Wole Soyinka: Exit, pursued by a bear

The Nigerian Nobel laureate's weird memoir recalls a life of protest, exile -- and farcical political interventions.

By Matt Steinglass

Read more: Books, Literature, South Africa, Africa, Reviews, Book reviews

April 20, 2006 | In 1987, the late Allan Bloom, a University of Chicago professor, published one of the defining texts in the neoconservative culture wars of the past several decades, "The Closing of the American Mind." The book was an extended harrumph directed at Bloom's students, whom he accused of embracing a lazy and unexamined cultural and moral relativism. Bloom wrote that his students were unable to respond cogently to the classic problems posed by the relativism they propounded -- for example, the question of what they would do if, while serving as a British colonial officer in India, they had to decide whether to allow a prominent man's widow to commit suttee, i.e. to be burned to death along with her husband's corpse.

The year before, the Nobel Prize in literature had been awarded to Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, and it's no coincidence, in a tenor-of-the-times sort of way, that he was the author of the scenario Bloom was referring to, or rather of its greatest artistic representation. In Soyinka's 1975 play, "Death and the King's Horseman," the king (or "Oba") of the Yoruba city of Oyo has died, and his horseman, Elesin Oba, is expected to follow him into the afterlife by committing ritual suicide. The colonial British administrator, Pilkings, bars the ceremony, which he considers barbaric. The result is a tragedy of unintended consequences.

One might suppose the author of such a text to be a bit of a moral relativist himself, someone prone to excusing the misdeeds of African regimes by appealing to non-Western cultural mores. Nothing could be further from the truth. Soyinka has been a relentless human rights and political activist since the dawn of the Nigerian republic. When he wrote "Death and the King's Horseman," he had already served two years in prison for opposing the brutal policies of one Nigerian military dictatorship and was in self-imposed exile from another; he was busy denouncing yet a third when he received the Nobel Prize.

A lot has happened since the late 1980s. The post-colonial left has decided that some cultural traditions are less morally relative than others: Nigerian picturesque ritual suicides, perhaps yes; Nigerian genital mutilation of girls, perhaps no. Bloom's University of Chicago neoconservatives, having seized the wheel of American foreign policy and steered it into Iraq, have found that a culture-neglecting moral absolutism can indeed lead to tragedies of unintended consequences. In Nigeria, as the oppressive military dictatorship of Ibrahim Babangida gave way first to the obscenely sadistic one of Sani Abacha, and finally to a problematic democracy under Olusegun Obasanjo, Soyinka has remained steadfast in opposition, hewing to a relentless moral absolutism of his own. Now he has come out with a new memoir, "You Must Set Forth at Dawn," sketching his attempts to reconcile culture and politics, Africanness and internationalism, over the past 50 years. Unfortunately, the sketch is rather aimless and superficial, and Soyinka doesn't take on the most important issues his autobiography raises.

"You Must Set Forth at Dawn" makes a convincing case for Soyinka's central place in Nigerian history. Nigeria is a huge country; no one is sure just how big, but population estimates run between 120 million and 150 million. (A government census in March was hampered by ethnic separatists in the southeast who threw acid in census workers' faces and hacked at them with machetes, and by large numbers of urban residents who decamped to their ancestral villages to be counted so that village chieftains could bulk up their purported populations and get bigger government subsidies.) But the reader of "You Must Set Forth at Dawn" could be forgiven for thinking that the country is about the size of a large high school. Soyinka appears to have had a personal relationship with virtually every significant political and cultural figure the country has produced over the past 40 years. Current President Obasanjo; Bola Ige, an attorney general who was assassinated in 2001; the governor of Lagos (Nigeria's largest city), Bola Tinubu; ex-dictators Babangida and Abacha; Afrobeat great Fela Kuti; writers Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Ken Saro-Wiwa; and artists, businessmen, human rights activists -- Soyinka has known them all.

And he hasn't just known them. He has known them from back in the day, through complex and interrelated emotional twists and turns. Their relationships, as he presents them, have been the stuff of Nigerian history. Soyinka's dramatic sense has often been called Shakespearean, and "You Must Set Forth at Dawn" tries to cast Nigerian history as one of the Bard's histories might: a tale enacted by a limited cast of characters, thick with dramatic confrontations, daring escapades, great friendships, bloody treachery, metaphysical themes and portentous soliloquies, somewhere between "Henry IV" and "Macbeth."

Yet ultimately, the memoir recalls the histories less than it does the comedies. Soyinka's political courage and dedication are beyond dispute. But, as described here, many of his political endeavors carry a hint of the ridiculous. After some of the more striking episodes, one half expects to see him (like that other political exile, Angelo in "A Winter's Tale") exiting, pursued by a bear.

Consider: November 1965. Soyinka charges into the broadcasting booth of the state radio station in Ibadan, armed with a gun, to compel the engineer to remove the tape of Western State Prime Minister Akintola's electoral victory speech and substitute his own tape denouncing voting fraud. He is tried for armed robbery, and acquitted on a technicality.

Autumn 1967. The Nigerian-Biafran civil war. The young officer commanding the Nigerian army in the Western Zone, none other than future President Obasanjo, is home in his bedroom. He hears a telephone ringing in his closet. He was unaware that there was a telephone in his closet. He finds it, and picks up the receiver. On the other end -- Wole Soyinka! The playwright bears a message of peace from secessionist Biafran Gen. Victor Banjo and wants to arrange a secret rendezvous.

Summer 1992. Soyinka meets the newly released Nelson Mandela at a dinner in Paris hosted by François Mitterrand. He becomes convinced that he and Nigeria can host a summit between Mandela and South African Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi to end the bloodshed between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. (The two groups' young street soldiers were beating, shooting and "necklacing" one another -- placing flaming, gasoline-doused tires around the victim's neck -- as they positioned themselves for power in the coming post-apartheid order. Soyinka seems to have thought it was all just a misunderstanding.) After months of shuttling about, enlisting the support of Nigerian dictator Babangida and corresponding with Buthelezi, Soyinka succeeds in getting Nadine Gordimer to present his proposal to a meeting of the ANC Executive Council. Result: "The meeting broke up in a bout of derisory laughter."

Next page: Soyinka leads a quest to reclaim a Nigerian artifact. Too bad it's a fake