Soyinka: Activist laureate who pulls no punches

Resplendent in a huge mane of white Afro hair and matching beard, Nigeria’s leading literary light and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has over the years become a cult figure in Africa and the world at large.

Speaking to Saturday Nation this week on the sidelines of the Kenya International Film Festival in Nairobi, Soyinka reasserted his revolutionary spirit which has seen him consistently fire salvos at oppressors of every cline and colour. 

“The revolutions sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East are long overdue and should have taken place more than 20 years ago,” he said in his characteristic deep baritone.

“Even the most integrated police or military state will sooner or later crumble because even the uniformed officers are citizens.”

The renowned film-maker, writer, poet and playwright asserted that the revolutions will continue and predicted that the dictatorships still standing in Africa and in other countries around the world will soon crumble.

Referring to African dictatorships, he said: “The desire to reform the leadership actually began immediately after independence, when black imperialists replaced white colonialists.”

Celebrating blackness

Indefatigable, widely travelled, flamboyant and outspoken on every subject under the sun, the man known as Akinwande Oluwole ‘Wole’ Soyinka, aka Kongi, is the one who countered the Negritude philosophy by famously saying: “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude; it pounces!”

The famous line was meant to be a broadside against the Negritude movement led by literary greats like Aimé Césaire, Alexandre Dumas and famous Senegalese statesman, philosopher and poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Although known for celebrating blackness and African culture in general, the Negritude movement did not attract people like Soyinka.

The latter, defiant and intellectually combative, flatly refused to board the bandwagon, instead characteristically choosing to deride the movement with his famous line, which seems to best capture his own life as a scholar who needs little provocation to pounce on the powers-that-be.

Born on July 13, 1934, Soyinka is a tireless activist, raising the ante of his global crusades after he was awarded the 1986 Nobel prize for literature.

Lauded in the Nobel citation as a man “who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence”, Soyinka became the first African in Africa and in the Diaspora to be awarded the literature prize.

That achievement was to open the way for other black literary figures, and in 1992 the prize was awarded to Derek Walcott, the poet from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean who has gained a reputation as one of the most prolific black men of letters.

The following year, the literary prize was awarded to Toni Morrison of the United States, who became the first black woman to win the coveted prize.

Today, well into his 77th year, Soyinka has shown no signs of waning energy as he traverses the globe carrying out a plethora of activities.

Many of these are related to his role as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) goodwill ambassador for the promotion of African culture, human rights, freedom of expression, media and communication.

Soyinka has lived up to a family reputation for political pyrotechnics. A leading member of Nigeria’s eminent Ransome-Kuti family, the laureate is a cousin to Fela Ransome-Kuti, the renowned musician who took Nigeria’s military dictators head-on and paid for it.

Soyinka had numerous run-ins with the dictators and is also renowned as an implacable critic of political tyrannies worldwide, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. 

Consistent and outspoken in his onslaught against tyranny, much of Soyinka’s writing has been preoccupied with what he has referred to as “the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it”.

Soyinka has often hit world headlines. In 1965 he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service and demanded the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections, which he claimed had been rigged.

For this dare-devil act, he was arrested but was later freed on a technicality. He was not so lucky when, in 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the Federal Government of General Yakubu Gowon and detained in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace accord between the warring Nigerian and Biafran parties.

While in prison, the author of The Open Sore of a Continent pioneered African prison literature by writing poems on tissue paper that were later published in a collection titled Poems from Prison. 

He was released 22 months later after international attention was drawn to his unwarranted imprisonment. His experiences in prison are recounted in the book, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972).

Only last year, he shocked the world when he referred to England as a “cesspit” and “a breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims”.

In his tirade, Soyinka, who ironically studied at Leeds University in the 1950s and made his name as a dramatist after performances in the UK, was relentless in his criticism of the country. 

Seething with indignation, he told the influential US website The Daily Beast that it was social logic to allow all religions to preach openly.

Hundreds killed

He, however, added that what England was doing was illogical because no other religions in the country, apart from Islam, preach apocalyptic violence.

“Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too,” he said. “Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.”

On the religious fundamentalism that saw hundreds killed in the Nigerian central city of Jos, he said:

“A virus has attacked the world of sense and sensibility, and it has spread to Nigeria, where it has taken on a sanguinary dimension.

“Roaming hordes of killers are entering homes and dragging out people of other faiths and hacking them to death.”

He added: “In my youth you heard, side-by-side, the church bells ringing and the beautiful, sonorous call to prayer of the muezzin. But now, it’s a disease. One doesn’t really know how to handle it.”

His solution is even more dramatic. “I think this is where our rocket engineers and astronauts can come to our rescue.

“We should assemble all those who are pure and cannot abide other faiths, put them all in rockets, and fire them into space.”

Soyinka’s acrid activism has often exposed him to great personal danger, most notably during the military regime of eccentric dictator General Sani Abacha (1993–1998), which pronounced a death sentence on him “in absentia”.

Fortunately, Soyinka had fled the country of his birth using unconventional means, a hair-raising feat he vividly narrates in his wide-ranging memoir, You Will Set Out at Dawn.

It was while in exile that Soyinka regularly visited national parliaments and lobbied world leaders to impose sanctions against the brutal Abacha regime.

“His best success is in the formulation of Yoruba myth to express contemporary reality,” says Moi University literature professor Peter Simatei. “His practical activism is astounding.”

Soyinka’s commitment to justice for humanity has been consistent over the years.

“I believe there is no reason why human beings should not enjoy maximum freedom,” he said in a past interview. “In living together in society, we agree to lose some of our freedom. 

Sporadic bloodshed

To detract from the maximum freedom socially possible, to me, is treacherous. I do not believe in dictatorship, benevolent or malevolent.”

Regarding religious and other violence, Soyinka has strong views. As for the origins of the current religious strife — including the  sporadic bloodshed in Nigeria — he believes they stretch back to the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini and his fatwa, in 1989, against  controversial writer Salman Rushdie.

“It all began when he assumed the power of life and death over the life of a writer,” Soyinka says. “This was a watershed between doctrinaire aggression and physical aggression.

There was an escalation. The assumption of power over life and death then passed to every single inconsequential Muslim in the world — as if someone had given them a new stature.”

Responding to a suggestion that popular social media like Facebook have  robbed the youth of a reading culture, the bard said there was no way one can win the war against technology.

“It is the responsibility of the state and parents to find a way of tapping into the social media networks to catalyse a reading culture,” he said recently.

“You have a chance in a million to defeat technology. Instead, domesticate it to serve you!”

The African story

On whether he was worried that the West has been telling the African story often to the detriment of the continent, Soyinka said:

“The external world has been telling our story since we were children, and people like Ngugi (wa Thiong’o), (Chinua) Achebe and myself have been rebuffing that and telling it in our own manner.”

The rather eccentric laureate recently lifted the lid off his distinctive hairstyle, saying, he had not had a haircut for more than 50 years.

In an interview in a popular television programme, Moments with Mo, the professor asserted that the high cost of haircuts when he was a student in England forced him to shun barbers.

“When I was in England, the barbers were charging too much,” he said. “I didn’t think it was necessary to pay that much.

This was around 1959 or 1960, so I stopped cutting my hair. Besides, I noticed that when I comb some hairs fall off, so my comb has become my barber.

“The only time I cut my hair,” he continued, “was when it was burnt by a candle in my hometown of Abeokuta.

“There was no light, so I was reading by candlelight, and after a while I began to smell something burning.  Due to that incident I had no option but to trim the affected part.”

On how it feels being a Nobel winner, Soyinka again, true to form, bewildered his audience when he said the honour was a burden to him.

“People expect so much from you as a Nobel laureate,” he said. “They even expect you to change in terms of everything.

“You have to watch what you do, what you say and all that.  Worst of all, you don’t have your privacy anymore.”

Besides being detained and being sentenced to death, Soyinka, popularly referred to as Kongi  after the protagonist in his play, Kongi’s Harvest, has also been called disparaging names.

One Chief Sunny Okogwu, a relative of former Nigerian military ruler General Ibrahim Babangida, has even gone as far as to claim that Prof Soyinka is not a Nigerian.

“Pitifully, Wole is not a Nigerian, so he has no right, no privilege, to represent Nigeria and talk about Nigeria or about the situation of Nigeria,” the chief asserted.

“He is not a Nigerian; he is a settler. The man is a nationalised Nigerian. He is a beneficiary of our generous constitution.”

The chief said Soyinka knew where he came from and cheekily posed: “Have you ever seen a Nigerian like Wole Soyinka, the man who puts on white hair, unruly like a Rastaman, and a white beard not taken care of? A true Nigerian does not wear such hair.”

Soyinka, by virtue of his being the only Nobel Laureate in literature from his country, as well as the sheer volume of his works, has had to share the limelight with his soul brother, Prof Chinua Achebe, fondly referred to as the father of the African novel.

While there is no formal or open rivalry between Eni Ogun (One who belongs to Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, as Soyinka is referred to) and the Eagle on Iroko (as Achebe is called by his fandom), there have occasionally been signs of rivalry.

There have been laughter-inducing moments when the two eminent compatriots have contributed, willy-nilly, to the debate over who is better.

Both masters of the comeback, there is the story of a time when Soyinka was reported to have said Achebe suffered from “unrelieved competence’” to which Achebe retorted that Soyinka must suffer from “unrelieved incompetence”.

And when Soyinka in 1986 became Africa’s first Nobel laureate in Literature, an award that stirred quite a controversy on whether he really deserved it, it was Achebe who fired the first salvo. 

He reportedly advised Soyinka not to consider himself the “Asiwaju (leader) of African Literature,” for winning a “European prize.”

Soyinka was touted to vie for the presidency in last April’s elections. In this interview, however, he categorically denied ever entertaining such ambitions.

“I have never, never said I was going for the presidency. I think it was in this country that a journalist wrote a stupid story like that,” he said, but admitted he formed a political party “because the youth were being choked in the other parties.”

Today, Soyinka shuttles between America and Nigeria, but is also a regular visitor to Kenya and is credited with being instrumental in letting the world know about the state of Kenya’s literary scene through PEN magazine.