Soyinka, Wole 1934–

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Wole Soyinka 1934-

(Full name Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka) Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, lecturer, librettist, biographer, and nonfiction and short story writer.

For additional information on Soyinka's career, see Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1.

INTRODUCTION

Recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, Soyinka is regarded as one of Africa's finest contemporary writers. His plays, novels, and poetry blend elements of traditional Yoruban folk drama and European dramatic form to create both spectacle and penetrating satire. His narrative technique is based on the African cultural tradition, in which the artist functions as the recorder of the mores and experiences of his society. Soyinka's works reflect this philosophy, serving as a record of twentieth-century Africa's political turmoil and the continent's struggle to reconcile tradition with modernization. Through his nonfiction works and essay collections, Soyinka has established an international reputation as an unflinching commentator on political injustice and a sophisticated provocateur of social criticism.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Soyinka was born in 1934 in Ìsarà, Nigeria. As he grew older he became increasingly aware of the tension between African tradition and Western modernization, a theme that would appear in his later work. Aké, his village, was populated mainly by people from the Yoruba tribe and was presided over by the ogboni, or tribal elders. Soyinka's grandfather introduced him to the pantheon of Yoruba gods and other figures of tribal folklore. His parents, however, were representatives of colonial influence: his mother was a devout Christian convert, and his father was a headmaster at the village school established by the British. Soyinka published poems and short stories in Black Orpheus, a Nigerian literary magazine, before leaving Africa to attend the University of Leeds in England. He returned to Nigeria in 1960, shortly after the country's independence from colonial rule. In 1965 he was arrested by the Nigerian police, accused of using a gun to force a radio announcer to broadcast his satirical commentary on the fraudulent election. No evidence was ever produced, however, and the PEN writers' organization soon launched a protest campaign, headed by William Styron and Norman Mailer. Soyinka was eventually released after three months. He was arrested again two years later, during Nigeria's civil war, for his vocal opposition to the conflict. Soyinka was particularly angered by the Nigerian government's brutal policies toward the Ibo people, who were attempting to form their own country, Biafra. After he traveled to Biafra to establish a peace commission composed of leading intellectuals from both sides of the conflict, the Nigerian police accused Soyinka of helping the Biafrans to buy jet fighters. This time Soyinka was imprisoned for more than two years, although he was never formally charged with a crime. For the majority of his arrest, he was kept in solitary confinement. Denied reading and writing materials, Soyinka created his own ink and began to keep a prison diary, writing on toilet paper and cigarette packages. This diary was published in 1972 as The Man Died. In the early 1990s, Soyinka opposed Nigerian General Ibrahim Babangida's refusal to allow a democratic government to take power. Babangida appointed General Sani Abacha as head of the Nigerian state and Soyinka, along with other pro-democracy activists, was charged with treason for his criticism of the military regime. Facing a death sentence, Soyinka left the country in 1994 to travel and lecture in Europe and the United States. Following the death of Abacha, who held control for five years, the new government, led by General Abdulsalem Abubakar, released numerous political prisoners and promised to hold civilian elections, prompting Soyinka to return to his homeland. He has held teaching positions at a number of prestigious universities, including the University of Ghana, Cornell University, and Yale University. He also served as the Goldwin Smith professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts at Cornell University from 1988 to 1991. Soyinka has received several awards for his work, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 and the Enrico Mattei Award for Humanities in 1986.

MAJOR WORKS

Soyinka's early plays focus on the dichotomies of good versus evil and progress versus tradition in African culture. For example, The Swamp Dwellers (1958) condemns African superstition by showing how religious leaders exploit the fears of their townspeople for personal gain. Commissioned as part of Nigeria's independence celebration in 1960, A Dance of the Forests (1960) warns the newly independent Nigerians that the end of colonial rule does not mean an end to their country's problems. The play features a bickering group of mortals who summon up the egungun—spirits of the dead, revered by the Yoruba people—for a festival. They have presumed the egungun to be noble and wise, but they discover that their ancestors are as petty and spiteful as anyone else. While Soyinka warned against sentimental yearning for Africa's past in A Dance of the Forests, he lampooned the indiscriminate embrace of Western modernization in The Lion and the Jewel (1959). The plot of this drama revolves around Sidi, the village beauty, and the rivalry between her two suitors. The story also follows Baroka, a village chief with many wives, and Lakunle, an enthusiastically Westernized schoolteacher who dreams of molding Sidi into a "civilized" woman. The Trials of Brother Jero (1960) was written in response to a request for a play that could be performed in a converted dining hall in Ibadan. Drawing on his observations of the separatist Christian churches of Nigeria, on Ijebu folk narratives, and on theatrical conventions used by dramatist Bertolt Brecht, Soyinka constructed a vigorous comedy around the character of a messianic beach prophet. Brother Jero—a trickster figure who sets up a shack on Bar Beach, Lagos, prophesying golden futures in return for money—belongs to one of the revivalist Christian sects that existed at the time of Nigerian independence. In Kongi's Harvest (1965), the demented dictator of the state of Isma has imprisoned and dethroned its traditional chief, Oba Danlola. To legitimize his seizure of power, Kongi has laid claim to the Oba's spiritual authority through his consecration of the crops at the New Yam Festival.

Soyinka's later plays rely heavily on classical theatrical devices as a vehicle for the author's potent political and social satires. The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), an adaptation of the play by Euripides, reinvents the classic tale as a meditation on the nature of personal sacrifice within unjust societies. Death and the King's Horseman (1975) combines powerful dramatic verse and characterization with a structure that incorporates contrast and juxtaposition. The play is based on an actual 1945 incident of a colonial officer's intervention to prevent the royal horseman, the Elesin, from committing ritual suicide at his king's funeral, whereupon the Elesin's son would take his father's place in the rite. A Play of Giants (1984) is a surreal fantasy about international poetic justice in which an African dictator, on a visit to the United Nations in New York, takes a group of Russian and American delegates hostage. He threatens to release the Soviet-supplied rockets from his embassy arsenal unless an international force is sent to crush an uprising in his country. The Beatification of Area Boy (1995) centers around Sanda, a security guard at a Lagos shopping mall. Despite his position at the mall, the charming Sanda routinely organizes local scams and robberies. It is eventually revealed that Sanda is an ex-revolutionary who had sacrificed his higher education to organize political protests.

Soyinka's fiction expands on the themes expressed in his plays, constructing sweeping narratives of personal and political turmoil in Africa. His first novel, The Interpreters (1965), is essentially a plotless narrative loosely structured around the informal discussions between five young Nigerian intellectuals. Each has been educated in a foreign country and has returned on the eve of Nigerian independence, hoping to shape Nigeria's destiny. They are hampered by their own confused values, however, as well as by the corruption they encounter in their homeland. Season of Anomy (1973) takes the central concerns from The Interpreters and selects a new moment at which to consider the choices confronting those working for change. The plot follows a variety of characters including an artist named Ofeyi, a cold-blooded assassin named Isola Demakin, and a harmonious community called Aiyero in a narrative that is thematically linked to the myths of Orpheus and Euridice.

The prose in Soyinka's nonfiction works and essay collections is largely based on his own life and his personal political convictions. Besides The Man Died, he has also composed a series of memoirs—Aké (1981), Ìsarà (1989), Ibadan (1994), and You Must Set forth at Dawn (2006). While Aké, Ibadan, and You Must Set Forth at Dawn focus on Soyinka's personal life—Aké concerns his childhood, Ibadan recounts his teen years to his early twenties, and You Must Set Forth at Dawn chronicles his life as a public intellectual and his political struggles against the Nigerian government—Ìsarà is a biography of Soyinka's father. Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), Soyinka's first essay collection, combines criticism of specific texts with discussions that reveal the scope of Soyinka's acquaintance with literary and theatrical traditions, as well as his search for a personal perspective. He further explored his interest in the role that politics and literature play in modern Africa in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage (1988). The Open Sore of a Continent (1996) reprints a series of vitriolic lectures in which Soyinka denounces the Nigerian government under the dictator Sani Abacha and laments the indifference of the West to the state of Nigerian politics. In The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1999), Soyinka discussed the role of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and questioned the nature of political truths. Climate of Fear (2005) is comprised of five lectures given by Soyinka at the Royal Institute of London in March 2004. In these works, Soyinka discusses the climate of fear that defines the political and social atmosphere of the early twenty-first century and the threat of terrorism on a worldwide scale.

Soyinka has also published several collections of poetry, including Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Ogun Abibiman (1976), and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988). Composed over a period of twenty-four hours, Idanre collects a series of mythological poems that feature Yoruba terminology and display subtle manipulation of words, images, and idioms. Soyinka drew upon stories associated with the Yoruba mythological figures Ogun, Atunda, Sango, and Oya, and the Idanre Hills. In the twenty-two-page poem Ogun Abibiman, Soyinka combined a direct call for African states to take action against the apartheid movement in South Africa with a mythologized manifesto for the country's liberation. The treatise describes Ogun, Yoruba god of war, joining forces in a violent and mystical union with the legendary Zulu chieftain Shaka. In 2002 Soyinka published Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, a poetry collection that offers reflections on modern politics, his exile from Nigeria, and such writers as Josef Brodsky and Chinua Achebe.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Soyinka's work has frequently been described as demanding but rewarding to read. Although his plays have been widely praised, they are seldom performed, especially outside of Africa. He has been acknowledged by many critics as Nigeria's finest contemporary dramatist and one of its most distinguished men of letters. While many critics have focused on Soyinka's strengths as a playwright, others have acknowledged his skill as a poet, novelist, and essayist as well. The most significant aspect of Soyinka's work, critics have noted, is in his approach to literature as a serious agent of social change and his commitment to promoting human rights in Nigeria and other nations. Commentators have maintained that the humor and compassion evident in his writings, as well as his chilling portrayals of the consequences of political greed and oppression, add a universal significance to his depictions of West African life. His incorporation of Yoruba mythology and ritual in his work has been a recurring topic of critical interest as well. His poetry, novels, and nonfiction works have attracted an international readership. Soyinka was the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and he has been applauded by commentators for his versatility and the power of his works.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Invention (play) 1955

The Swamp Dwellers (play) 1958

The Lion and the Jewel (play) 1959

A Dance of the Forests (play) 1960

The Trials of Brother Jero (play) 1960

The Republican (play) 1963

The New Republican (play) 1964

Before the Blackout (play) 1965

The Interpreters (novel) 1965

Kongi's Harvest (play) 1965

The Road (play) 1965

The Strong Breed (play) 1966

Idanre and Other Poems (poetry) 1967

Poems from Prison (poetry) 1969; expanded edition published as A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972

Madmen and Specialists (play) 1970

Plays from the Third World: An Anthology [editor] (plays) 1971

The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (diary) 1972

The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite [adaptor, from the play by Euripides] (play) 1973

^*Collected Plays: Volume One (plays) 1973

Season of Anomy (novel) 1973

Death and the King's Horseman (play) 1975

Myth, Literature, and the African World (essays) 1976

Ogun Abibiman (poetry) 1976

Opera Wonyosi (libretto) 1977

Aké: The Years of Childhood (memoir) 1981

Priority Projects (play) 1982

Requiem for a Futurologist (play) 1983

A Play of Giants (play) 1984

Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (essays) 1988

Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (poetry) 1988

Ìsarà: A Voyage around Essay (biography) 1989

Before the Deluge (play) 1991

From Zia with Love (play) 1992

Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946-65 (memoir) 1994

The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope (play) 1995

The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (lectures) 1996

Early Poems (poetry) 1997

Arms and the Arts—A Continent's Unequal Dialogue (nonfiction) 1999

The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (non-fiction) 1999

King Baabu (play) 2001

Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (poetry) 2002

Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World (lectures) 2005

You Must Set forth at Dawn (memoir) 2006

*This volume includes The Swamp Dwellers, A Dance of the Forests, The Road, The Strong Breed, and The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite.

CRITICISM

Tejumola Olaniyan (essay date fall 2002)

SOURCE: Olaniyan, Tejumola. "Modernity and Its Mirages: Wole Soyinka and the African State." Modern Drama 45, no. 3 (fall 2002): 349-57.

[In this essay, Olaniyan examines Soyinka's pragmatist critique of the African state, juxtaposing his The Open Sore of a Continent with Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.]

We know that a broad and relentless interrogation of the African state constitutes the moral constant of Wole Soyinka's dramatic universe, whether he is employing the most arcane and ritualistic, or the most realistic and accessible, performance form. By the "African state" I mean both the established ruling institution and the existing social condition as a whole. This persistent critical interrogation has made Soyinka the foremost scourge of the seemingly perpetual state of anomie on the continent and those who manage and profit from it. Although this is less clearly articulated in the dramas than in Soyinka's other writings, I see the catalyst of the dramatist's huge exertions as one grand irony, a historical irony of epic proportion that serves as vast diorama: Africa as living a modernity it practically financed with its blood and toil, its human and material resources, but whose direction it is powerless to chart and whose effect it is unable to control. If the acknowledged gains of that modernity in the West—stable, orderly government, accountability between the rulers and the ruled, entrenched striving for egalitarian relations, rationalized bureaucracy and economic system, optimum management of the population—continue to elude Africa, it is not because Africa is not part of that modernity but because it is part of it unequally.

What I want to do in these brief remarks is not, as my title might imply, to demonstrate how Soyinka's critique of the state in his works registers the illusions of modernity so far in Africa. As I have suggested above, such forceful registration is the constitutive fabric of Soyinka's exertions and, therefore, needs careful attention. Such an attention is indeed a substantial part of my larger project. Instead, what I want to do here is to raise a meta-query of Soyinka's critique of the African state. In other words, I am concerned here with frameworks of critique, with modalities rather than with mere examples.

There is a reason for my fixation with this kind of query. The African state as we have it today, we all know, is an outgrowth of the colonial state. It is a consequence of historical developments that actually circumscribed indigenous agency. Even now, forty years after independence, none of the institutions of the state—the party, the judiciary, the police, the bureaucracy, the language, and so on—has been decolonized enough to command the affect of the governed. This is the main source of the unending crisis of legitimacy facing the states. It has made them into perpetual states of "rule" with little hope of ever becoming states of "hegemony." Now, if this nutshell analytical history of the African state is accurate, then there are crucial implications for the kind of critique directed at it by would-be critics.

Two crystallized dominant paradigms are currently available for the critique of the African state: the pragmatist and the foundationalist. The pragmatist critique affirms the legality and authenticity of where the African state is here and now and insists that it could do much better by learning from its mistakes, as well as from successful examples worldwide, and by bringing uncorrupted reason and commitment to bear on the business of government. It foregrounds the necessity for managers of people and resources to be of unimpeachable character and avows that the soul of any institution is people of integrity. For the pragmatist, there is no human institution, no matter its wayward origins, that cannot be tamed under the proper direction. Behind this claim is a fierce belief in the endless capacity of individuals to make a difference in society; after all, the only dynamic factor in politics is the individual person. This mode of critique is dominant today among African writers and intellectuals, as well as among scholars of Africa. In addition to Soyinka, other leading writers whose works express the pragmatist view include Chinua Achebe, Nurrudin Farah, Peter Abraham, T. M. Aluko, and Athol Fugard, to cite only a few examples. This is also the reigning position in the social sciences, and has been so since the wave of independence in the 1960s.

The foundationalist critique, on the other hand, argues that the origin of the contemporary African state in the dictatorial colonial state compromises it so much that without a thoroughgoing decolonization of the instruments and procedures of rule, the African state cannot resolve its crisis of legitimacy. For the foundationalist, the problem is at the foundations; in other words, the problem is structural or systemic. While conscientious individuals are certainly needed to run institutions, the foundationalist holds that no amount of moral suasion can keep large numbers of people upright in circumstances that sneer at or even punish uprightness. Bad management of human and material resources, says the foundationalist, is not the root of the problem but merely a symptom. What can the best and most honest of men and women do, running a bureaucracy that speaks a language that 60 percent of the population they are governing cannot understand? Writers for whom only a fundamental critique of the state would suffice include Sembene Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiong'O, and, in rare instances, Chinua Achebe (Arrow of God only) and Ayi Kwei Armah (Two Thousand Seasons only). In the last decade, a significant social science literature on the African crisis has begun to focus on foundations, after what seemed an exhaustion of its earlier fixation with lamenting the absence of "honest" and "good" leaders. Some of the scholars creating this literature are Basil Davidson, Crawford Young, Patrick Chabal, Claude Ake, Mahmood Mamdani, and Achille Mbembe.

The predominant mode of Soyinka's critique of the state, I suggest, is the pragmatist. In play after play, he is more interested in what is wrong now, and who is responsible, than in asking how things come to be what they are and what structured institutional and extra-institutional constraints and possibilities produce them. That is why his most favored generic mode in interrogating the state is satire. Satire, as we all know, derides and makes contemptible actions and behaviors that are aberrations or deviations from a desirable norm. But the emphasis is on the derision, not on investigating how an aberration came to be. What satire says is this: "Whatever the cause of your bad behavior, you would do well to change for the better." But satire does help the project of reform, even if it is uninterested in causes as such. And here is a defining ideological complexity at the heart of the genre. Satire aims to reform and thereby, according to the logic of reformation, make itself subsequently unnecessary; but precisely because its province is more of manifestation than origins, its reappearance is virtually guaranteed.

But for my comparative critical assessment of both the pragmatist and foundationalist critiques of the African state here, I will be using, rather than any of Soyinka's classic dramatic satires, a non-fiction text in which he articulates the pragmatist view in elaborate detail. This is the important book The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, published in 1996. For the sake of clarity, I will read this book alongside another significant book proposing a foundationalist critique, published in the same year by the notable political scientist Mahmood Mamdani: Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.

There is a critical supplementary relationship between these two books. While Soyinka critically dissects a contemporary instance of the crisis of an African state, Mamdani's wide-ranging historicization shows how that crisis came about, how it could not have been otherwise. With perspicacious insight, Soyinka shows how the evil genie of tyranny, once set loose from its moorings, perpetuates itself and is perpetuated remorselessly even under different circumstances. Mamdani, on the other hand, gives us a persuasive account of the historical—specifically, colonial—origins of the evil specter: an account of "where the rain began to beat us," as Achebe would say (44). A similar supplementarity is evident in the respective styles of the two writers. Mamdani's is the clinical, sedate prose of the scholar-scientist; his sentences are rarely more than four lines long. On the other hand, what we get from the irrepressible wordsmith, Soyinka, is a near-average of seven lines per sentence, with not a few sentences running to twelve lines: a cascading, torrential prose of the embattled activist right in the thick of the struggle at the moment.

To say that a logic of supplementarity structures the two books is, also, of course, to say, clearly and simply, that they are different in stimulating ways.

Effectively, two of Soyinka's three chapters are devoted to meticulous interrogations of the nation-state form. Nigeria provides the specific point of departure, interspersed with theoretical reflections on general issues such as "nationhood" and "nationmaking," the nation and its boundaries, the nation and its constituent human groups, the nation and the state and their relations, national belonging and its modes, and the national will—the modes of its determination, and consequences of its conservation or subversion.

In all the observations and analyses, Soyinka is the clear-eyed pragmatist, keenly aware of the weak foundational structures of the nation called Nigeria—whether of awkward boundaries, the unseemly mixture of different ethnicities, or a score of other forms of co- lonial gerrymandering. At the same time, however, he is deeply affirmative that those are not, and ought not automatically to be, enough unmanageable reasons for the edifice to collapse. With true patriotism, the type that transparently promotes the mutual interests of all the constituent groups within the nation space, Soyinka suggests, it is actually possible to survive the affliction of rickety foundations.

The immediate backdrop of Soyinka's exertions is the structured inequality among the different ethnic groups in Nigeria regarding access to the common wealth, a structured inequality that has led to a civil war, judicial murders, and repeated crises of different varieties. Of the lessons of the late-1960s Biafran War for the present, Soyinka states that "every day still reminds us that the factors that led to Biafra neither were ephemeral nor can be held to be permanently exorcised. And instead of such evasive or pious devices, it would serve us better to think instead of what mutual interests need to be emphasized, promoted, and packaged with all the skill of first-class salesmen, in order to ground our nationalist sentiments in something more durable" (32). In other words, a nation is something not just more than but actually other than a geographical space, such that it is possible to have a geographical space called Nigeria that is really not a nation. But since nations are made and not divinely ordained, a geographical space can actually be a nation, become a nation—even one with strong foundations—through a thoroughgoing secular political act of articulating the "mutual interests" of the constituent groups. This, for Soyinka, is the "something more durable" that makes and conserves nations. This is the polemical pragmatism that subtends the title Soyinka gives to chapter one of his book: "A Flawed Origin—But No Worse Than Others," meaning that though the origin of the entity called Nigeria is defective, it is not thereby irredeemable.

Mahmood Mamdani would certainly agree with this assessment, though from an entirely different perspective. He is more interested in the contours of that form of rule specifically programmed to engender, among other things, endless ethnic competition and animosities, rather than in the specific manifestations of such ethnic rivalries within the nation space. This difference is significant. For Mamdani, the major legacy of colonial rule that has continued to impede democratic initiatives in Africa is the entrenchment of what he calls the "bifurcated state" (16-23), by which he means colonial rule through ethnically organized Native Authorities (NAs) enforcing "customary law," in the rural areas, and through a racially based supervisory central state in the urban centers. The NAs speak the language of custom as defined and enforced by the colonizers, while the central state speaks the language of civil society. Africans under the NAs were "subjects" under oppressive local "overseer" states, while their entrance into civil society where they could be "citizens" was jealously guarded by colonial racism.

At independence, the major reform carried out by the victorious nationalists was the Africanization or deracialization of the central state, while there was very little corresponding dismantling or "detribalization" of the NAs, much less the establishment of a non-coercive way of linking the rural and the urban. This, argues Mamdani, was ultimately the result, whether we are talking of "mainstream nationalists" (289-90) who came to power through multiparty elections or "radical nationalists" (290-91) who adopted the single party in order to detribalize the NAs. The result was "decentralized despotism" in one case (289) and "centralized despotism" in the other (291).

Within Mamdani's paradigm, the trajectory of Nigeria's decolonization is that of conservative, mainstream nationalism. The central state was deracialized and the civil society indigenized. But these democratic reforms were mainly urban-centered, as the rural power of the NAs was never detribalized. Electoral reform did not affect the appointment of the NAs and its chiefs (289). In such a context of bifurcation and decentralized despotism, electoral politics usually carries unduly high stakes, for victors will not only be the representatives of citizens in civil society but will also who have the right to rule over subjects through NAs, "for the winner would appoint chiefs, the Native Authority, everywhere. More than the rule of law, the issue in a civil society-centered contest comes to be who will be master of all tribes" (289). This is why, Mamdani says, "the ethnicity of the president is the surest clue to the ethnic tinge of the government of the day" (289).

In his book, Soyinka rails against what he calls the "spoils of office," which is transitory and position-based, and the "spoils of power," which is permanent and group- or ethnic-based (61-62). Mamdani's submission is that the entrenchment of these spoils could hardly have been otherwise, for two reasons: first, because "civil society politics where the rural is governed through customary authority is necessarily patrimonial: urban politicians harness rural constituencies through patron-client relations" (289); and, second, because the tribalized and undemocratized NAs, through the economy of patron-client relations, can only infect the deracialized civil society in the urban with its tribalism, which is why the nationalist deracialization of the central state on independence, in nearly all cases, wore an ethnic face.

One of Mamdani's great insights is the debunking of the opinion, commonly expressed in many circles, that decentralization equals democratization. The lesson of Nigeria is instructive indeed in its ironies. As part of the post-civil war strategies to decentralize government so that government, as the agent and bearer of "development" and "modernization," could reach the remote corners of the country, four large regions became twelve states. More than a decade later, twelve states became nineteen, ostensibly for the same noble goal of democratizing development. By this time, however, many discerning observers had begun to wonder if state creation was not just another ingenious white elephant to siphon the national wealth to line individual pockets, since the main attraction of state creation has turned out to be the endless lists of bureaucratic positions to fill and contracts to award. It matters little whether a state is economically viable or not, for, after all, the budget allocation comes from the almighty federal government, the central state. Today, the states are thirty-six, and more groups are still clamoring for states of their own.

But there is a further decentralization: each state is divided into "local government areas" or LGAs, each with its own local administration, which is entirely dependent on the state for sustenance, just in the same way in which that particular state depends on the federal government. In all this energetic decentralization, however, the model is that of the NA system set up by the colonizers, with its enforced tribalism and blighted notion of the customary. For not only are Nigerian states aggregations of supposedly related ethnic groups, but the LGA divisions further refine and tribalize, giving nearly every sub-ethnic group its own local government. The president, state governors, and chairs of LGAs are either appointed or elected, depending on whether the regime is military or elected. It is a testament to the enduring colonial legacy of the bifurcated state—or, in this Nigerian specificity, the triplicated state—that in spite of the extensive decentralization, the relationship of despotism along the chain of command remains firmly intact. States are merely autonomous, not independent of the federal government; and, in turn, the LGAs are autonomous but not independent of the state. Whether appointed or elected, the state governor depends on the goodwill of the president for prompt and adequate budgetary allocation, and many other things besides. In turn, the LGA chairs in the state must compete for the governor's favor by running their divisions in line with the governor's fancies. The old tyrannical relationship between the country and the city, the rural and the urban, that was established by the colonizers to serve the colonial dictatorship survives—even thrives,—under "democracy"!

Since what a military regime does is silence or at least depoliticize civil society, crises and violent disarticulations in the "triplicated state" occur mostly during electoral politics. Soyinka records for us in his book one especially unforgettable instance of the decentralized despotism at work. It happened in Ile-Ife, Oyo State, in 1982. Six members of a political party—the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN)—were set on fire in a minivan as they drove to join a political rally. The perpetrators were thugs of a rival political party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), which is the party of the President but which lost Oyo State in the previous governorship elections and was determined to win at all costs this time around. As this "daylight massacre" (67) went on, writes Soyinka, the police, "numbering over a hundred, sat on their hands in four open-sided vans, their rifles and teargas launchers between their legs" and simply watched "with emotions varying from impassivity to helpless horror" (66-67). The local police, it turned out, had advance orders from the federal government-controlled police national headquarters in Lagos to do nothing. The country's police everywhere in the nation had become an extension of the party in power at the centre, had become a tool for the entrenchment of the party of the incumbent president in every region of the country. The federal control of the police throughout the country was so total that even state governors, if they belonged to a different party from the President, had little control over the state branch of the police. Needless to say, the NPN did win the governorship elections in Oyo state, as had been predetermined and carefully executed!

The lesson of all this is, of course, that a system of electoral politics alone does not guarantee democracy. In fact, it had in many cases been what the late distinguished Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake called it: the "democratization of disempowerment." And specifically within the context of unreformed bifurcated or triplicated power structure, electoral politics can only produce inter-ethnic, inter-religious, and other kinds of factional struggles that provide the ideal thriving ground for the politics of clientelism. Soyinka's book is a passionate attack on the venal and ethnic character of this clientelism, while Mamdani's attention is on the embedded structures of the postcolonial state—and their historical origins—that cannot produce anything other than that clientelism. This returns us, then, to Soyinka's polemical title: "A Flawed Origin—But No Worse Than Others." Mamdani's foundationalist answer would be that a flawed origin cannot be so easily dismissed; that the implied meaning that Nigeria could do better, even with flawed origins, may be somewhat far-fetched; that other African countries that share similarly flawed origins are not necessarily doing better with democratic governance; that the question may be not so much being worse off than others as the historic challenge today of being better; and, finally, that there may be no real movement forward in democratization, no matter who wins elections, without our returning to revise that primal origin of colonially implanted impediments to democratization.

Soyinka, in exasperation at the inability of many committed people like him to turn the nation around, once described his generation as a "wasted generation" (emphasis added).¹ The hide of the rampaging elephant was just too tough for the available sharp knives. Soyinka's phrase gripped the Nigerian public imagination and was hotly debated in the papers. Critics borrowed the phrase to describe a new generation of much younger and obviously less patriotic Nigerian politicians and bureau- crats as the "wasteful generation." By raising the sort of query I have raised in this [essay], and by seeming to lean more to the foundationalist than to the pragmatist view in thinking about the mirages of African modernity, I suppose I belong to a yet different and perhaps more dangerous generation: the pessimistic, skeptical, perhaps even a little bit cynical, generation. But I like to think that this is a pessimism of the intellect only, not of the will.

Note

1. "In a statement I made last year I referred to my generation as the wasted generation and I was thinking in terms of all fields, not just the literary: the technological talents that we have which are not being used; but I also had in mind our writers of course, the fact that a lot of our energy has really been devoted to coping with the oppressive political situation in which we find ourselves. A lot of our energies go into fighting unacceptable situations as they arise while at the same time trying to pursue a long-term approach to politics such as, for instance, joining progressive-looking political parties, but of course each step is always one step forwards and about ten backwards. I find the political situation very, very frustrating, personally frustrating. I mean, forget even the amount of let us say personal work one could have done, writing and so on, and just think in terms of the amount of time one could have spent on training, in theatre for instance, would-be actors, or devoting more time to would-be writers, many of whom are constantly inundating one with cries for help; the qualitatively different kind of creative community atmosphere, structures that one would really love to give more time to […]. I know, very definitely, that I feel a great sense of deprivation in terms of what I could have contributed to the general productive atmosphere of the country in literary terms and I'm sure a lot of other writers feel the same. That is one of the penalties of the political situation we've been undergoing since independence and which has got progressively worse, progressively more lethal. The penalties for the wrong kind of political action in this situation have become far more depressing" (Wilkinson 92-93).

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. "The Novelist as Teacher." Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann, 1965. 42-45.

Ake, Claude. The Democratization of Disempowerment in Africa. Lagos: Malthouse P, 1994.

Chabal, Patrick. Power in Africa: An Essay in Political Interpretation. New York: St. Martin's, 1992.

Davidson, Basil. The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State. New York: Random, 1992.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.

Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.

Soyinka, Wole. The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Wilkinson, Jane, ed. Talking with African Writers Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists. London: J. Currey, 1990.

Young, Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994.

Wale Oyedele (essay date 2004)

SOURCE: Oyedele, Wale. "Season of Anomy—Postmodernism and Development Discourse." Neohelicon 31, no. 2 (2004): 281-88.

[In the essay that follows, Oyedele discusses Season of Anomy as a postmodernist text, focusing specifically on the narrative subtext, which emphasizes the themes of emancipation and progress.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

Martin Banham (essay date 2005)

SOURCE: Banham, Martin. "Back to before: Soyinka's Stagecraft in The Beatification of Area Boy & King Baabu." In African Theatre: Blackout, Blowout & beyond: Wole Soyinka's Satirical Revue Sketches, edited by Martin Banham, pp. 1-9. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005.

[In the following excerpt, Banham contends that the subject matter and structure of The Beatification of Area Boy and King Baabu "indicate that Soyinka has returned enthusiastically and powerfully to the revue format that formed such a successful part of his early work."]

Let's start with a song:

The Russian astronauts flying in space

Radioed a message to their Moscow base

They said, we are flying over Nigeria

And we see high mountains in built-up area

Right in the middle of heavy traffic

Is this space madness, tell us quick!

The facts were fed to the Master Computer

Which soon analysed the mystery factor.

That ain't no mountain, the Computer said, snappish,

It's just a load of their national rubbish.
 

I love my country I no go lie

Na inside am I go live and die

I know my country, I no go lie

Na im and me go yap till I die.

This is one of the verses of Etike Revo Wetin? from the revue Unlimited Liability Company, music and lyrics by Wole Soyinka, with Soyinka's great and long-time musical collaborator Tunji Oyelana. The revue was recorded onto a long-playing record in 1983.¹ In 1995, in The Beatification of Area Boy, premiered in Leeds, a slightly altered version of the song emerges again—the Russian astronauts make their observation and ‘the strange report was fed to computers / Which soon analysed the ponderous beauties / The computer replied, don't be snobbish / You know it's a load of their national rubbish.’ The chorus, in line with the play's setting, substitutes Lagos for ‘my country’.

I love dis Lagos, I no go lie

Na inside am I go live and die

I know my city, I no go lie

E fit in nation like coat and tie

When Lagos belch, the nations swell

When the nation shit, na Lagos dey smell.

The river wey flow for Makurdi market

You go find in deposit for Lagos bucket.²

The Beatification of Area Boy and Soyinka's most recent play King Baabu, ³ satirise respectively the Abacha regime in Nigeria and military tyrants generally. King Baabu, of course, takes its inspiration from Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi and the form and stagecraft of both plays indicate that Soyinka has returned enthusiastically and powerfully to the revue format that formed such a successful part of his early work. This brief [essay] is entitled ‘Back to Before’ and you will recognise the ‘Before’ as being a reference to the various revues created by Soyinka and his colleagues in the late 1960s and early '70s, partially published in Before the Blackout in 1971.⁴ Material from the Unife Theatre ‘Guerilla Unit’ 1978-9 under the general title of Before the Blowout is also relevant here.⁵ Those of us lucky (and old!) enough to have enjoyed The Republican and New Republican in 1964 and Before the Blackout in 1964 can share Soyinka's regret, voiced in the preface to the published review, that inevitably the mime sketches cannot be reproduced, but in fact they do resurface in—for instance—the postures of the Reformed Aweri Fraternity, the characters of the Right and Left Ears of State and in Kongi's assumption of ‘unconscious’ poses (‘A Leader's Temptation’, ‘The Loneliness of the Pure’, ‘The Face of Benevolence’) in Kongi's Harvest (1967) as well as in set pieces such as The Professor's praying duel with the Bishop in The Road (1965). Soyinka, in the same preface, argues for the effectiveness of the revue format as a counter to the amnesia created by ‘the cosy, escapist air of formal theatres’.

Before the Blackout, the two available sketches from Before the Blowout and the recording of Unlimited Liability Company offer a range of examples of Soyinka's creative recycling of revue material into the two latest substantial plays. We have seen how a revue song reemerges in The Beatification of Area Boy. Before the Blackout and Before the Blowout seem to me to contribute both characters and situations to Beatification and King Baabu. Both plays parade gross characters before us, in Baabu 's case a reincarnation of Jarry's monstrous eponymous hero Ubu and his equally grotesque wife. But we have met them before. The two sketches from Before the Blowout, ‘Home to Roost’ and ‘Big Game Safari’ feature ‘the famous Chief Theophilus Ajijebolorita Onikura and his wife Cecilia, known as "De Madame".’ As they prepare for power they proclaim themselves ‘The People's Couple’. Inflated only slightly they re-emerge in King Baabu as King Baabu the Bountiful, Baabu the Munificent, Father of the Nation, and his Queen consort Maariya. Their posturings on the balcony of the State House remind us of Kongi and mimed sketches from Before the Blackout. King Baabu's theatrical genesis can also, I suggest, be traced to Babuzu Lion Heart, ‘the Papa Doc of the continent’ in the Before the Blackout sketch ‘Babuzu Lion Heart’. Soyinka describes him as ‘a clear noon-day paranoid’. ‘I am’, he declaims to his sixteen year old ‘popsy’, ‘Babuzu the Only, with a heart of a Lion. No, I am the Lion. Babuzu the Lion of Malladi. Grr-r-rrr!’ [He stops by a flowerpot, uproots the entire plant and squeezes it in his hand] How I deal with plots against the state. Good! [squeezes harder] That juice is red, the blood of Babuzu's enemies. Gr-rrr-! Animals!' The mixture of the absurd, the pathetic and the downright lethal embraces a wide bag of tyrants. King Baabu himself eats his way through the wildlife of Africa and then, further to feast and satisfy himself, turns on his fellow men. Ubu has also been visited before by Soyinka. In another sketch from the same revue, ‘Childe Internationale’, ‘Politician’—described as ‘a "native-proper" self made businessman’—confronted by his ‘been-to’ wife, reminisces about a play he had been taken to see at the University and enjoyed. The only one, he observes, that he hadn't fallen asleep at. ‘… something like Yakubu … you know, the one I liked, where everybody was saying Shit.’ The reference here to Ubu Roi's famous opening line—‘Merde!’—confirms that Jarry's play was well established in Soyinka's creative consciousness long before King Baabu emerged. (Astutely, James Gibbs identifies another relative of Ubu in the ‘malignant monster’ Field Marshall Kamini, in A Play of Giants, who famously tastes ‘the elixir of power’ when he seduces the wife of a man he is later to execute.⁶ Incidentally, the University of Toronto also gets a mention in Before the Blackout. In the sketch ‘Press Conference’, The Minister deals with the Press confidently and without brooking interruption:

Question: Now Sir, about the problems of this coalition Government. I wonder if …
Answer: My friend, before you say anything else let me remind you that I am an M.A. Michigan. In fact, I got two B.A.s, you know: one at Toronto for Political Science and one for National Economics and Sociology, that was in Dublin … it was after that I went to Michigan to get my Masters … The B.A. Toronto was with honours you know. First class with honours. The B.A. Dublin had no honours but that was discrimination. …

But to return to Beatification and Baabu. Both plays are broadly and vivaciously drawn pieces of popular theatre. Beatification has a range of scenes that could stand alone as revue sketches—the prisoners doing the ‘army conga’, the adoration of the bicycle, the military officer with his cry of ‘Don't Touch My Uniform!!’ plus strong musical elements. Baabu is constructed in a series of increasingly extravagant, fiercely satirical episodes tracking the career of Baabu from ‘loyal’ general to genocidal madman. Beatification is subtitled ‘A Lagosian Kaleidoscope’. In King Baabu the kaleidoscope tumbles ever more jagged and bloody images before us as this latter-day Ubu goes out of control and takes his country with him. The theatrical satire, playing to the eye as much as the ear, commences by entertaining the audience and culminates by confronting it. In the last moments of the play⁷ (and here I'm quoting from the second draft of the manuscript) King Baabu, in a scene that may remind us of the despatch of another tyrant, is poisoned by a dose of doctored rhino powder—his preferred aphrodisiac. His Queen, Maariya looks on her collapsing world:

And what are you all looking at? You think this is a freak show do you? It's not over. It's much too soon to crow. I know all your secrets and I won't go quietly. I know you're going to start lying to the people, lying, lying, lying, you fake redeemers. You want to settle accounts but your accounts are safely stashed away you know where. Now he's gone you'll all become butter-won't-melt-in-your-mouths latter-day saints. No, of course you never knew him, you never embraced him or sucked up to him, never used him when it suited you, you lying sycophants, you stinking collaborators, you slimy accomplices before, during and after the fact. Lying, lying … laundering your past so you can continue without shame in the public eye, shameless, shameless, shameless … of course now it was he who did it all, single-handed, no help from anyone, you never knew anything … oh yes you know how to renew yourselves so people begin to wonder if their memory has failed them, if you're not the same people who drove them into the wilderness, but oh yes you'll keep going and going and going on and on and on … [As the lights dim slowly]

It is, I believe, in the whole-hearted return to broad satirical theatre, growing from the fertile roots and means of the revue format, that Soyinka is seeking a new political engagement with contemporary audiences.

A song to finish with to remind us where Maariya's sentiments come from—another potential tyrant, petty-Ubu, lethal fool—again from Before the Blackout —‘The Ogbugbu of Gbu’. ⁸

These trying times demand much care

With crises, plots and tension

From six hundred quid to a naira a year

Is that a decent pension
 

What matters if I sell my friends

And lick some ass's arse-hole

The new generation will make amends

I'll stay on the government pay-roll.
 

And this is the law I do maintain

Till death, and so would you Sir

That whatsoever Big Noise may reign

I'll be the Ogbugbu of Gbu, sir.

The text of Before the Blackout that was published c. 1971 represented a range of materials first created for the revues of the 1960s—The Republican, The (New) Republican (1963) and Before the Blackout (1964). All were presented by companies Soyinka formed with colleagues, The 1960 Masks and the Orisun Players.

The programme of The (New) Republican … gives a taste of this early work and the performers who worked with Soyinka—many of them, including the musician Tunji Oyelana and the actor the late Wale Ogunyemi, becoming stalwarts of Soyinka's work thereafter. It describes the show as ‘1960 Masks in The (new) Republican and the Orisun Players’. Sketches were credited to Ralph Opara, Francesca Pereira, Yemi Lijadu, Olga Adeniyi-Jones and Wole Soyinka. The programme identifies writers through initials. Stage management was by Frank Aig-Imoukhuede and Kofi Pereira, and the production by Yemi Lijadu. The occasion was described as ‘introducing the Orisun Players’ and bore the following tongue-in-cheek disclaimer:

The 1960 Masks solemnly declare that all the characters in this revue are wholly fictitious, and that any resemblances to man or woman, living or dead, are accidental and should be brought to their notice for further development.

In March/April 1964, six months after The (New) Republican was put on, Soyinka returned with Before the Blackout, presented in Lagos and Ibadan. The programme indicates the content, the running order and offers a few clues as to the targets of the sketches.

Of course the impact of the majority of these sketches in all the revues relied on their contemporary references and relevance, and a certain complicit familiarity with those lampooned on behalf of the audience generally (the Lagos and Ibadan middle class/university audience). The corruption and self-serving nature of politicians was a common topic. Some individuals are specifically targeted. For instance, in the 1971 text, as the note at the head of the sketch indicates, Babuzu Lion Heart was originally based on Kwame Nkrumah, but events between 1964 and the 1970s made it more pertinent to be updated to point to the Malawian ‘President for Life’ Dr Hastings Banda. Vintage Scenes is a grotesque comment on the cynical manipulation of the post-independence 1962 census in Nigeria, with voters being conjured back from the dead. Childe Internationale and, to a degree, Death Before Discourtesy made fun of the clash between generations and cultures in a rapidly changing world, again a theme well within the experience of the revues' audiences….

Notes

1. Ewúro Productions EWP 001.

2.The Beatification of Area Boy, Methuen, London 1995, p. 17.

3. Performed 2001, published by Methuen 2002.

4. Orisun Acting Editions, Ibadan, 1971.

5. For information on Before the Blowout see Ahmed Yerimah, ‘The Guerilla Theatre as a Tool for National Re-Awakening: A Study of the Soyinka Experiments’, in Ebele Eko et al. (eds), Literature and National Consciousness, Heinemann, Ibadan, 1989 (I believe this article may have appeared originally in Odu 32, 1987).

6. James Gibbs, Wole Soyinka, Macmillan, London, 1986, p. 158.

7. Second draft of King Baabu, October 2000.

8. ‘Ballad of Nigerian Philosophy’, pp. 73-5.