WOLE SOYINKA - Assets · WOLE SOYINKA Politics,PoeticsandPostcolonialism Biodun Jeyifo examines the...

WOLE SOYINKAPolitics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

Biodun Jeyifo examines the connections between the innovativeand influential writings of Wole Soyinka and his radical politi-cal activism. Jeyifo carries out detailed analyses of Soyinka’s mostambitious works, relating them to the controversies generated bySoyinka’s use of literature and theatre for radical political purposes.He gives a fascinating account of the profound but paradoxicalaffinities and misgivings Soyinka has felt about the significance ofthe avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Jeyifo alsoexplores Soyinka’s works with regard to the impact on his artisticsensibilities of the pervasiveness of representational ambiguity andlinguistic exuberance in Yoruba culture. The analyses and evalu-ations of this study are presented in the context of Soyinka’s sus-tained engagement with the violence of collective experience inpost-independence, postcolonial Africa and the developing world.No existing study of Soyinka’s works and career has attempted sucha systematic investigation of their complex relationship to politics.

is Professor of English at Cornell University. Heis the author of The Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria () andThe Truthful Lie: Essays in a Radical Sociology of African Drama ().He has written essays and monographs on Anglophone Africanand Caribbean literatures, Marxist cultural theory and colonial andpostcolonial studies and has also edited several volumes on Africandrama and critical discourse.

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Series editor: Professor Abiola Irele, Ohio State University

Each volume in this unique series of critical studies will offer a comprehensiveand in-depth account of the whole œuvre of one individual writer from Africaor the Caribbean, in such a way that the book may be considered a completecoverage of the writer’s expression up to the time the study is undertaken. Atten-tion will be devoted primarily to the works themselves – their significant themes,governing ideas and formal procedures, biographical and other background in-formation will thus be employed secondarily, to illuminate these aspects of thewriter’s work where necessary.

The emergence in the twentieth century of black literature in the UnitedStates, the Caribbean, and Africa as a distinct corpus of imaginative work rep-resents one of the most notable developments in world literature in moderntimes. This series has been established to meet the needs of this growing areaof study. It is hoped that it will not only contribute to a wider understanding ofthe humanistic significance of modern literature from Africa and the Caribbeanthrough the scholarly presentation of the work of the major writers, but also offera wider framework for the ongoing debates about the problems of interpretationwithin the disciplines concerned.

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Chinua Achebe, by C. L. InnesNadine Gordimer, by Dominic HeadEdouard Glissant, by J. Michael DashV. S. Naipaul, by Fawzia MustafaAime Cesaire, by Gregson DavisJ. M. Coetzee, by Dominic HeadJean Rhys, by Elaine Savory






WOLE S OYIN K APolitics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

BIODUN JEYIFOCornell University






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For my mother

Morounranti Aduke Jeyifous (nee Oyebanji)

(In memoriam: “ope mi ko i to” )

For my sons

Okunola Bamidele and Olalekan Babajide

And for their mother

Sheila Walker






My task is to keep company with the fallen, and this word rosein pride above spiked bushes. We must all stick together. Only thefallen have need of restitution.

The Road

Words are mad horsesrunning hard to collectrecalcitrant debt from my teeming head

I will not tame them.John La Rose

Any culture contains essential and secondary elements, strengthsand weaknesses, virtues, defects, positive and negative aspects, fac-tors for progress or for regression.

Amilcar Cabral

Contradictions are our only hope.Bertolt Brecht






Contents

Preface page xiChronology xxvList of abbreviations xxxiii

‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self:the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka

Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse – critical andtheoretical writings

The “drama of existence”: sources and scope

Ritual, anti-ritual and the festival complex in Soyinka’sdramatic parables

The ambiguous freight of visionary mythopoesis: fictionaland nonfictional prose works

Poetry, versification and the fractured burdens ofcommitment

“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write

Notes Bibliography Index

ix






Preface

When one scholar published a book-length study of the writings of WoleSoyinka in and gave it the title Wole Soyinka Revisited, he was re-flecting in that title the fact that at the time, there were already abouteight other book-length studies or monographs on the Nigerian authorin print. Since then, the number of books and monographs on Soyinkahas grown steadily to the point that to date, studies devoted exclusivelyto Soyinka’s works number more than a dozen and a half. And this iswithout reference to important works like Jonathan Peters’ A Dance ofMasks: Senghor, Achebe, Soyinka (), Tejumola Olaniyan’s Scars of Con-quests, Masks of Resistance () and Kole Omotoso’s Achebe or Soyinka() which involve exhaustive comparison of Soyinka’s writings withthe works of other major African authors or writers from the Africandiaspora. Moreover, there are at least five collections of critical essays onSoyinka’s works, with others planned or projected. Finally, there are sev-eral special issues of academic journals devoted specifically to the manyfacets of Soyinka’s works and career.

Given this impressive number of full-length and full-scale studies ofSoyinka, it does seem obligatory to explain why I or anyone else shouldset out to do yet another study of the Nigerian author. One explanation isone which every single author of a study of Soyinka will perhaps hence-forth have to invoke: our author has produced a quantitative and, moreimportantly, qualitative body of works which, for a long time to come,is sure to generate diverse revisionary studies and totally fresh worksof interpretation and evaluation. While this book has definitely in partbeen fostered by this factor, there is a more determinate basis for thepublication of the study. This arises from the fact that because Soyinkahas sustained an almost unbroken literary productivity over the courseof the last four decades, his output has generally tended to very quicklyoutstrip the scope of each successive study of his writings. And on thispoint, it is important to note that the more substantial of the full-length

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studies of Soyinka were published nearly a decade ago, leaving a vacuumwhich has only partially been filled by the plethora of slim monographson specific genres and themes which has dominated Soyinka criticismin the intervening years, monographs like Tanure Ojaide’s The Poetry ofWole Soyinka (), Tunde Adeniran’s The Politics of Wole Soyinka (),and Mpalive-Hangson Msiska’s Wole Soyinka (). Thus, that anothermajor, comprehensive study of Soyinka’s writings is long overdue is anevident fact; that this book aspires to be such a study is a matter that re-quires a prefatory statement. What follows is an attempt at such prefatory“annunciation.”

Sometime in April , Kole Omotoso, the Nigerian novelist andcritic, and I visited Wole Soyinka in Accra, Ghana, on a special mission.Soyinka was then in the fourth year of exile from Nigeria. With the fall ofthe military government of Yakubu Gowon and the assumption of powerby General Murtala Mohammed and indications of a probable changeto a more open and perhaps even “progressive” military rule, we feltthat it was perhaps time for Soyinka to return home. “We” here refersto a group of writers, critics and academics based at the Universitiesof Ibadan and Ife called the “Ibadan-Ife Group” who had started thejournal Positive Review. A few members of the group had been Soyinka’sstudents, and all were ardent admirers of his writings. Moreover, we allfelt greatly inspired by the courage of his political activism, and by thefact that we saw him as one of two or three of the most progressive writer-activists on the African continent. Omotoso and I represented this groupon that mission.

In Accra, we found a Soyinka who was as productive and as ebullientas ever, a man for whom exile was no state of angst-ridden complacency.He was working full-time as editor of the journal, Transition (which he hadrenamed Chi’Indaba) and had just released the first issue of the journalunder his editorship, an issue which contained an important statementon the exemplary nature of the revolutionary anti-colonial struggle inGuinea-Bissau under the leadership of Amilcar Cabral and the PAIGC.We found also that Soyinka had turned the journal into a very effectiveforum for mobilizing opposition on the African continent to the brutal,murderous regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. Indeed, his editorial officein Accra was a veritable beehive swarming with the diverse activitiesof the Nigerian playwright and his small administrative staff: planningfuture issues of the journal; serving as a port of call for many localand visiting foreign writers, artists, academics and publishers’ agentsconnected with the arts and cultural scene of Africa and the Black world;






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coordinating contacts with writers, diplomats, academics and activists,in Accra itself, and throughout the continent in a truly massive effort toisolate Idi Amin and ultimately cause the downfall of his regime. Besidethese round-the-clock activities, Soyinka was also busy on a new venture,this being the then newly formed Union of Writers of the African Peoplesof which he was the Protem Secretary-General; he was drafting notes andstatements laying out his vision of what the organization could be andaccomplish. One of these was a drive to make Kiswahili the continentallingua franca and in furtherance of this goal, encouragement of all Africanwriters to work for the translation of their writings into that projectedcontinental common tongue.

Our discussions with Soyinka on that “mission” touched on all thesePan-African issues, but ultimately we settled on the realities of the newsituation at home in Nigeria. Like us, Soyinka also felt that things werelooking as auspicious for “new beginnings” as they had ever been at anyother time in the fifteen years of Nigeria’s post-independence history.With this in mind, we discussed the details of his eagerly awaited returnto Nigeria: what could be anticipated from the new regime in powerin Lagos; what was the state of things with various groups and personsin the political and intellectual life of the country; what specific talks orpublic lectures we could schedule upon Soyinka’s return home.

Not too long after this, Soyinka returned to Nigeria, took up appoint-ment as Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Ifeand generally began what could be called the Nigerian extension of thephase of his career which has been described as “post-civil war” or “post-incarceration,” a phase of intense political and ideological radicalizationwhich had started in the years of exile. Thus, it was a totally unantic-ipated development that in this same period, and within a year of hisreturn from exile, a big falling apart developed between him and mostleftist writers, critics and academics in the country, a falling apart thatwas particularly acute between Soyinka and us, members of the Ibadan-Ife Group who had been so eager for his return from exile. Since a lot hasbeen written about the ferocious intellectual and ideological battles thatensued between Soyinka and ourselves, I will give only a brief summaryof the issues involved in the controversy.

At the most general level, the “quarrel” centered around our call forthe application of a rigorous class approach to the analysis and evalu-ation of the production and reception of works of art and literature inAfrica, especially given the fact that a class approach in African literary-critical discourse was at that time decidedly marginal to the far more






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dominant racial and ethnic “imperatives.” Moreover, we felt that a classapproach was definitely appropriate to the work of a writer-activist likeSoyinka who is a self-declared partisan of egalitarian and revolutionarypossibilities in the desperate historical and social conditions of Nigeria,postcolonial Africa and the Third World. In the light of such perspec-tives, we felt that Soyinka was often ideologically irresolute or ambiguousin that his works and activities seemed to promote a sort of “bourgeois”radicalism in representing the lower social orders in ways that did notshow a belief in their readiness or capacity to overthrow the conditionsof their oppression. From this we concluded that Soyinka’s political ac-tivism was without question often courageous and powerful in protestingspecific policies and trends consolidating misrule and inequality, but leftmuch to be desired with regard to the deep-rooted systemic and struc-tural bases of imperialist domination of the Third World and internaloppression of subaltern groups and classes in Nigeria and Africa.

On his own part, Soyinka felt that our positions were too doctrinaire,too dogmatic, and consistent with his genius for satiric phrase-making,he dubbed us “Leftocrats” in a major essay, “Barthes, Leftocracy andOther Mythologies,” which is included in his volume of essays on litera-ture and culture, Art, Dialogue and Outrage. He was particularly affrontedby what he considered the extremely formulaic, textbook derivativenessof our materialist analyses of his use of myth, ritual and other expressiveforms which come from the African precolonial past. One of his mostserious charges against us was something he called “literary infanticide”;by this he meant that the narrow and dogmatic application of Marxistprinciples of class politics and ideology by us, as he saw the matter, wasextremely destructive to young, aspiring writers. Such fledgling writers,in Soyinka’s view, felt intimidated by the “authority” of our claims to bespeaking on behalf of the oppressed masses and by our location as uni-versity teachers. Writers of his own stature and self-confidence, Soyinkaasserted, were completely immune to our brand of extremism, but notthe young, budding literary talents of the country.

With one or two notable exceptions, most of those who have writtencomments on these battles and controversies have been unaware of thefact that even with the staking of positions and views which seemed –and are – far apart in these battles of words and ideas, there continuedto be important collaboration between us and Soyinka in furtherance ofwhat continued to be, ultimately, common goals and objectives. One ex-ample of such collaborations happened when, in , I adapted BertoltBrecht’s Herr Puntilla and his Man Matti for the Nigerian stage. Soyinka






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not only accepted the script of my play titled Haba Director! for staging bythe company of the Dramatic Arts Department which he then headed,he in fact made suggestions about incorporating some topical issues intothe play, suggestions which were willingly accepted because of the satiricbite which they gave to the production.

I have made the foregoing “declaration” because, inevitably, the ex-perience that it narrates does provide a point of departure for this study.For me, and I daresay for other members of that now sadly moribundIbadan-Ife Group, perhaps the most important aspect of Soyinka’s worksand activities, the thing that made him so vital to the prospects we thenfelt for real meaningful social and economic transformations in Nigeriaand Africa, was a dimension of art, literature and culture that we didnot pay much heed to in those battles with Soyinka, this being whatcan roughly be called the subjective dimensions of artistic creativity andcultural politics. Soyinka’s proud assertion in the heat of those quarrelsthat he was personally beyond “coercion” and intimidation by us andour invocation of the “objective,” “determinate” forces of history speaksto the heart of this matter. Let us recall again the profile I have drawnabove of Soyinka in the editorial offices of Transition in Accra in which shows the writer-activist engaged in those herculean tasks of mo-bilizing continental and worldwide opposition to the murderous violenceof the regime of Idi Amin, putting in place the machinery for the smoothand effective functioning of the then newly formed Union of Writersof the African Peoples, all the while continuing to write in all genres ofliterature.

These issues constitute the conceptual foundations of this study andshaped the methodological choices I have made in organizing the con-tents of the book. As a deliberate departure from the common trendin Soyinka criticism of taking his exceptionally strong personality forgranted, I have made it a focal point for exploring his literary corpus inits own right. Moreover, I have deployed this focus on “subjectivity” toexplore the deep imbrication of Soyinka’s writings in the cultural pat-terns and dominant ideological discourses and representations of whatI call the postcolonial national-masculine “sublime” which, in my view,decisively shaped Soyinka’s own personality and the collective identity ofhis generation of artists, writers and critics and indeed an entire periodof postcolonial history in Africa and the rest of the developing world.For it is no accident of history or circumstance that Soyinka belongs to ageneration of the Nigerian literary intelligentsia whose leading memberslike Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo and Soyinka himself






xvi Preface

have been called “titans.” Neither is it of no consequence to the socialramifications of the works of the most prominent writers in this genera-tional cohort that the political life of Africa, from the late colonial periodto the first few decades of the post-independence era, was completelydominated by great, larger-than-life figures in the historic projects ofnation-building, social reconstruction and collective self-definitions afterthe formal end of colonialism.

One definitely has to have this broad pattern in mind when one con-siders the significant fact that in the international arena of the then newlyemergent nonaligned movement and the anti-imperialist front, figureslike Nehru, Sukarno, Nasser and Nkrumah projected or exuded muchvaster power and presence than was warranted by the weak state structuresand precarious polities which they inherited from the departing colo-nial powers. Thus, in Nigeria during the first decade of independence,Soyinka’s generation of “titans” in literature and the arts confronted anunceasingly crisis-torn lifeworld dominated by the towering, larger-than-life personality of an Azikiwe, an Awolowo and a Sardauna of Sokoto andmany others beside these three potentates. Indeed, we now know thatin the postcolonial project of fashioning collective identities to displacethe erstwhile identities of “natives” and “subject peoples” brought to lifein the high tide of colonial rule in Africa, Asia, Latin America and theCaribbean, the figure of the male patriarchal leader of legendary renownwas deemed to represent the will to freedom of the colonized nation,putatively holding society together around the charisma and mystiqueof his person. This broad socio-historical process and its representationalinscription around the figure of a strong male leader included conser-vative bourgeois nationalists as it did left-wing revolutionary socialists;and it embraced authoritarian, elitist military putschists as well as lead-ers of grassroots populist movements. There are many famous namesand personalities here: Jawaharlal Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, Gamal AbdelNasser, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, KwameNkrumah, Eric Williams, Jomo Kenyatta and Leopold Sedar Senghor.These and many more are the scions of a highly gendered postcolo-nial national-masculine tradition which provided the pivotal signposts ofidentity formation and collective self-fashioning in the period of strug-gle against foreign domination in the former colonies and in the firstfew decades of the post-independence era. It is a tradition that is clearlyin deep, sustained and perhaps terminal crisis. Among other factors, itis in a terminal crisis because of the historically inevitable unravelingof the idealistic or coercive unification it once imposed on the diverse






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communities and conflicting interests and practices making up the“nation.” One important expression of this crisis in the world of lit-erature and the arts, at least in the West Africa region, is the fact that thegeneration of writers who came into prominence after Soyinka’s gener-ation have virtually all made a break with the “big man” view of artisticcreation. This generational cohort includes writers like Kole Omotoso,Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Kofi Ayindoho, Sonny Labou Tansi, Ta-nure Ojaide, Odia Ofeimun, Syl Cheney-Coker, Festus Iyayi, AtukweOkai and Funso Aiyejina. They have made what could be described,following Antonio Gramsci, a national-popular ideal the basis of theircollective identity, of their situation as engaged writers. And of course byfar the most important institutional and ideological expression of the cri-sis of the national-masculine tradition in literature and critical discourseis the strong female presence of writers and critics in West Africa like AmaAta Aidoo, Efua Sutherland, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, MariamaBa, Aminata Sow Fall, Calixthe Beyala, Tess Onwueme, Zeinab Alkali,Molara Ogundipe, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Nana Wilson-Tagoeand Abena Busia. Elsewhere on the continent, the national-masculinetradition in the arts, literature and criticism is even more powerfullytranscended by the works of women writers, scholars and critics likeMicere Githae Mugo, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Assia Djebar,Nawal el Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, Rose Mbowa,Brenda Cooper, Rosemary Jolly and many others.

This study locates Soyinka’s towering artistic personality in this broadsocio-historical context. It does this on the basis of two premises. Thefirst premise concerns the methodological assumption that underlies theanalysis of texts in this study, the assumption that nearly all of Soyinka’sliterary writings stand as remarkable works in their own right. From rel-atively minor works like The Trials of Brother Jero and The Swamp Dwellersto the great, ambitious titles like A Dance of the Forests, The Road, Madmenand Specialists and Death and the King’s Horseman, no work of Soyinka’s ma-turity as a writer is reducible to national or epochal allegories. On thebasis of this premise, the study approaches all of Soyinka’s writings asdistinctive works of literature, applying the framing ideas and themes ofthe study to these works, singly and collectively, very flexibly. In otherwords, the framing ideas and themes of this study, as indicated in itstitle, will be found hovering around and mostly merely inflecting theexegetical tasks and the sheer intellectual pleasure of tackling the rich,complex texture of Soyinka’s writings against the background of his tu-multuous career and the critical reception of his works in the last four






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decades. Moreover, the tasks of textual exegesis and analysis in this studyhave been dialectically conditioned by four decades of scholarly and crit-ical commentary on Soyinka’s works. In the main, Soyinka criticism inthese decades has focused intensively on the alleged “complexity” and“obscurity” of his most important writings, without paying systematic oreven sustained attention to one important source of the alleged “com-plexity” and “obscurity.” This is Soyinka’s literary avant-gardism, hisextensive and defining open and experimental approach to the diverseand contending traditions of formal and linguistic resources available tothe postcolonial writer or indeed any writer in our contemporary globalcivilization. The study is thus conceived in part as a critical response tothe influence of critical commentary on Soyinka’s works in the last fourdecades, the purpose being to locate the “difficulty” and “complexity”of his writings in their appropriate linguistic and cultural sources, andto reorient the study of Soyinka as a writer towards a more systematicengagement of his connections to the historic avantgarde movements ofthe contemporary world.

Beyond this, and supplementary to matters of exegesis and analyses,the second premise of this study relates to issues of interpretation andexplanation and pertains to the framing ideas and themes which, as Ihave remarked earlier, are brought to bear in a flexible manner on theanalyses of texts. It is perhaps useful to give a brief elaboration of theseideas and themes.

Among the “titans” of his generation of Nigerian literary artists,Soyinka’s career is the closest conscious approximation we have inAfrican literature to the revolutionary or “sublime” expressions, as op-posed to the conservative or repressive currents, of the long postcolonialtradition of the “big man” of politics, of trade unionism, of coup making,of popular culture and millennarian religious movements. Typically, thisis the “big man,” whether of the left or the right, whose claim to poweror influence rests on the “sovereign” ability to gather around his persondiverse areas of the life and times of the late modern postcolony. Butthis observation is of more than merely documentary interest, for wemust bear in mind that the “big man” in literature in the colony andthe postcolony has to enact his capacious subjectivity in, and throughlanguage, specifically in written texts published in the adopted “world”language of the colonizers. Moreover, even if the “turf ” of the “bigman” in politics, in trade unionism, in commerce or in military coup-making is not specifically based in language, all these figures who embodythe “great man” theory of postcolonial history and politics necessarily






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must have a justificatory or celebratory discourse around them, a lan-guage which serves as a very important currency of their claims to status,power or influence. This makes language a privileged domain, and the“big man” in language and writing such as Soyinka a powerful prismthrough which to extricate the ontological and normative truth contentsof this national-masculine tradition from its massive socio-economic andideological overdeterminations. The normative “truth content” has todo with the fact that both in nature and in all forms and at all stages ofsociety, extraordinary concentration of talents, energies and capacitiesare often lodged in exceptional individuals, taking many forms which, insum, constitute a permanent source of enrichment to the human com-munity. Moreover, in the nationalist struggles against colonialism and incontemporary struggles in the developing world against local and foreignbases of oppressive social power, exceptionally gifted and endowed indi-viduals have distinguished and are distinguishing themselves as resoluteand unwavering agents of progressive change. The “falsehood content”makes us attentive to the fact that because these talents, capacities andenergies are “undemocratically” distributed and have often been assim-ilated to an essential maleness, they often take bizarre forms, forms inand through which individual, group, national or racial claims to excep-tionalism or superiority produce unjust, oppressive and alienating socialarrangements which, in their most extreme expressions, assume the false“sovereignty” of organized state terror. In the life of the African post-colony, this “falsehood content” has produced in countries like Somalia,Uganda, Liberia and especially Sierra Leone, the inexpressible and in-effable terror of warlords many of whom present themselves as revo-lutionaries and “saviors” of the nation and gather around themselvesmarauding boy-warriors of unspeakable barbarity.

Generally, I take the view that it is possible and necessary to identifyand hold separate the “truth” and “falsehood” contents of this historicnational-masculine tradition. This is made necessary by the fact thatin this study I read the positive, heroic currents of the tradition and itsnegative and pervasive barbarous deformations as the outer limits of thehighly gendered postcolonial project of collective and individual self-definition and self-constitution. But I do not ignore the fact that in itsappearance as an image, as a representation of the will to human eman-cipation and the ideal of freedom, the “truth” and “falsehood” contentsof the tradition are often inextricably interfused and stir up powerfulemotions of excitement, unease or terror incapable of being representedby conventionally pleasing or “beautiful” aesthetic expressions. Thus,






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I explore tradition in this study in the figure of the sublime, the figurewhich confronts conventionally “beautiful” and pleasing affects and ef-fects with their inadequacies and infelicities, the figure in short in whichthe claims of representation, any representation including the represen-tation of the will to emancipation, confronts its limits. It is perhaps nec-essary for me to state that unlike most postmodernists on the concept ofthe sublime, for me its figuration of the constitutive aporias and limitsof representation does not thereby imply an abyss at the (absent) coreof representation; rather, it represents a need for representation to re-flect back on its processes, means and ends the better to meet the greatchallenges of progressive cultural politics at the present time.

The highly gendered postcolonial national-masculine tradition of thepatrimonial “big man” of national, continental or “racial” destiny is ev-idently in deep crisis and is indeed in decline, even as it continues togenerate regimes and acts of great barbarity. Its inscription in Soyinka’swritings and career dialectically involves both positive celebration ofthe heroic, revolutionary currents of the tradition and at the same timevery scathing, ironizing parodies of its pretensions and mystifications,especially in their yield of cycles of catastrophic violence and tyranni-cal misrule in Africa and many other parts of the developing world.This study engages this little explored but crucial dimension of Soyinka’scareer not by making sociological allusions to it, but by placing con-siderable emphasis on the textual constructions of his “personality” bythe Nigerian author. Most previous studies of Soyinka have taken this“personality” as simply existent, even when it is admitted that it is acomplex personality compounded, like the personalities of many greatartists, of heterogeneous and even somewhat contradictory attributes. Asin nearly all previous studies of Soyinka’s writings and career, the per-sonality of the Nigerian poet, playwright and activist looms large in thisstudy. But while I have not sought to entirely suppress the perspectivesof “Soyinka and his times” or “Soyinka’s unified sensibility and vision”which have been implicitly or explicitly dominant in Soyinka criticism,as a deliberate departure from this trend, I have emphasized the ideo-logical pressures and ethical choices which have shaped the constructionof that personality. In effect, this means that I have been very attentiveto the postmodernist call to be wary of the metaphysics of “presence”and intentionalist subject-centeredness in all cultural criticism and liter-ary studies, especially where this involves “strong” individuals. However,unlike the postmodernists, I have not reproduced in this study yet an-other instance of discourses of the “death of the subject,” of the “waning






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of affect” or of the impersonal regime of the “author effect.” In thestudy will be found a “subject” who is present in his writings and actsin an elaborate mythopoesis of the self and the social as a basis for bothself-idealized and self-critical engagements of the often terrifying dilem-mas of the life and times of the modern postcolony. What I can stateas hopefully a distinctive aspect of the study is a considerable emphasison the active relationship between Soyinka’s textual constructions of his“personality” and his permanent openness to possibilities that might ex-pand the scope of political and cultural freedoms in Africa and the restof our increasingly globalized world.

These underlying perspectives of this study that I have outlined hereperhaps resume, in a sublated fashion, the old debates that we had withSoyinka in the s and s. However, in the present study I havetried to combine the values and methodologies of objective scholarship,especially in the exegeses of texts and the arduous tasks of social andhistorical interpretation, with the sort of passionate ideological partisan-ship of the experience narrated in the “declaration” through which Ihave tried to indicate the point of departure for this study. Thus, it willbe found that for the first six chapters of the study, I have pretty muchstayed within the methodology which I adopted when I collected andedited Soyinka’s essays for the book, Art, Dialogue and Outrage. This, inprinciple, was mostly to confine myself as much as possible to explicat-ing objectively the most important ideas and themes of Soyinka’s criticalthought and the contexts in which they were elaborated. Thus, what Ihave tried to accomplish in these first six chapters is an expostulationof the construction or “fashioning” of the self in Soyinka’s works. This Ihave done with regard to the fascinating, differential patterns of our au-thor’s self-expressions and self-extensions in the genres of drama, proseand poetry. These are the patterns which in the study I have designated“homologies of the self and the social,” seeking to explicate them in therefracted light of Soyinka’s unique combination of aesthetic innovative-ness and political radicalism. It is only in the seventh and last chapter ofthe study that I have expressed any sustained critique in a manner thatmay be vaguely reminiscent of those battles of yesteryears with Soyinka,but even in that chapter, I have not been exhaustive in this critique.That kind of critique, it is my belief, belongs in another work of the fu-ture which will expand the terms of the exploration of the issues beyondthe works of Wole Soyinka. In this respect, the study is intended as acombination of limited ideology-critique and, more extensively, a pro-legomenon to a systematic investigation of the intersection of artistic






xxii Preface

avant-gardism and political radicalism in Africa and the developingworld.

No work of course exists in a vacuum or starts ex nihilo. Indeed, farfrom this, this study, in every chapter of the work, is constructed on anassimilation, positively and in some cases by negative dialectics, of thevast body of existing scholarship and criticism on Soyinka’s works. Infact the careful reader will very quickly find, by openly acknowledgedintellectual debts, which scholars and critics have provided perspectivesand ideas without which this study would simply have been impossible.To all such scholars and critics, my gratitude.

The completion of this book was delayed for at least six years by agrave illness that nearly proved terminal in /. This not only ledto a rewriting of the entire earlier draft of the study when I was able atlast to resume work on the project with the energy and focus of the yearsbefore the illness, it also made me permanently indebted to many friends,family and colleagues whose love or concern saw me through the criticalperiod of the illness. They are too many to name in entirety here. So, if Ileave out any names, I give assurance that I will make amends fully at theearliest opportunity. Thus, a great debt of gratitude which I can neverhope to repay in full to: Sheila Walker, Okunola and Lekan; to Yemi andSade Ogunbiyi; to Femi and Nike Osofisan; to John La Rose and SarahWhite; to Seinde and Dunni Arigbede; to Eddie and Bene Madunagu;to Emmett and Charlotte Walker; to Ropo and Banke Sekoni; to Laiand Elaine Ogunbiyi; to Akwasi and Constance Osei; to John and LilyOhiorhenuan; to Winthrop and Andrea Whetherbee; to Yomi and DeolaDurotoye; to Chima and Bisi Anyadike; to Elaine Savory and RobertJones; to Eileen Marie Julien, Anne Adams, Susan Andrade, MichelinRice-Maximin and Rhonda Cobham-Sander; to Wole Ogundele, Tejuand Moji Olaniyan, Priyamvada Gopal, Catherine McKinley and KenMcClane.

Over the years, I have been the fortunate beneficiary of the unwaveringsupport of friends and interlocutors whose contribution, in many intan-gible but invaluable ways, sustained me in the course of writing this book.For this reason, very special thanks are due to Reginald Selwyn Cudjoe,Odun Balogun, Sope Oyelaran, Niyi Osundare, Kole Omotoso, G.G.Darah, Folabo Soyinka-Ajayi, Odia Ofeimun, Macdonald Ovbiagele,Olu Ademulegun, Lanre Adebisi, Kayode Komolafe, Ike Okafor-Newsum, Dapo Adeniyi and John Onajide for their friendship andencouragement. This group of friends includes the “trio” in France,Christiane “Kenshiro” Fioupou, Etienne Galle and Alain Ricard whose






Preface xxiii

comradeship I shall always treasure and whose many conversationswith me on the subject of Wole Soyinka brought an informal but rich“Francophone” dimension to preparatory work on this study. I note also,with deep appreciation, the solidarity of “Comrade Egbon” MolaraOgundipe, “Uncle D” Dapo Adelugba, Omafume Onoge and TunjiOyelana. In the same vein, I wish to acknowledge here the inestimablecomradeship of spirit and intellect of Segun Osoba and Dipo Fasina thatbegan in my years in Ile-Ife and has deepened in the intervening years.And I give special, heartfelt thanks to Hudita Mustafa for her sustaininglove and friendship.

The members of the administrative staff of the Department of English,Cornell University, my institutional “home,” deserve my thanks fortheir friendship, their courtesy and their many kindnesses. MarianneMarsh, Vicky Brevetti, Darlene Flint, Robin Doxtater, Jenka Fyfe andHeather Gowe, my warmest thanks to you all. My appreciation alsogoes to many friends and colleagues in the Department: all the mem-bers of the Minority and Third World Studies caucus, especially SatyaMohanty, Ken McClane, Helena Maria Viramontes and HortenseSpillers; Harry Shaw, Paul Sawyer, Tim Murray and Scott McMillin.Parts of this study were written during a two-year period I spent atHarvard in the Afro-American and English departments. For theirfriendship and hospitality, I am greatly indebted to H.L. “Skip” Gates,Jr. and Larry Buell. I also thank Cindy Fallows of the administrativestaff of the Harvard English Department for her warmth, courtesy andkindness.

Of a very special kind of debt is what I owe Abiola Irele, the editor ofthe series of studies of African and Caribbean authors for which this studywas written. His patience, solidarity and encouragement were unstinting.Indeed, but for his steadfast encouragement, this study would have finallybeen abandoned for other projects after the long hiatus between itsearlier incarnations and what began, very slowly and fitfully, to crystallizeafter my convalescence from my illness. In the last fourteen or fifteenyears, I have had intellectual discussions with “Egbon” Irele of a kindwhich I have had with no one else, with the possible exception of JohnLa Rose and, of course, Femi Osofisan, on diverse subjects and topicstouching on, ultimately, the dimensions of the crises and perplexitiesfacing our country, Nigeria and the African continent. If only indirectlyand subliminally, these discussions have shaped some of the perspectiveswhich make this book what it is, though in exactly what ways I am unableto say.






xxiv Preface

The debts to “Kongi” are equally as great, even if they are infinitelymore difficult to assess or express. I can only say that I hope the honestyand frankness of the analyses and evaluations of his work and legacy inthis study constitute an adequate acknowledgment of these debts which Ishare with all who have found much profit and inspiration in his writingsbut which really began about thirty-four years ago when he taught myundergraduate dramatic criticism class and for a brief period acted assupervisor of my studies as a graduate student.

Finally and ultimately inexpressibly, my mother, of unforgettablememory. Pablo Neruda has declared: “There is no space that is widerthan that of grief.” In bringing this project to completion not before Ihad experienced that grave illness and slowly regained my strengths, Ilearnt that great grief can be a psychically sustaining emotion, that itcan powerfully bring to consciousness hitherto barely recognized or ac-knowledged dimensions of the self. But I made this discovery only whenI was finally able to overcome the great folly of repressing my emotionsand could then grieve, really grieve for your loss, Morounranti Aduke.






Chronology

Born July, at Abeokuta, western Nigeria, the secondchild of Samuel Ayodele and Grace Eniola Soyinka.

– Attends Abeokuta Grammar School.– Attends Government College, elite high school where he

begins writing and wins prizes for his poems.– On graduating from high school works in Lagos as an

inventory clerk at a government pharmaceutical store.Has stories read on national radio.

– Attends University College, Ibadan.– Five-year sojourn in the UK. Attends the University of

Leeds, obtaining the BA English Honours degree in .Begins writing two plays, The Swamp Dwellers and TheLion and the Jewel. Works for some time as playreader atThe Royal Court Theatre in London. In directs theNigeria Drama Group in The Swamp Dwellers and has anevening of his work comprising poems, songs and a play,The Invention performed at The Royal Court.

March, independence of Ghana, inaugurating the post-colonial era in black Africa.

Returns to Nigeria, on eve of the country’s indepen-dence from Britain. Given a two-year Rockefeller re-search grant to study drama in West Africa.

October , independence. Soyinka completes Camwoodon the Leaves, a radio play, and The Trials of Brother Jero,a stage play. Forms a theatre group, The Masks,and produces A Dance of the Forests which raises questionsabout the country’s future for Nigeria’s independencecelebrations.

Appointed a lecturer in English at the University ofIfe but resigns in protest when the authorities of the

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University align the institution with the unpopular gov-ernment of Samuel Ladoke Akintola. General social andpolitical unrest in western Nigeria.

General Strike of Nigeria’s trade unions, effective coun-trywide. Soyinka very actively involved around theLagos-Ibadan area. Produces The Lion and the Jewel ina season of plays in English and Yoruba. Forms a newtheatre group, The Orisun Theatre Company.

Produces satirical revue, Before the Blackout as politicalturmoil escalates in western Nigeria. Premieres a ma-jor new play, Kongi’s Harvest, in August in Lagos. Later inthe year in London for the Commonwealth Arts Festivalin which another major play, The Road, is staged andSoyinka reads from his long poem, “Idanre.” Appointedsenior lecturer at the University of Lagos. Novel,The Inter-preters, published. Turbulent election in western Nigeriaand disputed victory of S.L. Akintola after widespreadrigging of the elections. A gunman holds up the radiostation of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service at Ibadanand forces the station to broadcast a recorded speech dis-puting Akintola’s victory. Soyinka is later charged for theaction, but is acquitted on a legal technicality.

First military coup in Nigeria, January , topples thefederal government of Tafawa Balewa. Second counter-coup in July after May pogroms against Igbos inNorthern Nigeria. The country slides irreversibly to civilwar.

– Nigerian civil war pitching federal forces against Biafransecessionists.

Kongi’s Harvest and Idanre and Other Poems published early . With Tom Stoppard, receives the John WhitingDrama Award in London. Off-Broadway productions ofThe Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed at GreenwichMews Theater, New York. Appointed Head of the Schoolof Drama, University of Ibadan but unable to take upthe position because of arrest in August by the federalgovernment for activities to stop the war. He is incarcer-ated without trial for most of the duration of the war andspends most of his time in prison in solitary confinement.Smuggles some protest poems out of prison; later writes






Chronology xxvii

a book of his prison experience, The Man Died, publishedin .

Receives Jock Campbell-New Statesman LiteraryAward, London. Publication of Forest of a ThousandDaemons, Soyinka’s translation of D.O. Fagunwa’s clas-sic Yoruba hunter’s saga, Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale.Kongi’s Harvest produced by Negro Ensemble Companyat St. Mark’s Theater, New York.

Three Short Plays (new edition of Three Plays) and Poems fromPrisonpublished. Released from detention in October andtakes up post of head of Department of Theatre Arts,University of Ibadan.

Directs Madmen and Specialists at the Eugene O’NeillTheater Center, Waterford, Connecticut. Plays the roleof Kongi, the dictator, in Calpenny Films production ofhis play, Kongi’s Harvest. Inauguration of Orisun ActingEditions with Soyinka as literary editor.

– Years of self-imposed exile from Nigeria, travelingaround the world and ultimately settling in Accra,Ghana, where in he assumes editorship of the jour-nal, Transition which he re-names Ch’Indaba.

Before the Blackout, first title in the Orisun Acting Edi-tions, published. Directs Madmen and Specialists at Ibadan.The play published later in the year. Plays the roleof Lumumba in Joan Littlewood’s Paris production ofMurderous Angels, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s play on theCongo crisis.

A Shuttle in the Crypt and The Man Died published. Re-signs as head of the Department of Theatre Arts at theUniversity of Ibadan. Directs extracts from A Dance of theForests in Paris.

Appointed Visiting Professor of English at Universityof Sheffield and overseas fellow at Churchill College,Cambridge University. Publication of Collected Plays,vol. , Camwood on the Leaves, and The Bacchae of Euripi-des which is given an unimaginative production by theNational Theatre at Old Vic, London. Publication ofsecond novel, Season of Anomy.

Collected Plays, vol. , published. Teams up with the SouthAfrican poet, Dennis Brutus, to form Union of Writers






xxviii Chronology

of the African Peoples and is elected its first Secretary-General.

Yakubu Gowon overthrown in a military coup. GeneralMurtala Mohammed becomes head of state. Soyinka re-turns to Nigeria and is given appointment of Professor ofComparative Literature by the University of Ife.Death andthe King’s Horseman published. Edits Poems of Black Africa.

Murtala Muhammed assassinated, General OlusegunObasanjo becomes head of state. Myth, Literature andthe African World and Ogun Abibiman published. Govern-mental corruption and social inequality intensify in thewake of an oil-boom economy. Soyinka fiercely out-spoken in his social criticism and faces intimidation byagents of the military regime. First stage production ofDeath and the King’s Horseman at the University of Ife inDecember.

Administrator of FESTAC (International Festival ofNegro Arts and Culture), Lagos. Completes and directsOpera Wonyosi, a composite adaptation of John Gay’sBeggars’ Opera and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera which sav-ages several African military and civilian despots and thevalues they are entrenching across the borders of Africancountries. Soyinka is prevented from staging this play inLagos and he forms a group called Guerrilla TheatreUnit out of the professional company of the Universityof Ife Theatre. Writes short, biting and highly popularskits attacking governmental hypocrisy, corruption andsadistic policies which are performed by the new group inopen-air markets, streets, community centres and schoolplaying fields.

Joins the People’s Redemption Party, a social-democraticparty whose leadership is made up of the most promi-nent progressive politicians of the North and the South,and trade union and academic leftists. When the partyfragments into conservative and radical factions, Soyinkagoes with the latter and becomes its Deputy Director ofResearch. Directs The Biko Inquest, an edited version ofthe court proceedings of an inquest on the death of SteveBiko in police custody. In the fall he directs Death and theKing’s Horseman at the Goodman Theater, Chicago. Upon






Chronology xxix

successful run at the Goodman, production is transferredto the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC where it isalso well received. Shehu Shagari wins federal electionsand Nigeria returns to civilian rule.

Appointed Visiting Professor, Yale University. OperaWonyosi and Ake, the first part of Soyinka’s autobiogra-phy, published. Produces satirical revue, “Rice Unlim-ited” with the Guerrilla Theatre Unit.

Ake launched at Ake, Abeokuta in January. Soyinka usesthe occasion to lambast the policies of the Shagari gov-ernment and its “achievements”: the plundering of thecountry’s wealth; the massacre of unarmed farmers andpeasants at Bakolori in the North; the subversion of theKaduna and Kano state governments controlled by thePeople’s Redemption Party (PRP); the destruction ofthe offices of The Triumph newspaper owned by the PRP;the storming of an elected legislature by the paramilitarydetachment of the Nigerian Police Force controlled byShagari’s government; the deaths of students, athletes,members of the National Youth Corps and ordinary citi-zens at the hands of the police at the innumerable check-points set up by the government to intimidate and coweran increasingly restive populace. Late in the year Die Still,Dr. Godspeak!, a play on the influence of the quackeryof parapsychologists, astrologers and ‘metaphysicians’ inNigeria is broadcast on the African Service of the BBCWorld Service.

Production of Requiem for a Futurologist, stage version ofDie Still, Dr. Godspeak! Soyinka uses countrywide tour ofthe production to spread ideas contained in the “PriorityProjects,” a satirical revue attacking corruption, misman-agement and hypocrisy of the country’s political rulers.On the eve of the national elections in August, Soyinkareleases the songs from this revue in a record album titledUnlimited Liability Company; the album takes the country bystorm and is a huge success. Shagari wins the electionswhich are marked by massive vote rigging, use of thearmed services of the state to intimidate opposition par-ties and their supporters, and widespread outbreak of vio-lent protests and demonstrations. Soyinka flies to London






xxx Chronology

and uses the BBC World Service and the internationalpress to condemn the corruption of the just concludedelections. He predicts revolution or a coup. On the lastday of the year, Shagari is overthrown in a coup thatbrings General Mohammadu Buhari to power.

Blues for a Prodigal, Soyinka’s film on the elections of released. In May an unsuccessful production of TheRoad opens at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and inDecember Yale Repertory Theatre produces A Play ofGiants. Six Plays and A Play of Giants published.

August , General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida over-throws the Buhari-Idiagbon junta.

In June, Wole Soyinka, as President of the InternationalTheatre Institute (ITI), is embroiled in an internationalpress and media controversy following the decision of theITI to drop a dramatization of George Orwell’s AnimalFarm by the National Theatre of Britain from the officialprogram of the Festival of Nations in Baltimore, Maryland,USA. (The ITI decision is based on petition by the SovietUnion that the version of Animal Farm in the NationalTheatre of Britain entry is a veiled Cold War-inspiredcultural assault on the Soviet state).

In October, the Swedish Academy announces thatSoyinka is the year’s winner of the Nobel Prize forliterature.

Death and the King’s Horseman produced at Lincoln Center,New York City.

Publication of Art, Dialogue and Outrage, a major collectionof Soyinka’s essays on literature and culture. Mandela’sEarth published.

Isara: A Voyage Around ‘Essay’, a fictional account of theauthor’s father and his friends published.

A Scourge of Hyacinths, a new radio play broadcast on BBCRadio .

From Zia, with Love, a stage version of A Scourge of Hyacinths,is premiered in Sienna, Italy. The play uses a satiricaland farcical exploration of the inner workings of the in-ternational traffic in drugs to expose the corruption andhypocrisy of the Nigerian military rulers.

June , the victory of Moshood Kashimawo Abiolaat the federal elections to return Nigeria to civilian






Chronology xxxi

rule canceled by the military dictatorship of IbrahimBabangida. Massive protests in Lagos, Ibadan and otherNigerian cities, met with brutal force by the army. At-tempt by Soyinka to organize a long protest march fromthe South to the nation’s capital in Abuja in the Northis aborted by the regime. The country is plunged intoconstitutional and political crisis as Babangida is forcedfrom office and hands power over to a lame-duck civilian-led caretaker government headed by Ernest Shonekan,a crony of the generals. In August Shonekan is removedfrom office and General Sani Abacha replaces him ashead of state. The Beatification of Area Boy, a new play onthe revolt of the underclasses of the Lagos slums, is givenits world premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leedsand is published.

Publication of Ibadan: The ‘Penkelemes’ Years – A Memoir,– , the third part of the author’s memoirs.

Soyinka forced into exile in the face of threats to hislife from the Abacha regime which escalates repression,intimidation and politically motivated assassination be-yond anything previously seen in the country. Publicationof Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the NigeriaCrisis.

– President of the International Parliament of Writers. Soyinka and eleven other pro-democracy members of the

internal and external opposition to the Abacha regimeare charged with treason and placed on trial in absentia.Meanwhile, in association with other members of theexternal opposition, Soyinka launches “Radio Kudirat”which transmits broadcasts to Nigeria in English and thecountry’s main indigenous languages challenging the le-gitimacy of the Abacha regime and exposing its isolationin the international community.

On June , Sani Abacha dies unexpectedly and is suc-ceeded by General Abdulsalami Abubakar. Two weekslater, on the eve of his release from prison, Moshood K.Abiola dies mysteriously. In September, Soyinka returnsto Nigeria, ending his four-year exile.

In January, publication of Outsiders, a volume of poetry.In February, Olusegun Obasanjo wins federal presi-dential elections and becomes civilian head of state in






xxxii Chronology

October. Publication of The Burden of Memory, the Muse ofForgiveness.

June , meets Mumia Abu-Jamal, the prominent AfricanAmerican death row activist and thinker.September , addresses Roundtable on Dialogue AmongCivilizations at the United Nations in New York.

August –September , attends conference againstracism in Durban, South Africa sponsored by the UnitedNations Commission for Human Rights.July-August, unpublished play King Babu premiered inLagos and tours a few Nigerian cities.October –, International Conference on Soyinka’stheatre at the University of Toronto, Canada.

In mid-March Soyinka and five other writers represent-ing the International Parliament of Writers make good-will visit to Palestine and Israel in furtherance of peacein the Middle East.October , reads old and new poems in the distinguishedReadings in Contemporary Poetry of the DIA Center inManhattan, New York.






Abbreviations

ADO Art, Dialogue and Outrage, Ibadan: New Horn Press, ADO Art, Dialogue and Outrage, New York: Pantheon, CP Collected Plays, vol. CP Collected Plays, vol. DKH Death and the King’s HorsemanIOP Idanre and Other PoemsME Mandela’s EarthMLAW Myth, Literature and the African WorldOA Ogun AbibimanSOA Season of AnomyTBE The Bacchae of EuripidesTI The InterpretersTMD The Man Died

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