Outside the Kemta Estate gate in Idi Aba, the outskirts of Abeokuta, the sky was clear and blue. The air was humid. Tucked away in the swelling vistas of the Autonomous Republic of Ijegba (ARI) located high up in the hills of Kemta, there is a brick house surrounded by forest and birdsong.
It is the home of Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, also known as King Kongi or Eniogun. This afternoon, a long line of children stretched, as they made their way into the forest. They walked excitedly from the open plains where a couple of buses were parked for them to find their way into the republic, where no visa is free, no national anthem is sung and total freedom of expression is allowed.
Inside the amphitheatre located at the basement of the red brick house, a large number of children struggled to pack into the available spaces, waiting for the arrival of the ‘King’. The theatre soon became enervated with the sound of Kongi!Kongi!! at the entrance of King Kongi.
For close to 15 years, Kongi or Eniogun, depending on the moniker you chose for Professor Wole Soyinka, always hosted children across the country and selected kids from Ogun State.
The Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange (WSICE) is celebrating the 90th birthday of the Nobel Laureate in a series of events, which will run till end of July.
The Co-executive Producer, WSICE, Teju Kareem, explained that the mentoring session is one of the ways Soyinka wants to save the Nigerian child.
The WSICE began in 2010 in Lagos with a three-day programme, when Soyinka was 76, and has run every year since then at its permanent home in Abeokuta, Ogun State, with satellite events in Ondo, Ekiti, Oyo, Rivers and other states. It has also been staged in London, Ghana and Barbados.
Over 2000 students/youths and over 200 adult participants usually congregate every year at the project’s permanent venue in Ijegba Fore-Stage, a vast creative village located in the neighbourhood of Wole Soyinka’s residence in the Idi Aba Housing Estate Kemta Abeokuta.
Already, the organisers of the WSICE 2024 Essay Competition for Senior Secondary School Student have announced 90 finalists representing a diverse array of talented students from schools across Nigeria writing on the many lives of an irrepressible patriot, humanist and rights activist.
“These finalists have demonstrated exceptional writing prowess, creativity, and insightful perspectives on this year’s theme. Their essays stood out among numerous submissions, reflecting their dedication to scholarly inquiry and intellectual engagement,” said the jury.
“The selection process was rigorous, guided by a panel of esteemed judges who are renowned in their fields. These judges evaluated each submission based on originality, coherence, depth of analysis, and relevance to the theme. While all finalists have already distinguished themselves through their essays, examination of the submitted essays continues to determine the top three entries, ensuring the most outstanding contributions are recognised.”
Each finalist’s essay not only showcases their individual talent but also contributes meaningfully to the broader discourse on the theme. Their perspectives offer fresh insights and thought-provoking arguments that are sure to resonate with readers and inspire further dialogue.
This year’s scholarship money prizes and gift will be in excess of 10 million Naira declared by Dr. Teju Kareem, Executive Producer of WSICE programme in the last 15 years.
At last year’s event, the lawyer and rights activist, Dele Farotimi; social worker, Ier Jonathan; writer-teenage activist, Adamu Garko; broadcaster-rights activist, Ireti Bakare, among others described Soyinka as a truly Nigerian patriot.
Farotimi stated, “Nigeria is younger than Prof Soyinka. But Nigeria has never known rights, freedom or justice. Citizens are not killed the way Deborah was killed in Sokoto. Citizens don’t get routinely wounded by agents of the state. These happen in a state where citizens are routinely discounted and thrown away. The person we gathered to celebrate today has lived a life in pursuit of justice. He suffered in prison.’’
Also, Professor of English literature at the University of Maiduguri, Razinatu Mohammed, stated that there would be no justice in Nigeria because the judicial system was optimally corrupt.
The lecturer said, “Soyinka has over the years, since his youth, been fighting for justice. Our judicial system is dragging this country down. I am from Borno State where Boko Haram is making lives unbearable.”
The playwright, novelist, poet and essayist is one of the writers who have shaped modern literature. Known popularly with the moniker, Eniogun, his literature breathes elegance. A giant among his contemporaries, he bestrides the literary space like a colossus. And as Waziri Adio puts it in his Postcript, an opinion column in Thisday Newspapers, there are very few artists — living or dead — like that: rounded.
“Here too, it is difficult to find many artists who have taken on the mantle of activism and put their freedoms, livelihoods and even their lives at risk as much as Soyinka has done. At some point, some may be misled to actually think that Soyinka got the highly coveted Nobel for his activism. Of course, some of his actions, statements and choice of words stir controversies. But he cannot be accused of not taking a public and sometimes dangerous position on issues dear to him,” said Adio.
Soyinka is widely regarded with awe in Nigeria, and throughout Africa, ‘for political boldness and commanding intellect that is manifest in every genre he tackles’. “Though his real forte is drama,” said Adio, he has cut across the different genres in a manner that distinguishes him as an eminent and venerable writer. His oeuvre cannot be circumscribed in just one genre. He is a master.
Born July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, the playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, actor, director, filmmaker, memoirist, translator and even singer/song writer is a descendant of the rulers of Isara.
Wole was born the second of his parents’ seven children. His siblings were Atinuke ’Tinu’ Aina Soyinka, Femi Soyinka, Yeside Soyinka, Omofolabo ‘Folabo’ Ajayi-Soyinka and Kayode Soyinka. His father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka (whom he called S.A. or ‘Essay’), was an Anglican minister and the headmaster of St. Peters School in Abẹokuta.
Having solid family connections, the elder Soyinka was a cousin of the Odemo, or King of Isara-Remo Samuel Akinsanya, a founding father of Nigeria. Soyinka’s mother, Grace Eniola Soyinka (née Jenkins-Harrison), whom he dubbed the ‘Wild Christian’, owned a shop in the nearby market. She was a political activist within the women’s movement in the local community. She was also Anglican.
As much of the community followed indigenous Yorùbá religious tradition, Soyinka grew up in a religious atmosphere of syncretism, with influences from both cultures. He was raised in a religious family, attending church services and singing in the choir from an early age; however, Soyinka himself became an atheist later in life.
He had his primary education at St Peter’s Primary School in Abeokuta. In 1946, he was admitted to study at the Government College in Ibadan, at that time one of Nigeria’s elite secondary schools. After finishing his course at Government College in 1952, he began studies at University College Ibadan (1952–54), affiliated with the University of London. He studied English literature, Greek, and Western history.
Among his lecturers was Molly Mahood, a British literary scholar. Between 1953 and 1954, his second and last at University College, Soyinka began work on Keffi’s Birthday Treat, a short radio play for Nigerian Broadcasting Service that was broadcast in July 1954.
While at university, Soyinka and six others founded the Pyrates Confraternity, an anti-corruption and justice-seeking student organisation, the first confraternity in Nigeria.
Later in 1954, Soyinka relocated to England, where he continued his studies in English literature, under the supervision of his mentor Wilson Knight at the University of Leeds (1954–57).
After graduating from Leeds, Soyinka remained in Leeds and began working on a master’s degree programme. He intended to write new works combining European theatrical traditions with those of his Yorùbá cultural heritage. His first major play, The Swamp Dwellers (1958), was followed a year later by The Lion and the Jewel, a comedy that attracted interest from several members of London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Encouraged, Soyinka moved to London, where he worked as a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre. During the same period, both of his plays were performed in Ibadan. They dealt with the uneasy relationship between progress and tradition in Nigeria.
In 1957, his play, The Invention, was the first of his works to be produced at the Royal Court Theatre. At that time, his only published works were poems such as The Immigrant and My Next Door Neighbour, which were published in the Nigerian magazine, Black Orpheus. This was founded in 1957 by the German scholar Ulli Beier, who had been teaching at the University of Ibadan since 1950.
He, however, came to national consciousness, when he wrote the play A Dance of the Forests (which was the official independence play in 1960).
Soyinka marked the nation’s political stillbirth with the play, in which a spirit child shuttles between this life and that of the unborn. The play reflects on the ugly past and projects into a blossoming future.
“It was to warn against the replacement of external with internal domination,” said Soyinka to an interviewer. “It sprang from an early consciousness that we’re romanticising history when there’s a real problem of power.”
A Dance of The Forest, a biting criticism of Nigeria’s political elite, unsettled Nigeria’s ruling class with its subversion of the ideal of a pure, uncontaminated precolonial Africa. The play satirises the fledgling nation by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past. A Dance of the Forests revealed a dramatist who saw tomorrow.
Though he had gone on to write dozens of plays, thereafter, such as, Camwood on the Leaves, The Trial of Brother Jero, Jero’s Metamorphosis, Opera Wonyosi, Bacchae of Euripides, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, Before the Blackout, The Man Died to Requiem for a Futurologist, in less than two decades, he proved that he was a master dramaturgist.
From 1965, when as a 31-year-old young man, he replaced the recorded tape of the premier of Western Region, for which he was detained and charged but set free for want of ironclad evidence, to 1966, at the beginning of the civil war two years later, where he undertook a perilous journey to Biafra, to avert a full-blown war and the death and destruction to follow, an endeavour for which he was arrested and put in solitary confinement for two years, Soyinka has remained an enigma in national discourse.
For Soyinka, it is not enough for the artist to produce profound and socially-conscious art, the artist must also be personally involved. He has always shared his dedication to his arts with persistent struggles for freedom, justice and progress in Nigeria and beyond.
His plays have been performed around the world, his poems anthologised, his novels studied in schools and universities, while his nonfiction writing has been the scourge of many a Nigerian dictator.
Scoffing at Negritude, the francophone movement led by the Senegalese poet and President Leopold Sedar Senghor, which advocated a black African identity divorced from European rationalism, Soyinka famously said, “a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude”.
Struck by affinities between the ancient Greek and Yoruba pantheons, he adapted The Bacchae of Euripedes for Britain’s National Theatre. He adopted Ogun, the Promethean Yoruba god of iron, as a creative muse.
“Like Sophocles and Euripedes, Soyinka derived a secular poetics and aesthetics from religious mythology, fusing Yoruba and Greek elements into a distinctively African notion of tragedy,” said Malawian critic Mpalive-Hangson Msika, lecturer in English and humanities at Birkbeck College and author of the 1998 book, Wole Soyinka.
For Msika, Soyinka’s art was a precursor of the ‘hybridity’ proclaimed by postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha. Soyinka drew on O’Neill and Synge, Beckett and Brecht. His refusal to “cut off of any source of knowledge” drew opprobrium from Chinweizu and fellow Nigerian critics in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980).
Yet for Soyinka, whose 1970s prison memoir famously proclaimed “the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny,” there can be no true home without justice.”
When he senses that things like freedom and democracy are under threat in his country, he gets involved. This tendency has always led him into trouble. He confronts power with satire.
What stands Soyinka out is that he has remained consistent with his criticism of bad leadership of successive Nigerian (and African at large) governments, especially the country’s many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies. He is preoccupied with the liquidation of all forms of oppression in the continent.
According to Aysegül Sert, his strong sense of social justice caused him a lifetime of pressure and persecution; yet he persevered.
“I know it’s unbelievable but I really just prefer my peace of mind; I like to sink myself in a truly tranquil environment, which I find mostly in the forest. But (he raises his voice pronouncing those three letters), if between getting out of your house and getting into the forest you encounter something unacceptable on the way then that becomes a problem, and you cannot just enjoy what you really want until you have dealt with what you just saw,” Soyinka told Sert in the interview both had in 2023.
Soyinka’s art has always found its genesis in the African continent’s myths and mystifications, and in his own life experiences—he has been jailed on two occasions, in 1965 and again from 1967-1969, tortured, condemned to death by dictator Sani Abacha, and forced repeatedly and for long periods into hiding for his own safety.
Soyinka’s hatred for despotism, tyranny and oppression is captured in A Play of Giants, an absurdist satire on Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu and Equatorial Guinea’s Macias Nguema. His political satire on the theme of dictatorship is also interrogated in The Beatification of Area Boy, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, King Baabu and From Zia with Love.
He did not also spare the civilian regime of President Shehu Shagari, condemning it as an “insatiable robbery consortium”. His “guerrilla theatre” improvised “shot-gun sketches” outside the house of assembly. “Performances were stopped, some actors were arrested or attacked by political thugs.” He also made popular records lampooning the regime’s corruption. His film, Blues for a Prodigal (1983), intended as a “call to arms” against the regime, was seized and doctored at its Lagos premier, and Soyinka was put under house arrest for criticising election rigging. Tipped off that there was a price on his head, he fled the country for four months until Shagari was ousted. Later he campaigned for safety on Nigeria’s notorious roads.
In his preface to Opera Wonyosi, Soyinka’s version of Brecht’s Three penny Opera, which skewered the corrupt Lagos elite of the oil boom years, he wrote that art “should expose, reflect, even magnify the decadent, rotted underbelly of a society that has lost its direction… in the confidence that sooner or later society will recognise itself.” He says, “The problem hadn’t been exhausted dramatically; I wanted to take it to the limits in King Baabu.”
With works that address the clash of cultures, the interface between primitiveness and modernity, colonial interventions, religious bigotry, corruption, abuse of power, poor governance, poverty and the future of independent African nations, he has been able to achieve the status of “classic” artist, an academic staple who university professors lecture on because he must be “covered,” even if they do not appreciate his artistic accomplishments. His themes have remained constant over time and many African states are still grappling with issues he has raised since the 1950s.
“His works reveal him as a humanist, a courageous man and a lover of justice. His symbolism, flashbacks and ingenious plotting contribute to a rich dramatic structure. His best works exhibit humour and fine poetic style as well as a gift for irony and satire. These accurately match the language of his complex characters to their social position and moral qualities,” said Abayomi Awelewa, a Lecturer in African and African Diasporan Literature, University of Lagos, writing in The Conversation.
In 1986, he became the first sub-Saharan African, and is one of only five Africans, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This was in recognition of the way he “fashions the drama of existence.”
The Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Committee said: “This year’s Nobel Prize in literature goes to an African writer, Wole Soyinka (from Nigeria) … who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence… He has a large and richly varied literary production behind him and is in his prime as an author.”
Soyinka is better known more in Nigeria as an activist than a playwright, he remains an influence on younger writers. His prose, especially his novels, is not the most accessible to the average reader, but Soyinka is primarily a playwright with poetic sensibilities.
The cancer survivor, hunter, wine connoisseur, author, activist and national treasure, known simply as Wole Soyinka, can’t be easily described. He is a teacher, an ideologue, a scholar and an iconoclast, an elder statesman, a patriot, humanist and a culturalist.
In a way, Soyinka seems more worried about Nigeria’s future today than under Abacha. To him, the nature of the threat has changed. “Something has happened to the quality of sensibility in this nation,” he said. “I haven’t put my finger on it completely. But something has given in this nation.”
Indeed, Africa’s most populous nation, a country of incredible diversity in so many ways — language, religion, ethnicity, landscape — has over the past decade or so been wracked by one crisis after another. Boko Haram and its powerful offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province, have plagued the northeast, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Mass kidnappings have become a common occurrence in the northwest.
Clashes between herdsmen whose cattle destroy farmlands and farmers who expand their fields into traditional herding corridors have become a fraught political issue. Security forces target civilians, including so many young people that last year, not long after Black Lives Matter protests occurred across America, they rose up in a movement known as EndSARS (SARS refers to Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad, the police unit that protesters accused of abuses).
Not since June 12 annulment has the venerable writer been more active in the space than now. Since 2014, when he celebrated his 80th birthday, his journey has been an unending road, which has bound him with all the hurdles and trials.
At 90, it’s being so many seasons, so much change for Soyinka. His stories have continued to reflect a life well-lived. The wish is for you to be renewed in spirit and energy for guidance and wisdom. Happy birthday.
The post Wole Soyinka: From Ake to Ijegba forest, a life in full appeared first on Guardian Nigeria News.
