A SALUTE TO WOLE SOYINKA AT 80

Wole Soyinka needs no introduction. His academic brilliance, his courage, his forthrightness, his concern for the society in which he lives and his sometimes acerbic criticism of authority have all become part of the living legend of our time. Wole Soyinka is a man of great conviction and, who, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature, has become a universally acclaimed giant. The Nobel Prize for Literature like every other Nobel Prize marks the highest point of excellence in any chosen field of endeavour. The prize is a salute to creativity and it designates the recipient as a giant in our civilization.

If there is an African man of letters who has magisterially faced the world literary and academic firmament as a scintillating star with solid achievements, it is Prof. Wole Soyinka, an accomplished academic, playwright, poet, novelist, actor, social critic, political activist and Nobel Laureate.

In the dramaturgic arts, the renowned professor was the artistic director of the 1960 Masks and Founder, Orisun Theatre Company. Prof. Wole Soyinka is endowed with incredible prodigious literary talents. This is an eloquent testimony borne by the sheer bewildering corpus of his literary creatures involving plays, novels and poetry collections. To this also is an impressive list of critical engagements through insightful and unsettling essays, political polemics and auto-biographical writings.

He is also an incurable political activist. His political temperament and ideological complexion, which are of the anti-establishment hue, have more often than not, landed him in thin ice. His avowed antagonism to and abhorrence for military tyranny and domination brought him into collision with the military authorities during the civil war of 1967-1970 and in the dark days of the Abacha regime when he had to leave on voluntary exile.

Prof. Wole Soyinka is deeply committed to the sanctity of human life. With the wanton carnage on our roads, he had at various times been in the vanguard of protecting innocent lives through his involvement with the Road Safety Corps. Rex Collings, Wole Soyinka’s friend and publisher, describes him as “something of a universal man, poet, playwright, novelist, critic, lecturer, teacher, actor, translator, politician and publisher.”

Twice, he had seen the four walls of prison for his involvement in the politics of our time. In 1965, during the then Western Region election crisis, he was detained on a charge that he had substituted his own tape for the one supposed to be broadcast by the late Chief S.L Akintola, the then Premier of Western Region. In 1967, the Federal Military Government detained him for allegedly constituting himself into a great security risk by contravening the Armed Forces and Police Special Powers Decree No. 24 of 1967.

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The exemplary life and times of Prof. Wole Soyinka must make it to the screens as a permanent source of inspiration to all those who love to see the unity of  Nigeria built on equity, justice and fair play and to those who will for ever stand by the side of truth blaring the trumpets of joy for the arrival of the time of the people. More than just a W.S (William Shakespeare), Wole is actually a Nigerian Enrico Mattei, as the Italians implicitly told us when they awarded him the Enrico Mattei Prize for the Humanities. Therefore, the greatest tribute that we can pay to our W.S. is to ensure that he does not march alone. The rest of us should not hesitate to complement the efforts of this remarkable literary icon whose stupendous energy has faithfully and resolutely ensured that Art is not indifferent to life.

His sensitivity to human conditions and his refusal to accept things uncritically or even keep “silent in the face of tyranny” and injustice put him way ahead of his contemporaries. Hence, his much avowed unconventionality and non-conformist vision of and attitude to life. He is not known to have aspired to any elective post, but having been in various leadership positions, he has proved himself to be a charismatic personality with a strong force of attraction, magnetism and vision.

He emerged  from the jail house to publish a book The Man Died which again gives added impetus to his revolutionary commitment and zeal. His forays into popular agitation blossomed during the Buhari’s military regime. He has blossomed as a genuine revolutionary, totally committed to the eradication of hunger, poverty, disease and squalor. Few Nigerians have the stature to blow the whistle and be taken as seriously as Soyinka could be. In the past, the late Aminu Kano and late Obafemi Awolowo used to do it well. But they are gone. Even while they were around, cynics impugned their sincerity of purpose by claiming that they were politicians in search of power. The difference here is that Wole Soyinka’s moral authority has resided in the knowledge that he is not in a gladiatorial sense.

Like the proverbial prophet that is not recognized in his own land, Soyinka had to win the Nobel Prize to merit the award of the Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR). At the peak of the June 12 validation protests,  he publicly marched on his CFR medal which he had flunked on the ground. Soyinka’s  achievement is similar to Okonkwo’s which Prof. Chinua Achebe describes as “solid personal achievement” in Things Fall Apart.

To a casual observer, the man is simple. No aura of “professorship”. He is accessible to all. But again, there is something behind that façade of “simplicity” that is almost beyond human comprehension. His personal bravery in trying to get the two warring factions in the Nigerian Civil War “to see reason” is well-known and permanently chronicled. It earned him a two-year  stint in prison. Even though a special marshal of Oyo State Road Safety Corps, after witnessing the carnage on Nigerian roads, his pungent criticism of the Shehu Shagari government makes him one of Nigeria’s most committed human rights activists. During the Shehu Shagari era, he was one of the early voices to condemn the deportation of Shugaba Abdulrahaman, the Bakolori massacre, the wanton abuse of office by politicians and the “cynical manipulation of the elections.” Where praise is due, Soyinka is likely to voice out his satisfaction like he did on the WAI programme of the Buhari regime, which he dubbed as a laudable project though “amorphous in nature and concept.” At a time, he poured encomiums on late President Umar Musa Yar’Adua for “his performance as governor of Katsina State.”

Happy Birthday, the conscience of the nation!