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Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) - in full Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka | |
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Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and critic, first black African who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Wole Soyinka was imprisoned several times for his criticism of the government. From the 1970s lived long periods in exile. Soyinka's plays range from comedy to tragedy, and from political satire to the theatre of the absurd. He combined influences from Western traditions with African myth, legends and folklore, and such techniques as singing and drumming. When his chuckles had subsided, he grew solemn again. 'Now, here is Ayo, very ambitious for you. He wants to send his son into battle and believe me, the world of books is a battlefield, it is an even tougher battlefield that the ones we used to know. So how does he prepare him? By stuffing his head with books. But book-learning, and especially success in book-learning only creates other battles. Do you know that? You think those men are going to be pleased when you, whom they are nearly old enough to spawn, start defeating them? Hm? Tell me that. Has Ayo ever discussed that with you?' (Aké: The Years of Childhood by Wóle Soyinka, New York: Vintage Books, 1983, p. 143) Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, southwestern Nigeria, which was then a British colony. The Soyinkas were members of the Yoruba tribe. His father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, was the headmaster of St. Peter's Primary School. Soyinka's mother, Grace Eniola Soyinka, whom the author calls "Wild Christian", was a shopkeeper and respected political figure in the community. Like many other major Nigerian writers, including Elechi Amadi, Chinua Achebe, John Okigbo, John Pepper Clark, and Cole Omotso, Soyinka was educated at the University College of Ibada. In 1954 he moved to England, where he studied English literature at the the University of Leeds, receiving his B.A. in 1959. During this period he started study of the work of Eugene O'Neill and wrote two plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel, a story of a floppish school teacher and a old African chief competing for a young village woman. Both of the plays were staged in London. SIDI: These thoughts of future wonders—do you buy them While in England, Soyinka married Barbara Skeath, a fellow student at Leeds; the marriage was brief. In 1960 Soyinka returned to Nigeria, and established an amateur ensemble acting company. He also wrote scripts for radio and television. Soyinka's first important play, A Dance of the Forests (publ. 1963), was written for Nigeria's independence celebration. Soyinka was appointed in 1962 a lecturer in English at the University of Ife and in 1965 he became senior lecturer at the University of Lagos. Challenging the unquestioned position of Christian churches on the campus, he co-authored in the seventies an unpublished document entitled 'An Appeal for the Re-establishment of African Religions on the University of Ife Campus'. However, Soyinka has also interpreted Christian themes, motifs and symbols in many different ways, such as the water symbolism, the figure of the archetypal Savior, and the idea of the sacrificed God. There are also Buddhist's reference points and mythologies in his poetry, too. Soyinka declared in 1963 that he is neither a Christian nor a Moslem. Although Soyinka used in his plays traditional African forms
of expression, he also drew from Western avant-garde techniques. The Strong Breed (1963), a play,
was based on the Yoruba festival of the new year and the ritual of
sacrificing a "carrier" of the previous year's evil. Eman is a stranger
who has found peace in his village, he has no desire to go away. Sunma,
a teacher, wants to spend with him the new year, far from the festival.
The villagers want to safricife Ifada, a helpless and unwilling boy.
Omae, Eman's betrothed, who has died giving birth to his child, appears
to him, and Eman finally fulfills his task and dies a carrier. "Those
who have much to give fulfil themselves only in total loneliness." The Interpreters
(1965), Soyinka's first novel, focused on a group of intellectuals who
meet at bars and nightclubs and other social "watering holes" in Ibadan
and Lagos and interpret the Nigerian reality. One of the characters is
named Lazarus; he is a prophet who claims to have risen from the dead.
Opening with the sentence "Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes," this
complex novel has been compared with the works of James Joyce and
William Faulkner. Season of Anomy
(1973),
Soyinka's long-awaited second novel, disappointed
critics. "I'm not really a keen novelist," Soyinka once
said. "And I don't consider myself a novelist. The first novel happened
purely by accident." (Wole
Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism by Biodun
Jeyifo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 169) Soyinka was first time imprisoned after elections in Western Nigeria, charged for illegal broadcast criticizing fraud of the results. After S.L. Akintola was elected premier of the Western Region, Soyinka, armed with a gun, had entered the broadcasting studios in Ibadan, and played his own tape instead of Akintola's victory speech. During the rule of Yakubu Gowon, Soyinka was jailed in 1967-69 for conspiring to aid Biafra's independence movement. Several American and British writers, among them Lillian Hellman and Robert Lowell, protested to the Nigerian government, and Soyinka was released. His poem, 'Live Burial,' appeared in The New Statesmen on the 23rd of May, 1969. It was sent to an English critic from the prison. "Sixteen paces / By twenty-three. They hold / Siege against humanity / And Truth / Employing time to drill through to his sanity." Soyinka's collection on poems, The Man Died (1972), describes his time in jail. The book was banned in Nigeria. "In his works, what is made manifest, or what Soyinka dramatizes, is that individual will that tends sometimes to get surfeited with power, destructive power, and that has the potential of annihilating its complementary creative power". ('Wole Soyinka' by Femi Euba, in Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998, p. 445) Madmen and Specialists, written in 1970, is perhaps Soyinka's most pessimistic play. It dealt with man's inhumanity and pervasive corruption in structures of power. After release Soyinka worked as a teacher, but went in 1972
into voluntary exile. He worked as a lecturer, held a fellowship at
Churchill College, Cambridge, and wrote three important plays: Jero's Metamorphosis, The Bacchae, and Death and the King's Horseman. PRAISE-SINGER: There is only one home to the life of a river mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter? (Death and the King's Horseman: A Play, New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, p. 11; premiered in 1975) Soyinka moved to Accra, Ghana, in 1975, becoming an editor of Africa's leading intellectual journal Transition. After a coup deposed President Gowon in 1975, Soyinka returned to Nigeria and was appointed professor of English at the University of Ife. Soyinka's childhood memoirs, Aké: The Years of Childhood, came out 1981. It depicted vividly the village where he grew up, his parents, and his education in Yoruba traditions and mysteries. You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir (2006), a follow-up to Aké, which gives insight into the history of Nigeria under military rule. In 1988 Soyinka became a professor of African studies and theatre at Cornell University. Despite government pressure, Soyinka was active in the Nigerian theater. Like the writer and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995), who was hanged despite of international protests, Soyinka criticized the corruption brought to Nigeria by the oil industry. Soyinka's cousin, Fela Kuti, a charismatic musician, was imprisoned in 1984 due to his criticism of the military government. A number of Soyinka's essays were collected in Myth,
Literature, and the African World (1976). He
was one of the most outspoken critics of the concept on négritude, which have been
associated with Léopold Senghor, the writer and former President of
Senegal. Soyinka sees that négritude
encourages into
self-absorption and affirms one of the central Eurocentric prejudices
against Africans, namely the dichotomy between European rationalism and
African emotionalism. "Negritude trapped itself in what was primarily a
defensive role, even though its accents were strident, its syntax
hyperbolic and its strategy aggressive. It accepted one of the most
commonplace blashphemies of racism, that the black man has nothing
between his ears, and proceeded to subvert the power of poetry to
glorify this fabricated justification of European cultural domination.
Suddenly, we were exhorted to give a cheer for those who never invented
anything, a cheer for those who never explored the oceans. The truth,
however, is that there isn't any such creature." (Myth, Literaturem and the African World by Wole Soyinka, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 129) In his essay 'Reparations, Truth, and Reconciliation'
Soyinka
defends the idea, that the West should pay reparations for crimes
committed against African people. "Where there has been inequity,
especially of a singularly brutalizing kind, of a kind that robs one
side of its most fundamental attribute—its humanity—it seems only
appropriate that some form of atonement be made, in order to exorcise
that past. Reparations, we repeat, serve as a cogent
critique of history and thus a potent restraint on its repetition."
(The Burden of
Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999, p. 83) Soyinka points out that this discussion is
not new, but Pan-African
organizations talked about compensation in the beginning of the 20th
century. Soyinka also defended African democracy. In the mid-1970s
he campaigned for Idi Amin's overthrow. Following the spread of
religious fundamentalism, Soyinka considered his duty to "fight
those who have chosen to belong to the party of death, those who say
they receive their orders from God somewhere and believe they have a
duty to set the world on fire to achieve their own salvation, whether
they are in the warrens of Iraq, or in the White House." ('Criticism Starts at Home' by Henry Louis Gates Jr., The New York Times, Aug. 5, 2004) Soyinka
lived in exile in the US and France after leaving
Nigeria in 1994. He participated in 1993 on a protest march against
the military regime and also witnessed on another occasion the killings
of peaceful demonstrators. In an interview Soyinka revealed that he
never applied for an American Green Card, but Presindent Jimmy Carter
got it for him. In 1997 Soyinka was tried in absentia with 14 other opposition members for bomb attacks against army between the years 1996-97. The military regime of General Sani sentenced him to death. "Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bulletproof. I never had that illusion," Soyinka said in an interview. After the death of military dictator Sani Abacha on June 1998, Soyinka demanded democracy to Nigeria. In an interview in Newsweek on August 10, 1998 Soyinka stated that to further the transition to Nigerian democracy "the United States must not give any ground to the regime until democracy has been restored." The accusations have been canceled and general Abdulsalami
Abubakar have granted amnesty for several political prisoners. Soyinka
returned in October 1998 to his home country, and and received a hero's
welcome. Moreover, he was urged to run for the presidency by his
faithful supporters. In his play King
Baabu (2001) Soyinka parodied past and present African
dictators. The title refers to Alfred Jarry's
classic absurdist play, Ubu Roi
(1896). Soyinka has called Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe
power-intoxicated, intolerant and despotic, no better than Idi Amin.
"The conduct of Mugabe is a
betrayal of what we have fought for on the African continent." ('Soyinka: Mugabe is a let-down' by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian, 19 January
2007) After
decades of struggle for democracy and freedom of expression, Soyinka
announced in 2010 that he has decided to retire from public life.
In 1989 Soyinka married his third
wife, Doherty Folake, also a Nigerian. His second wife, Laide Idowu,
whom he met while studying at the University College, Ibadan, worked
before her retirement as Librarian of Olabisi Onabanjo University. Following President Bashar Assad's brutal crackdown on the country's uprising, Soyinka and other writers, such as Umberto Eco, David Grossman, Amos Oz, Orhan Pamuk and Salman Rushdie, urged in June 2011 the United Nations to condemn the repression in Syria as a crime against humanity. Soyinka destroyed his green card after Donald J. Trump won the US presidential elections, saying, "Walls are built in the mind, and Trump has erected walls, not only across the mental landscape of America, but across the global landscape." The satirical Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021) was Soyinka's first novel in nearly 50 years. "I wanted this to be my present to the nation, to the people who live here: both the governed and those who govern, the exploiters and the exploited." (Wole Soyinka in The Guardian, 25 September, 2021) Soyinka hurriend to finish his book before the 60th anniversary of Nigerian independence. For further reading: The Writing of Wole Soyinka by Eldred Jones (1973, rev. 1983); Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka by James Gibbs (1978); Wole Soyinka by Gerald Moore (1978); Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka by James Gibbs (1980); Wole Soyinka: An Introduction to His Writing by Obi Maduakor (1986); Wole Soyinka Revisited by Derek Wright (1993); Research on Wole Soyinka, ed. J. Gibbs and B. Lindfors (1993); Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, ed. A. Maja-Pearce (1994); Wole Soyinka: Life, Work and Criticism by D. Wright (1996); 'Wole Soyinka' by Femi Euba, in Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); Conversations with Wole Soyinka, ed. Biodun Jeyifo (2001); Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism by Biodun Jeyifo (2004); Ogun's Children: The Literature and Politics of Wole Soyinka since the Nobel Prize, edited by Onookome Okome (2004) The Inner Eye: An Oriel on Wole Soyinka's Poetry by Segun Adekoya (2006); Early Soyinka by Bernth Lindfors (2008); The Interpreters: Ritual, Violence and Social Regeneration in the Writing of Wole Soyinka by Hakeem Bello (2014); Soyinka's Language by Obioma Ofoego (2016); Radical Humanism and Generous Tolerance: Soyinka on Religion and Human Solidarity by Celucien L. Joseph (2017); Wole Soyinka and the Poetics of Commitment, edited by Emeka Nwabueze (2018); The Soyinka Impulse: Essays on Wole Soyinka, edited by Duro Oni and Bisi Adigun (2019); Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation by Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola (2021); Postcolonial Agency in African and African Diasporic Literature and Film: a Study in Globalectics by Lokangaka Losambe (2022) - See also: Amos Tutuola, who became famous with his stories based on Yoruba folk tales Selected works:
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