HURRAH! Professor Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka is 90 years old today! Let us all celebrate the first blackman from the world over and the first from sub-Saharan Africa to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Wole Soyinka is among the contemporary Africa’s greatest dramatists and writers and he is also one of the continent’s most imaginative proponents of the use of traditional African culture and of the compassionate social order it embodies.
A laureate of the international order of merit, Soyinka carved a niche for himself as a world-class dramatist and literary writer and also as a doyen of traditional African culture and criticism whose foot-print on the sands of time in African literary scholarship is indelible. His hard-work and sustained commitment to research, writing, teaching, directing and political activism will forever illustrate his life as a cerebral scholar of international and uncommon standing who has had a distinguished and unparalled career all over the world.
His contribution to knowledge is encompassing and beyond discipline boundaries. With uncommon erudition it spans Wole Soyinka as king of playwriting, monarch of directing, supreme ruler of acting, crowned head of performance, sovereign of literature, ruler of music and song, baron of dramatic structure, emperor of the use of language, sultan of dance, mime and movements, prime of teaching methods, Czar of political activism, overlord of elegant poetry and khan of profound prose.
This uncommon erudition can only be so because Soyinka was born an uncommon child, reading the Holy Bible at the age of two years! Then growing up with this out of the ordinary characteristics, Soyinka became, in his adult age unconventional in his ways and manners of doing things and in handling situations. For example, Soyinka became unfamiliar in his eating habits, became unexpected in his teaching methodology, became surprising in his writing styles, became unusual in his demeanor, attitude and manner, became unorthodox in his dressing code and appearance. In this regard, Soyinka would buy hand-woven clothes from Igbira traders and sew it into round turtle-neck, shirts, a rare thing that was not common in Nigeria in 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s!
Soyinka is a man of many parts as he is an actor, playwright, novelist, poet, director, singer, hunter, political activist, wine connoisseur, teacher, critic and scholar all roll into one. The amazing thing is that he has been able to blend them all of these parts into just one personality and simultaneously excelling in each of these facets of his life. It will be pertinent, however, to note that he is first and foremost a creative artiste expressing himself in the various forms of the arts with an almost uniform dexterity.
Although Wole Soyinka considers himself primarily a playwright, he has also written novels- The Interpreters (1965) and Season Of Anomy (1973- and several volumes of poetry- Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Shuttle in Crypt (1972), Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988) and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). The Man Died (1972) is his prose account of his arrest and 22-month imprisonment for Nigeria’s Civil War in 1967-1970. Myth, Literature and African World (1976) is Soyinka’s principal critical work in which he examines the role of Yoruba mythology and symbolism. An autobiography, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981) was followed by Isara: A Voyage Around Essay (1989) and Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (1984). He published another memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006). Wole Soyinka served on the Board of Advisors of the Encyclopaedia Britannical Board (2005-6).
In addition to poetry, memoirs and other critical works, Soyinka has written several plays. To date he has published hundreds of works. He wrote a Dance of the Forests in 1960 to celebrate the Nigeria independence. The play satirizes the new nation by stripping it of romantic legend and by showing that the present is not glorious than the past. He wrote The Lion and the Jewel (1963) to make fun of the pompous, Europeanized school teacher. In The Trials of Brother Jero (1960), he mocks the clever teacher preachers of the prayer-churches who grow fat on the gullibility of their worshippers. But in his more serious plays such as The Strong Breed (1963), Kongi’s Harvest (1967), The Road (1965), From Zia with Love (1992), King Baabu (2002), he reveals his disregard for African authoritarian rulers and his disillusionment with the Nigerian political hardscape as well.
Soyinka denounced the sit-tight rulers of Africa who promote the ignominious narrative that government should be at whims and caprices of selfish and decided individuals like President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea (since 1979). Paul Biya of Cameroon (since 1982), and Yoweri Musevemi of Uganda (since 1986) who are negative examples of the Aftican leadership tragedy. In Madmen and Specialist (1971), Death and king’s Horseman (1975), and The Beatification of Area Boy (1995), Soyinka exhibits in these plays and his best plays, skillful use of rich dramatic structure in which elements of European drama are expertly crafted with Yoruba Folklore, Festival and religion in ingenious plotting to manifest dramatic techniques of symbolism, flashback, humor, fine poetic style as well as gift for irony and satire and expert use of language.
On political activism, Wole Soyinka has been involved actively in politics right from the beginning of his career till date. In 1959, he wrote a very important and the first play of his life, A Dance of the Forests in which he satirizes the Nigerian political elite. He was imprisoned for his political involvement in the Nigerian civil war in 1967 for 22 months. He criticizes bad governance, dictatorship, corruption and sit-tight rulership in Nigeria, Africa and all over the world as he believes “The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism’’.
In July 2009, Soyinka led a group of people on a protest mission to the National Assembly under the banner of “Enough is Enough’’. The protest produced the Doctrine of Necessity which eased Goodluck Jonathan into job of Acting as the President of Nigeria when some mafia blocked his way from acting for President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua when he was sick. That singular act when Soyinka acted as the conscience of the Nigerian community and the Lion of land also prevented Nigeria from breaking into bits and pieces.
On July 15, 2019, Wole Soyinka declared that the ‘’inability of President Muhammadu Buhari to find solution to the problems of herdsmen has wiped away the positive achievements of his administration. The carelessness and negligence of Buhari had led to hundreds of people being killed and massacred in their farms and their farms taken over by herdsmen have wiped away a lot of the positive achievements of the government’’ (The Guardian, 15 July 2019: p.8).
Wole Soyinka is the most articulate champion of the African theatre and is the first Nigerian academic to popularize African drama and theatre. Through his frequent theatrical revenues, gorilla theatres, seminars and essays in the mass media in Nigeria, he domesticated and gave public face and relevance to the supposedly arid discipline with nothing exciting or interesting in it. Popularly called Kongi for comparing his intellectual exercise of unpredictability to the dexterity of the politicians, Soyinka was a restless Nigerian intellectual who deployed his raw energy and conviction to courageously put the Yoruba culture in the global arena with his Myth, Literature and the African World.
In a career that spanned nearly nine decades of relentless research and consistent inquiry into African theatre, Soyinka waded through professional enquires of colleagues who were acolytes of colonial drama intellectual tradition, and survived the inferiority derision of neophytes to gain acceptability. His point was to battle with an influential and established Western tradition that claimed Africans had no culture, drama or theatre. Soyinka believed that Africa has a solid tradition of drama and theatre. Therefore, he spent the rest of his life to defend the thesis that Africa theatre does not exists.
First, he used his productivity, painstaking and relentless researches and lifestyle to disprove the notion that Africa has no drama and theatre. Secondly, he demonstrated a tenacity for scholarship and consistency for research long after retiring from the academic of university teaching. Wole Soyinka exuded, even at retirement and old age, an academic culture and intellectual mien that confer value on the professorship. Thirdly, Soyinka’s prodigious intellectual energetic life becomes a worthy example for today’s youths that hard work does not kill but confers honour, reward and respect for the person who is hard working.
The myth Soyinka has debunked is that Africans do not have the capacity for profound intellectual reasoning. His life signaled the fact that the true mark of scholarship is solving problems and breaking new grounds. He solved the problem of “Does African theatre exists?’’ by writing plays with African gods instead of Greek or Roman or British gods. Ogun, Obatala are African gods in plays like A Dance of the Forests and The Road. He is indeed the distinguished father of modern Nigeria/ African drama and theatre. Soyinka demonstrated his mettle by sheer productivity- hundred of books, plays, novels, essays, songs and music- rather than engage in endless polemics. With raw energy and bold resolve, Soyinka put in passion and personal sacrifice to entrench his intellectual conviction on a global academe that had always been riddled with Euro-Western ethnocentricism and prejudice against ideas emanating from Africa.
Wole Soyinka at ninety years is still mentally alert, physically strong, spiritually agile and intellectually acrobatic. He is still teaching as a visiting professor of World Literature at the Middle East Universities. He deserves to be given the highest honour in Nigeria, the Grand Commander of Federal Republic (GCFR). The Federal Government should consider this appeal because we are reminded that for all its insistence on and preference for the sciences and technology, it is in the Arts and Humanities that Nigeria has gained global attention through our worthy ambassadors of the pen.
HAPPY Birthday your Excellency of Drama and Theatre, The Nobel Laureate of the World Literature! Baba o Baba o Baba o/ Oluwa da Baba si fun wa Baba o Baba o Baba o/ Ki Oluwa da Baba si fun wa.
• Muyiwa Awodiya is a retired Professor of Theatre Arts. He can be reached through 08037424915.
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