenious and fertile minds of the twentieth century. Soyinka's life has been characterized by moments of leave takings and returns, as a result of his politics, and his engagement with his society. His art is forged on the purpose of his life, it seems, for that life has proved itself deeply fashioned by its own presence, as a conscious being, at active moments of history. This needs a little untangling: Soyinka has in other words, always thrown himself into the social and political drama of his time, either as a student at the University College Ibadan, when he was in the thick of student political and cultural life in the 1950s, or as dramatist in the heady Mbari years of the 1960s, when the explosions in the political life of Western Nigeria pulled Soyinka and his friends into the orbit of incendiary politics.
He has finally revealed the face behind the mask, in his recent autobiography, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, in the famous Radio House incident in 1965, potentially his first public act of challenge to egregious use of power. He used both the stage and the street theatre to bring attention to the political situation in the west, and in many ways, was catalytic in mobilizing public resistance to the impositions of the Akintola government in Ibadan.
He went to jail during the civil war, following his mission to Biafra, his contacts with Victor Banjo, and the plans to use the Ibadan underground, whose subterranean agency was always critical to the evolution of Soyinka's political activism, to "welcome the rebel army to Ibadan" in 1967.
Locked behind the gulag, Soyinka's mind squirted The Man Died, his prison memoirs and devastating account and indictment of the war-mongering elite that had taken over the government in Lagos, and a play like Madmen and Specialists, whose wry, ironic and inverted morality highlights the dilemma of a new society and its capacity to destroy its most ancient and sacred values. At the end of the war, Wole Soyinka resigned his position as head of drama at the University of Ibadan and went into exile, and lived in Accra, Ghana, as editor of the Transition magazine, which he promptly re-titled, Chi' Indaba, a position from which he launched devastating attacks against Idi Amin and other Africa dictators, and engaged in the project of the then Union of African Writers of which he was secretary-general.
He returned to Nigeria in 1975, soon after the coup against Gowon, and was appointed professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife. Ife became the base of his political actions; his critique of the Shagari government, and the massively rigged elections of 1983, and against the Buhari coup in 1983, for which he also went into exile.
He became involved with the Babangida government, which appointed him chairman of the Federal Road Safety Commission, but turned foe against him following the annulment of the June 12 elections, and the emergence of the Sani Abacha government, against which he led an effective international opposition.
In the midst of all this, he also managed to write a play like, The Beatification of an Area Boy and the book, Open Sore of a Continent. Indeed as Soyinka scholar, the literary critic Bidoun Jeyifo notes in his book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press 2004), "Soyinka has sustained an almost unbroken literary productivity over a course of the last four decades, his output has generally tended to very quickly outstrip the scope of each successive study of his writings." And thus indeed is the ground upon which the continuous challenge that Soyinka's life and literary output pose, form the basis of the curiosity around him for scholars of African politics and literary modernity.
Its the full complexity of Soyinka's art and life thus, that the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, wishes to further plumb at an international, interdisciplinary symposium on Wole Soyinka billed from February 28 to February 29, at Carbondale, Illinois. Titled, "Muse and Mimesis: Wole Soyinka, Africa and the World," convened by the playwright and director Segun Ojewuyi currently assistant professor and head of the directing programme at SIU, Carbondale will draw eminent scholars of Soyinka including Biodun Jeyifo, professor at Harvard, who would give the keynote statements to be responded to by Professor Robert Fox of the English Department at Southern Illinois University.
They would be followed with presentations by Dr. Awam Amkpa, director of Africana Studies at New York University, (NYU), Bisi Gwamna, professor of English at Iowa Wesleyan University, Marcel Okhaku of the University of Benin, Nigeria, in a session to be moderated by Frank Chipasula, professor of Black Studies at SIU, Carbondale. There would also be other speakers like Randall Robinson of TransAfrica, and Gary Younge, New York City correspondent for the London Guardian newspaper, who would give the keynote for the second day, with a response from Professor Reginald Robinson, Professor of Law at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. There would be presenters like Dr. David Krasner of the Theater Arts Department at Emerson College, Dr. Getahun Benti, Professor of African History at SIU Carbondale, and Dr. Joseph Adjaye, professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
The symposium aims to survey various questions ranging from topics like "The Climate of Fear: Law, Politics, and Media," Theater, Literature and Culture," and "Africa, the World and Darfur" - questions that have animated and engaged Soyinka himself through his long career of literature and political activism. His various conscientious stances in other words open themselves to the debates of this symposium. On a different note personally for me, is the question of the validity of the Nigerian universities in our contemporary era, in which tuppeny universities dot the entire landscape, drawn more to the theology of dress codes and right-wing fundamentalism steeped in the vision of hell and damnation: the professional quackery of those who purport to teach and run the Nigerian university systems is reflected, at least for me, in the increasing absence of the kind of intellectual engagement that marked university culture, even in Nigeria, not too long ago.
I have often been struck, that Nigerian scholars across the world who have taken flight from the spaces of Nigerian universities and are the ones now discussing and establishing Nigerian culture, outside of Nigeria, while the universities atrophy in Nigeria. A Soyinka Symposium in Carbondale is fit and proper, but a Soyinka symposium in Ibadan or Nsukka or Ife or ABU would even be more fit and proper, and ought to answer the question posed by Chinua Achebe himself once, about whether the writer and the written - that is those for whom the writer writes - still live in the same place.
In any case, the Soyinka symposium at Carbondale offers a great opportunity, once more, to explore the significance of one of late modernity's clearest voices. It would be concluded with a production of Death and the King's Horseman, directed by Segun Ojewuyi in collaboration with the St. Louis Black Rep Theatre.
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This is a beautiful writeup, how l wish this can be read and understood by people who today have succeeded in turning the university education to another shopping complex or a real estate business. Never, would we be able to have those vibrant days again if things remain this way.Ayo Oluwasanmi