July 10 – University College Ibadan in the fifties was a harmonic convergence for the famous four and pioneers of modern Nigerian literature – Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka. They all attended Government Colleges before then, straight from homes stocked with masterpieces some of their peers were not even aware of let alone read. They found a common interest in literature/ writing, stuck together for years until the civil war drove them apart and even consumed one of them. (Okigbo was killed at Enugu in August 1967 while fighting on the Biafra side.) The imminent execution of a soldier poet reunited the remaining three almost two decades later. Achebe died in 2013. JP followed seven years later. The last man standing of these rare breed of Nigerians will be 88 on July 13. THEWILL examines the extraordinary life of this extraordinary man. Michael Jimoh reports…
Many of us in literature class beheld Professor Wole Soyinka from a distance in secondary school in the seventies and early eighties. Some didn’t even know what he looked like at the time but we fell in love with his immortal poem “Telephone Conversation,” read, memorised and discussed under the masterful guidance of Mrs. Ebiyemi S. Gadimoh our literature teacher.
Unlike some of his denser poems, TC opened itself to us straight away, a home-seeking African student in the English capital, conversing with his potential landlady from a public telephone booth.
“The price seemed reasonable, location Indifferent,” TC begins innocuously enough setting some kind of amicableness between renter and landlady. “The landlady swore she lived/ Off premises. Nothing remained/ But self-confession. “Madam,” I warned,/ I hate a wasted journey – I am African.”
The silence that follows this declaration of his race shows the indecisiveness of the landlady after realising that a Black person was going to be her tenant. The verbal joust between the two is vintage Soyinka at his best. He is at once teasing and mocking, delighting in his knowledge that the landlady in question may not be so informed about things the black person already knows. All that gets the white woman mad, as she bangs the phone hard on the caller.
Did the poet himself experience what he described in TC?
We may never know. But what we do know is that racism against black Africans was prevalent at the time and even now although in different guises thus giving TC an everlasting appeal. Drawing from his imagination and in a mocking tone, Soyinka presented the plight of those Africans in a lyrical, rich verse with unforgettable imageries: the African student in the glass booth reeking of rancid breath, the ubiquitous red-coloured Omnibuses plying London streets and the landlady herself sitting, smoking and carrying on the conversation with her would-be tenant.
Some of us became Soyinka fans from then on such that one or two opted to go to what was University of Ife then if only they could sit and listen to Soyinka in class. I remember one particularly. His uncle read History at Ife in the seventies. A distant cousin followed as an Economics undergrad years later.
So, for two years beginning from 1984, he applied to study Philosophy at the institution. He failed at both times. He failed not so much because his JAMB score was too low but because his state of origin, Bendel, was considered an educationally advantaged state. His first score was 239 and in 1985, he upped his beat by 17 marks to 256. The school authorities were not impressed even at that.
Instead, based on the quota system that favoured educationally disadvantaged states at the time, a JAMB candidate from the north, say, with lesser score might possibly get the school authority’s attention and a possible offer of admission. Thus did the chap in question miss two opportunities consecutively to sit before a lecturer he wanted so much to listen to.
It is true the lecturer himself was not in Philosophy department but the University of Ife hopeful reckoned he could somehow choose one or two elective courses where his hero/ teacher was Head of Department.
“Look,” his father told him one day after his second try at JAMB, “what’s your fixation with Ife? Why not choose a university in your state?” His mates by then had gained admission to Bendel State University Ekpoma leaving him at home gobbling up great quantities of food to his father’s dismay but to his mother’s delight.
He was offered admission at University of Benin the same year Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in Literature and began registration in the same month not in Philosophy this time but Theatre Arts. To welcome the freshmen, the department staged a production of Death and the King’s Horseman directed by Mr. Tom Onyonyor with 300-level students acting. Kesse Jabari was Elesin Oba, Patrick Aburime was Simon Pilkins and Pedro Agbonifo now known as Don Pedro Obaseki was Olude.
It was a great performance of a great play by a great dramatist. Of course, the chap’s fascination with Soyinka deepened. Some of the dramatist’s works would be required reading for the undergraduates: The Swamp Dwellers, The Strong Breed, The Road, Kongi’s Harvest and his almighty essay that has become something of the Bible of Theatre Arts/ Dramatic Arts students in most Nigerian universities – “The fourth Stage: Myth, Literature and the African World.”
From the tentative steps taken in secondary school through TC, he was now taking surer footsteps and getting ever so close to knowing Soyinka better through his other works. After university, he became a journalist on the Arts beat with a national newspaper. It was inevitable that, in that position, the chap and Soyinka would meet. They did.
First time was his fellow poet Odia Ofeimun’s 50th birthday in 2000. Venue was 20, Sanyaolu Street, Oregun where Ofeimun resided at the time. Sitting among his younger co-writers, Soyinka was not only at home but was also a delightful presence that night – sipping, as usual, from a choice champagne.
Next was Maison de France aka French Cultural Centre then on Kingsway Road, Ikoyi. Big Brother Nigeria had just debuted and much of the scenes were quite distasteful leading to public outcry. Instead of being witty conversationalists, the housemates were more inclined at butt baring acts and even groping. In something that was a postmortem at the FCC, Soyinka offered his opinion to the audience on BBN. “We are not prudish,” he said, “but we are also not prurient.”
In as much as we do not wish to be like the sex police in censorious theocracies, Soyinka suggested that day, we cannot carry on as the Hugh Hefners and Larry Flynts of this world.
Next was a chance encounter at Freedom Park Broad Street, Lagos. The reporter was a tag-along with senior journalist, novelist and poet, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu. Right there before them was the man himself, hands clasped behind his back and pacing. “Oh Maxim,” he said. And turning to the reporter after introduction, he asked: “How are you?” “Fine,” the reporter replied.
In a birthday tribute published in Premium Times a year ago, Maxim, who was one of Soyinka’s brightest student at Ife wondered, like so many have done, how his former teacher has made it to 87.
“It beggars belief that Soyinka has made it to the heavy age of 87 after a life of multiform dangers: an unknown gunman invading the broadcasting house to replace the premier’s tape, going to Biafra in a season of anomie, enduring imprisonment and solitary confinement, bearing the wounds of exile, daring Abacha…In short, way beyond the claims of the evangelical churches, the only miracle I see is Wole Soyinka’s life,” Maxim wrote.
Continuing, Maxim confesses that Soyinka was “so daring early in life that nobody gave him any chance of living up to 87 years on this earth.”
In the same piece, Maxim wrote of his fascination with Soyinka starting from his secondary school days at Onitsha. “I did not want anything to do with schooling anymore, being much of a tear-away in my youth – then I saw the name of Professor Wole Soyinka as the Head of the newly created Dramatic Arts Department at the then University of Ife.”
Unlike the chap who failed twice to gain admission to Ife, Maxim had his way. “My plans had been to head into the bush to change the system as a guerrilla fighter,” Maxim recalls, “but once I learnt of the Soyinka school at Great Ife, I applied and was taken.”
If there is any former student of the professor who knows him so well, it has to be Maxim, detailing in the said tribute Soyinka’s love for humanity, insisting that “aside from his genius in literature, Soyinka ranks amongst the greatest freedom fighters ever, a foremost defender of the sanctity of the human life.”
Maxim himself is a living example of Soyinka’s spontaneous generosity. Hear him: “After my degree exams, I was totally out of cash. I needed money badly, and I ran to Soyinka in his office. I told him I had no money to go home. He gave me all the money he had. In a show of bravado I told him I would pay him back his money when I came for convocation. Soyinka had a healthy laugh and said: “How am I sure you will not run through the money and come back with another sob story?”
Though not his student at Ife, accomplished and award-winning author, Helon Habila could not resist adding his voice to the growing Soyinka myth. “Soyinka is one of the greats, the last of the greats of African and black literature,” the professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University, Virginia, USA, told THEWILL via email last Friday evening. “I’d say the most successful of his generation, and not because he won the Nobel and others didn’t, but because of his sheer body of work and versatility: poet, novelist, dramatist, singer, actor, activist. It is a pity that sometimes his politics overshadows his writing, because then people are distracted and they don’t get to appreciate the full diversity of his oeuvre, from his engagement with African mytho-poetics in plays like A Dance of the Forest or The Strong Breed or in his well observed, child’s eye-view portrait of a world in transition from the traditional to the modern in his brilliant memoir, Ake: Years of Childhood, or in his engagement with religious hypocrisy in the Jero plays, or the more directly political works like King Baabu where he mocked the late dictator, Sani Abacha; or in what for me is his best work, the poetry collection Idanre. His work is visionary. In a play like A Dance of the Forest, for instance, he offered a different way of interpreting the newly created country Nigeria, he calls it “a gathering of the tribes,” presaging the bickering and sectarian squabbles that now dominate our national politics. The same play is also an engagement with the precolonial, pre-modern vision of a time when man and nature lived in harmony, an environmentalist reading of the environment around him, in which he decentered the human, placing the human on a level with the rest of nature, the trees and hills and rivers and animals, an animist reading of the world. A writer like that comes only once in a hundred years, if we are lucky. We have been blessed to have him among us.”
Apparently some bankers in Nigeria did not think so pre-Nobel. The story has been told of Soyinka approaching one or two banks in Lagos for a loan to build his own house since he had none at the time. They turned him down. But then, precursor to the Nobel came from Agip in Italy. The prize was worth thousands of dollars. Incredibly, the same bankers who refused him loan started approaching the Prof to become his bankers.
Irritating as they may be to him, that piece of indiscretion has not diminished Soyinka’s consistent struggle against repressive military regimes and wasteful, unconscionable civilian governments. Witness his constant run-ins with Nigerian governments, starting from Independence. “The man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny,” goes the maxim famously attributed to Soyinka.
He is still speaking up to the authorities and, lately, to marauding herdsmen, terrorists and bandits roaming free like vermin and tearing apart the social, economic and political fabric of the country. In a recent interview with BBC Pidgin, Soyinka lamented that swathes of land that were his sole preserve before have been taken over by terrorists, bandits and herdsmen. “My children and others told me that the forest is shrinking,” Soyinka said, meaning that he can no longer go on the hunt as he used to.
There have been other human losses as well and, being who he is, Soyinka is not one to make public a private grief. Only last month, his youngest sib, Professor Femi Soyinka, died. A renowned researcher and former provost of the College of Health Sciences, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, he was 85.
Days after Christmas of 2013, Soyinka’s eldest daughter, Iyetade, died at University College Hospital Ibadan. She had, according to Jahman Anikulapo aide to Soyinka, died after a brief illness. Another loss would follow barely six months later. It was not the demise of a relation or kin but a colleague. It was that of fellow Nobel laureate and colleague, Nadine Gordimer of South Africa. She died on July 13, 2014 when Soyinka was exactly a year older.
People do not choose when to die except patients with terminal cases. Like capricious fate, death can call at any time. But the old man must have wondered severally: how come death rears its ugly head just about when something good has arrived or is just around the corner?
Nigerians of a certain generation still remember the bitter-sweet feeling following the announcement by the Swedish Academy in 1986 that Soyinka had won that year’s number one prize in Literature. In the same month October 19, Nigerians woke up to the shattering news that the dashing editor of Newswatch Dele Giwa had been parcel-bombed at his Opebi home in Ikeja. He did not survive it. His death, Soyinka later rued, has turned the sweetness of the Nobel into “ashes in our mouth.”
For someone who survived solitary confinement for more than two years by a military regime, assassination attempts by another, Soyinka has survived it all, probably arming himself with Nietzsche’s quip that “out of life’s school of war – what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”
Soyinka is as strong as they come – mentally and physically – even well north of 80. Just last year, he published a fictional work, Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, a subtle dig and satire at the supposed pride of place his countrymen and women hold in that regard.
He is as sprightly as ever with very brisk steps, more than some men in their fifties, sixties or seventies and with a disciplined physique to match. If you happened to have seen him at any public function recently in Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt or his homestead in Abeokuta, there’s no way you won’t admire him – his flying mane, his unique sartorial preference and the whole process of aging gracefully.
“Youth would be an ideal state,” an English wit once said, “if it came much later in life.” It is a graceful combination in Soyinka’s case. Advanced in age, he seems to be getting younger by the day, a glowing, healthy skin with tender palms like one who has never experienced any form of hard labour under the sun.
The truth is that Soyinka has done his bit in harsh weather conditions and almost always alone in the process. True, his leonine features remind one of the great scholar of the Russian revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky – the greying goatee with fancy-framed spectacles balanced on his nose bridge.
There is another image of him not much seen by the public: WS in his hunting gear with his rifle and roaming the forests of Ogun state, squinting, aiming and bringing down a bird, two or three for the pot or to be barbecued. Indeed, he was on one of his hunting expeditions in 1986 when JP paid him an unscheduled visit at his home in Abeokuta. They had not seen or spoken since the end of the civil war in 1970.
It is very much public knowledge now that JP had met and spoke with Achebe concerning the imminent execution of soldier/ poet Mamman Jiya Vatsa implicated in a coup against Ibrahim Babangida in 1986. Next was to coopt Soyinka whom neither had spoken with for decades. JP took it upon himself to surprise his formerly comradely colleague in his Abeokuta hideout. Soyinka was out hunting on that very day, bringing to mind another celebrated hunter, Ernest Hemingway, who spent much of his time during his vacation bringing down buffaloes and some such beasts in the African safari.
In a special dedication by TheNews magazine on WS’s 80th birthday, readers got to know more about his family, his relationship with his wife and partner, Folake Doherty Soyinka, whom he met when she was a student at Ife, then African Guardian in the eighties. Those were the halcyon days of female journalists such as Amma Ogan, Juliet Ukabiala and Louisa Aguiyi Ironsi.
Though a wide age gap separates Soyinka and his current wife, it is a union some see as a carefully calibrated companionship that should add more together than apart. It has, spawning four children in the process.
“It is not my fault,” Fidel Castro famously declared, “that the CIA has been unable to kill me.” In the same vein, you could say that it is not Professor Soyinka’s fault that he has enjoyed this much longevity. For one, he is the oldest living Nobel laureate in Literature. Gordimer is gone, so is Naguib Mafouz and even some in Europe and the Americas.
After pitching the story idea to the editor last Monday during our editorial meeting, Olaolu Olusina readily approved. Sitting opposite was Cartoon Editor Victor Asowata. “Victor, will you accept a lunch or dinner invitation from WS if he asks you?” Yes, he said emphatically. “What about you?” indicating the guy sitting next to him. “I won’t,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. We thought he was joking or just wanted to be seen to be different. “He won’t even invite you,” someone told him and then we had a good laugh at his expense.
The same laughter will peal around the world on Wednesday July 13 when WS will be one year older. From the inscrutable and inner recesses of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm to donnish offices in Harvard or Cambridge, at home in Nigeria with family and friends, in the U.S. with his great friend, Henry Louis Gates and other like-minded intellectuals, you can be sure that hundreds will raise a toast to Soyinka with flutes of his favourite tipple.
You can be sure, also, that a handful of governors and politicians, traditional rulers, the media and even his foes (the last with grudging admiration) will raise that flute to his health and better years ahead. But more than anything is that, without exception, one thing will be running parallel in their minds on that day – what a man!
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