Wole Soyinka - Climate of Fear - The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

Reaching back through time to the thread of my earlier intervention, “Climates of Art,” made twenty-five years ago, the last word deserves to be offered on behalf of that last, doubly endangered (on account of her gender) species, victim of intolerance and fanaticism, who barely escaped the fate of the Algerian Tahar Djaout and a host of others, standing in for the disdained of the world, seeking equity for all humanity:

Some words are coarse, obscene, indecent. They make a case for censorship, such words as Pagan, heathen, infidel, unbeliever, kafiri etc. The cleric swears he’ll sweep the streets clean Of the unclean, armed with Book and Beard. Both Turn kindling, but overturn the law of physics. For the fire consumes all but the arsonist. He lives To preach another day.The promised beast Of the Apocalypse left me unbeliever Till a rambling cleric apportioned death on CNN— Surely that devil’s instrument! — on Taslima Nasrin. She wrote of an equalizing God, androgynous, Who deals, ambidextrous, with the Left and Right.

WOLE SOYINKA was born on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta,Western Nigeria, and lived with his family in the Aké quarter of the city. His homeland was then still a British dependency. His father was headmaster of an Anglican primary school, and his mother, whom he nicknamed “Wild Christian,” was a shop owner and trader. In 1981, Soyinka published Aké, a memoir about his youth, described in The New York Times as “a classic of childhood memoirs wherever and whenever produced.”

Early on, Soyinka became involved in and inspired by both Nigeria’s fight for independence and the revolt in which his mother was a leading activist against a tax on women. He described the tax revolt as “the earliest event I remember in which I was really caught up in a wave of activism and understood the principles involved. Young as I was, it all took place around me, discussions took place around me, and I knew what forces were involved. But even before [the tax revolt], I’d listened to elders talking, and I used to read the newspapers on my father’s desk. This was a period of anticolonial fervor, so the entire anticolonial training was something I imbibed quite early, even before the women’s movement.”

After studying Greek, English, and History at Ibadan University in Nigeria from 1952 to 1954, Soyinka traveled to England to study English Literature at Leeds University. On graduating, he worked as a play reader for London’s Royal Court Theatre, where he directed some of his own early plays. In 1960, he returned to Nigeria to research West African drama, and wrote and directed dramatic sketches critical of the government.

Four years later, Soyinka again ran afoul of the government. After being accused of holding up a radio station to prevent the broadcasting of false election results, he was arrested. A protest over his imprisonment was organized by an international group of writers, including Norman Mailer and William Styron. He was acquitted after a court trial.

In 1967, at the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, he was accused of helping rebels in the breakaway republic of Biafra buy jet fighters. Soyinka was arrested but never formally charged and spent most of the next twenty-seven months in solitary confinement in a cell that measured only four by eight feet.

During his imprisonment, Soyinka surreptitiously wrote on cigarette packets, toilet paper, and between the lines of books he secretly managed to acquire. Many of those scribblings were later compiled in his 1972 book The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka.

In October 1969, Soyinka was released from prison and became chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan, but the following year he went into voluntary exile in Europe for five years. During that time he served as editor of Transition, Africa’s leading intellectual journal, and taught at the University of Ghana, Accra, and Churchill College, Cambridge.

In 1975, Soyinka returned to Nigeria and the following year became professor of English at the University of Ife. During the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, he was a force in local and national politics in Nigeria and also served as a visiting professor at numerous universities, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Cambridge.

In 1986, Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African to be so honored. The Swedish Academy described him as “one of the finest poetical playwrights that have written in English.”

Between 1993 and 1998, Soyinka was again forced into exile as a result of his opposition to a military dictatorship and its brutalities. He was tried in absentia for capital treason, the charges being withdrawn after the fall of that government in 1998. Soyinka has since assumed a position as Professor Emeritus at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, but still teaches in universities in Europe and the United States.