Born July 13, 1934, Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka is Africa’s first Nobel Laureate of Literature. In spite of such controversy as the significance of prizes and awards for the life of literature and the ego of the author, the Nobel is arguably the peak of it all. But the sentence is not complete for a distinguished man of many parts – poet-playwright, director, novelist, essayist, translator, filmmaker, actor, activist, musician, connoisseur, hunter, road Marshall, culture man, indeed a real Renaissance man.
A real kinetic man, even at 80, his life story is the stuff of a journey motif. He formed first the “1960 Masks” and later “Orisun Theatre”, and had great influence on the practice of theatre in three of the first generation Nigerian universities – Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, the legendary cradle of Yoruba civilization from where he draws mythical materials for his plays. In somewhat radical and unequal measure, Soyinka has reduced or sometimes enlarged Western classical mythologies to form a quite eclectic and exciting form of “drama of existence” for which he remains compelling master.
When Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986, I was completing postgraduate degree in English at the University of Ibadan, where he was himself a student in 1952; with other pathfinders like Chinua Achebe (1948), Mabel Segun (1949), Christopher Okigbo (1950) and J. P. Clark (1955), we claimed the glories that the names brought, even if the “old school” would still insist that UCI was different from our UI! Two years before the Prize, Soyinka had turned 50 and Professor D. S. Izevbaye, then Head of Department, declared a holiday to celebrate literature and the man. I took two days off and hitched a ride in Dr. Niyi Osundare’s faithful car to the University of Ife where WS lived then.
A very suspenseful encounter indeed. First, we did not meet him at home; he scribbled a message that he was out doing one of his two (three?) great hobbies: hunting. When evening came, it was the night of celebration at the famed rotunda of the University’s arts theatre. My bit was to perform Okigbo’s “Hurrah for Thunder” but I was more eager to meet that huge-haired black Shakespeare of our time. I had never met him in flesh and blood before; every aspiring writer would love to meet his hero. Till date, I do not know how or exactly when the man appeared or arrived into that space. There was lights out, and less than ten seconds gone, lights back, our celebrant (advisedly, celebrity) was seated in the front row of the hall, a theatrical smile playing on his lips. I missed one line of Okigbo but had the first chance of meeting the man.
At 50, he was already accomplished inside and outside of literature and academia. I would encounter WS in other glorious places and moments in the US and Europe, the most memorable being in Berlin (2006) where he had gone to receive one of his many awards during which I had the formal privilege of reading his citation before the German President at the Bundestag.
Suspense and theatre find meaning too in Wole Soyinka’s courageous acts as social critic and activist. On November 3, 1965, he was accused of stealing two recorded tapes containing the victory speech of Chief S.L.A. Akintola (he was convinced that the just concluded elections was rigged). The tapes were valued at ₤2.2s property of the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Station. Though he was discharged by Judge Kayode Eso on the ground of “enough conflicts in the prosecution’s evidence,” Soyinka had a six-week pre-judgement detention ordeal. In signifying on Soyinka’s daring act in relation with that of Amiri Baraka (the African American poet-playwright and revolutionary who dared the New York Police when he organized a guerilla theatre in the streets of Harlem in 1964), Alain Ricard said that they had something to do with the theatre, “in both cases, the distinction between reality and theatre is abolished, in the street of Harlem, or the radio in Nigeria”. Soyinka would be imprisoned later for two years and two months after being accused of a non-evidential collaboration with Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, legendary leader of the Biafran cause in the last years of Nigeria’s first decade as a sovereign nation.
So, out of or in Literature, and using the literary voice as handle, Soyinka’s consummate interest in the political condition of the African continent is in no doubt. The poetics of his politics is not too removed from the plank of his dramatic theory. Soyinka has always believed in the unconditional freedom of the individual from all forms of constricting Establishment, be it modern or traditional. It is the charge and function of the individual with artistic sensibility to effect change in the society. In his “Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal”, Soyinka states that “it is the individual, working as a part of a social milieu - and this may be a fluctuating milieu - who raises the consciousness of the community of which he is a part.”
He sees his own theatrical form as a drama with an intent to effect a conscious exploitation of the innate activity of man…in the service of the large historic process.
From A Dance of the Forest (1960) to Alapata Apata – A Play for Yorubaphonia, Class for Xenophiles (2011), we have a harvest of some of the best plays on the human condition, bequeathed to generations yet unborn, delivered by the fecundity and intelligence of a man who has become larger than his immediate space.
Beyond being a perfectionist director of his and other authors’ plays, Wole Soyinka has also blurred the line between illusion and reality. As social critic and scourge of the Establishment, the playwright has been the protagonist in some unscripted plays of disguise from detention, avoiding a number of attempted assassinations, and achieving heroic status when he popularized the narrative of NADECO route in the heydays of the military junta, in the last decade of the twentieth century.
So, if on his 80th birthday, WS disappeared again into the forest, either to hunt deers and rabbits, or to argue the suspended return of the missing Chibok girls, it would neither be to my surprise, nor suspense. I have followed his trail long enough to know.
Happy Birthday, Kongi!
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