Poetry Scores is doing a project with Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature from Nigeria. I owe my familiarity
with his work to a 1996 assignment from my editor at The Nation magazine, John Leonard (R.I.P.), to review Soyinka’s then-new book in
the context of everything he had written before it. That was a lot of reading
to do for $150, though I’m actually forever in John’s debt for the challenge
and the education. This is my Nation
review.
*
Coffin for an Oligarchy
Review of Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative
of the Nigerian Crisis by Wole Soyinka
First
published in The Nation magazine,
August 12/19, 1996
By Chris King
“Wherever
there is a wicked majority, Wole Soyinka will be over here, with the minority,
to balance it out,” I was told by Noble Obani-Nwibari, vice president of the
Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. “Wole Soyinka is from a majority
ethnic group, the Yoruba, but he has done very much for the Ogoni people. I
cannot rest in this our struggle, because one day if I, an Ogoni man, did
nothing, what if that same day Wole Soyinka was fighting for the Ogoni? That
man challenges me.”
Soyinka does
indeed challenge us all, as activists and readers. In a poem about apolitical
poets, the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature once quarreled with
verse sloganeering. In the same poem, he declared that if he had a slogan, it
was “DANGER – DREAMS AT WORK.” But, for the moment, Soyinka the dreamer has
hung up his hat. A screaming philosopher wrote The Open Sore of a Continent.
For now, let
us savor poetic moments from past work: perhaps Egbo on the edge of orgasm in The Interpreters, “hanging by the
finger-tips to a sharp-edged precipice while the blood coursed sweetly down his
mouth.” Or something tiny like the penmanship of his father’s American
correspondent, in Isara: A Voyage Around
“Essay,” whose letter “t” appears as “a cheerful acrobat dancing on its one
leg, amusing the rest of its alphabetic audience.” Or we can simply delight in
remembering a literary career that has been, along with much else, a series of
love letters to a worthy father.
The polemicist
Soyinka marvels that he had developed a metaphor using the Ogoni situation back
when Ken Saro-Wiwa was enduring merely “the normal travails of a political
activist.” But Soyinka’s work has been pregnant with the Ogoni tragedy from the
beginning. In the very early play The
Swamp Dwellers, the city is a den of thieves and timber contractors, and
the bush is an overfarmed, polluted place in the Niger Delta, “poisoned by the
oil in the swamp water.” Oil erupts everywhere in Soyinka’s imagination. It
“casts an evil shade” in Shuttle in the
Crypt, his prison poems. In his 1973 novel Season of Anomy it gives off, with slaves and gold, the stench of
West African history, “a smell of death, disruption and desolation.”
Long before
Nigeria’s current dictator, Sani Abacha, strutted into power, Soyinka had
developed a keen nose for what he calls in the present work “the diabolism
inherent in the phenomenon of power.” He predicted Abacha in the 1967 play Kongi’s Harvest, in which an autocratic
ruler embarks on a Five Year Development Plan, hanging an opposition leader in
the name of Harmony. Before that, in The
Trials of Brother Jero, Soyinka had presented the power trips of a prophet
who caters to “strange, dissatisfied people. I know they are dissatisfied
because I keep them dissatisfied. Once they are full, they won’t come again.” Appropriately,
this play has become both a standard Nigerian school text and the recent
subject of interdictions, as Adewale Maja-Pierce notes in Index on Censorship. You can’t say Soyinka wasn’t warned – in Ake, his childhood memoir, Soyinka’s paternal
grandfather advises that “book-learning, and especially success in
book-learning only creates other battles.”
Ake showed the boy Wole politically active while still in
school, serving as “Oddjob man with the Women’s Movement” against unfair
taxation, forming what would become a habit of “settling down longest wherever
there appeared to be some promise of action.” Indeed, Soyinka, like the hero of
Season of Anomy, belongs to a
generation “born into one long crisis.” As early as 1965, surveying the political
scene in The Interpreters, he could
recite a litany like “lost elections, missed nominations, thug recruitment,
financial backing, Ministerial in-lawfulness, Ministerial poncing, general
arse-licking, Ministerial concubinage,” then leave an ellipsis, knowing the
list goes on.
After
Soyinka’s two-year detention (1967-1969) during the Biafran War, that
“experiment on how to break down the human mind,” his voice turned ever more
baroque and bizarre. Madmen and
Specialists (1987) is written by the Samuel Beckett of West Africa. The
chorus is made up of cripples from the war, including a blind man with lines
like, “The limbless acrobat will now perform his wonderful act – how to bite
the dust from three classic positions.” The citified African sell-out appears
here as Dr. Bero, “a specialist” who gives “the personal word of a scientist.
Human flesh is delicious,” especially “the balls.” The specialist first ate
flesh as a means to an end: “It was the first step to power you understand.
Power in its purest sense.”
Greed for
power is typically figured as cannibalism in Soyinka’s work. In The Apotheosis of Master Sergeant Doe
(1988) he inventories the “cannibal larder” of Africa’s military dictators.
Even the pompous ambassador in The
Interpreter tentatively declares “the nature of dictators to be rather ...
predatory on human beings.” As a child Soyinka was fascinated with the
traditional ruler’s ritual cannibalism of the previous king’s heart and liver.
“I would watch the Alake on our visits,” he writes in Ake, “wondering if I could detect the stain of human blood on his
lips.” Those same eyes still behold the jaws of power with that question.
And so, long
before Soyinka the polemicist, Soyinka the poet of power and disappointment
wrote of villagers with oil in their water, murderous business cartels and
their paramilitary troops, uncomprehending district commissioners, “the slave
in khaki and brass buttons,” the “world industrial seesaws” that ruin dependent
economies and the technocratic cannibals who manage them. Though he insisted in
an “Author’s Note” to Death and the King’s
Horsemen (1976) that political crisis in the literary work merely provides
the “catalytic incident” for a metaphysical drama – in the case of that
particular play, “an evocation of music from the abyss of transition.”
Open Sore is not so metaphysical, and is tuned
only to the most bitter music. It is a howl from the abyss with hope for a
transition to someplace human once again. Soyinka sounds quite like the Oba’s
praise singer in Death and the King’s
Horsemen, once secure in the knowledge that “our world was never wrenched
from its true course” but now forced, through the anguish of events, to lament,
“Our world is tumbling in the void of strangers.” The strangers ruining the Oba’s
world were British colonialists, while Soyinka’s demons are “a carefully
nurtured feudal oligarchy and their pampered, indolent and unproductive scions,”
but it is the same void. Most torturous to Soyinka is that these strangers are
alien to thought; “Abacha has no idea
of Nigeria.”
The
irascible Nigerian pop idol Fela made a record called Coffin for Head of State after the military raided his home,
tossing his mother out a second-story window. Fela’s suggestive phrase would be
a more apt subtitle for this book, which is not really a “Personal Narrative of
the Nigerian Crisis.” There are a few first-hand reports of Abacha’s “kill-and-go”
Mobile Police, import-license scams in the Shagari era (1979-1983), Soyinka’s
efforts to end the 1993 interim government, his recent suffering at the hands
of government propagandists (“WOLE SOYINKA IN SEX AND FRAUD SCANDAL”) and his
60th-birthday-party protest march, which prompted his exile. Taken
together, these personal incidents occupy only a handful of pages. What is most
personal about this text is Soyinka’s gift for invective – he produces what he
once called “monster prodigies of spleen.” He describes the Abacha regime as “yet
another circus of political mutants and opportunists,” “aliens from outer
space,” “practiced, back-alley abortionists of democracy.” Their methods are “nothing
but plain thuggery,” “the hostage-taking tactics of two-a-penny terrorists”
evincing the “straightforward will to domination by an anachronistic bunch of
social predators.” Woe to Abacha’s “megaphone” Dr. Walter Ofonagoro and that “inundating
spittle-launcher situated somewhere in his head,” or chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, who
“has demonstrated a remarkable involvement with the project of browsing where
the pasture appears greenest.” If words alone could kill, Nigeria would be
quite a few oligarchic corpses closer to democracy by now.
Open Sore is a passionately written recent
history of Nigeria, that “tightly sealed can within can, within can of worms”
encasing the annulled 1993 presidential election of Basorun M.K.O. Abiola and
the resulting “spiral of murder, torture, and leadership dementia that is
surely leading to the disintegration of a once-proud nation.” Even here the
real drama of Nigeria so deftly collaborates with Soyinka’s strange imagination
– he calls enemies “colorful dramatic personae, a veritable tapestry of rather
unappetizing prostitutes” – he must repeatedly stress an incident’s historicity
because it looks so much like one of his inventions. Consider the case of the
physician interrupted from ministering to death squad victims during the
Shagari-Adewusi heyday. While his patients bleed to death, the physician
undergoes torture; the torturer, it turns out, once studied under the tortured.
Soyinka
hammers nails in the coffin of oligarchy and injustice all over the world. He
anatomizes what he calls “the spoils of power” with a revealing glance at the
case of Richard Nixon. He exposes the common control method of tribalizing
dissent, and explains its effectiveness in recent years: “Man resorts to his
cultural affiliations when politics appears to have failed him.” He interrupts
structural analyses to plumb human costs, mourning “the condition of the
internally exiled” under a repressive regime and the “violation of the human
essence” that daily life demands. Imagine a U.S. writer with the strengths of
Gerald Early, Ishmael Reed and Adolph Reed Jr. chronicling our political
underbelly from Nixon to Iran/contra and
the S&L swindles, through the Desert Storm massacre up to the Patriot
movement and the counterterrorism bill, naming names and heaping scorn where
scorn is due, not flinching from the most terrifying implications of the connections
he makes and describing their toll on our character – then you will see what
Soyinka has done for Nigeria.
At its heart
Open Sore becomes a philosophical
inquiry: What is a nation? When is a nation? Will Nigeria survive? Should it?
There is no sentimental attachment to nationhood, especially given the dangers
of nationalism under a military regime: “A bugle rouses the nation to its
mission of keeping the nation together while a mailed fist and studded boot
silence the protestations.” Soyinka is mindful of the millions of victims “uprooted
from their homes, turned into stateless nonpersons, degraded from creatures of
feeling or sentience to mere digits in some abstract evocation.” He is loyal to
the Nigerian public, which, he reminds us, did not repudiate nationhood; they
announced their hunger for it by electing Abiola across all lines of supposed division,
only to see their will criminally flouted. “A nation is a collective
enterprise,” Soyinka writes, in words that should be translated into all
languages; “outside of that, it is mostly a gambling space for opportunism and
adventurism of power.”
For Nigeria,
Soyinka’s message is simple: Recognize the results of the June 12, 1993
elections or expect the worst. To international observers, he says: Revive your
comatose moral outrage and put it into action, or expect the worst. He calls –
in the wake of Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda – for a series of international forums
on the national question before it is too late. Like the Zapatistas’ intercontinental
referendum on neoliberalism, this seems a sensible yet visionary question. Let
us hope that future faces of the never-ending crisis permit Wole Soyinka to
dream again.
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