Wole Soyinka at 87
by Chris Dunton
In 1986, Wole Soyinka became the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (he was later to be joined by the Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, and the South Africans, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee). Poet, playwright, novelist and essayist, he has excelled in all genres by being prolific, provocative and sometimes hugely entertaining. He is often considered to be a “difficult” author: witness much of his poetry and a play such as The Road, which is deep and complex—and I would argue one of the very greatest plays written in English in the second half of the last century. But he can also be straightforward and very funny, as in satirical songs such as “Etiko Revo Wetin” (he accompanies himself on guitar) or in a play such as The Trials of Brother Jero, which crops up as a school set-text all over the place.
I have encountered Soyinka in person just twice. We both attended a conference held in Toulouse, France, which climaxed with a banquet during which Soyinka sang his songs (accompanied by aforementioned guitar) and—a significantly less scintillating performance—I sang “There’s a hole in my bucket.” Then, around the year 2000, I was local organizer when Soyinka came to Lesotho with the theatre company Nawao (that’s Nigerian for “wow!”) as producer of his political satire King Baabu, which was given two performances at the Conference Centre, Maseru. Both Soyinka—who can be prickly and demanding—and the actors and technical crew (from Switzerland, Germany, the UK and Nigeria) were extremely happy with the event, especially as it followed a not very successful tour of South Africa.
I recall with great amusement how petrified the audience was during the masquerade scene and, more seriously, how overwhelmed they were by the play’s devastating final lines. In the Republic, Soyinka had refused to give interviews, but after the first performance in Maseru he submitted to a question-and-answer session with the audience, “on any subject you like,” he said, “except for beauty contests.” That stipulation because he was sick of a row he’d got into over remarks he’d made shortly before on Nigerian television. For Soyinka is nothing if not controversial. All well and good, except that he doesn’t always check his facts. Some weeks after the southern African tour, he published an article in The Scotsman newspaper in which he confused Lesotho with Swaziland. This was embarrassing as, for all its constant political turmoil, Lesotho is a democratic, constitutional monarchy, and Swaziland a monarchical dictatorship.
Soyinka has been continuously engaged in political controversy. In 1967 he was jailed in Nigeria for almost two years and spent most of the next few decades in exile. His book, The Man Died, is perhaps the most important prison diary to come out of Africa, and I am not forgetting the many superb works produced during and after Apartheid.
At the age of 87, Soyinka is proving to be as feisty and combative as ever. One recent and very attractive example of this is his commentary on the fouling of democratic practice in the run-up to Uganda’s January 2021 Presidential election. Interviewed on this by the Guardian newspaper, Soyinka comments in a way that is both trenchant and laced with mordant humor. In the event, Yoweri Museveni claimed victory with 58% of the vote, his main opponent, Bobi Wine, reputedly coming in a poor second. Soyinka begins his Guardian account by referring to recent events in Washington, noting that “one casualty of the Capitol riot will be Uganda’s election; global outrage at the storming of the US Capitol risks diverting attention from repression by Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni.” A fair point, except that the world regularly diverts its gaze from abuses in Africa; witness recent attempts to get the UK government to wake up to what is going on in Cameroun. Soyinka says of the youthful, brave and vigorous Bobi Wine, “To me, he represents the spirit of Africa’s future.”
Yoweri Museveni is a much more difficult call. As a freedom fighter, he was instrumental in the overthrow of Idi Amin. But he has hung on to power since 1986, and Soyinka comments: “he has become in effect the very thing he fought against. Museveni’s going to fight to the end, and he’s going to fight dirty because he believes power is his natural birthright.” Then, as he continues to lambast Museveni, Soyinka’s sense of the ridiculous kicks in: “I wasn’t impressed by his intelligence . . . I remember we were in Davos and we were on a podium and afterwards I met some of his people and I said ‘Look, just tell your man not to talk about things he doesn’t understand.’ And you know what one of them said? He said: ‘Look at you. You only had him for a few minutes. We have him all the time!’”
Far less attractive than his piece on Uganda has been Soyinka’s response to the work of two writers, Caroline Davis and Juliana Spahr, who have dug up again the matter of CIA funding for African writers and literary journals in the 1960s. The fact that the CIA—directly and indirectly—provided such funding during the Cold War, in the hope of getting African writers and editors on to the side of the West, is very well documented. One had thought the matter had been laid to rest, especially with the work of the Canadian scholar, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, who in his superb book, Poetry, Print and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2017), provides the most authoritative account of the affair to date. Whatever the case, Soyinka’s reaction to Davis and Spahr is shallowly vindictive, as he threatens to pursue them “to the end of the earth and even to the pit of hell unless they supply proof of their allegation or retract what they published.” To vindicate Davis, she states “there is no evidence that Soyinka was aware of the CIA source of his patronage during the 1960s,” though she later introduces a critical note by referring to “the exceptional degree of support that was given to Soyinka by the CIA and its affiliated institutions, which he took for granted, without questioning its source.” On Soyinka’s part, then, a matter of carelessness rather than infamy.
No gainsaying, Soyinka’s stamina remains formidable. In November last year he published a novel, Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, that runs to 500 pages. This is not the longest published African novel to date: The Old Drift, a recent worldwide hit by Ethiopian novelist Namwali Serpeli, runs to 592pp, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow clocks in at 874pp. But it’s still around double the average length for a work of fiction.
The title of the novel deserves comment. It is drawn from an entry in The Book of Nigerian Facts, which states that “a 2003 study of over 65 countries suggested that the happiest and most optimistic people in the world live in Nigeria.” One has always imagined that when that entry in The Book of Nigerian Facts was composed, the compilers were holding their datasheet upside-down.
Then there is the use of the word “chronicle.” This is generally applied to an account of events arranged in chronological order, usually without much in the way of analysis or interpretation. Examples would be the two Old Testament books thus named, which largely have to do with begetting, or the mostly dry-as-dust historical record, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, only a couple of livelier sections of which are regularly studied as literature. Soyinka’s novel is, however, laden with sufficient analysis and interpretation to sink a battleship.
Certainly, there are many instances of deft humor. When, for example, one of the central characters waits for hours to be admitted to his appointment with the Prime Minister (His Excellency the People’s Steward)—with various aides and cleaners flitting in and out of the ante-room—Soyinka comments: “He was beginning to feel like Alice in Wonderland.” For metre after metre of text, however, the sheer heaviness of Soyinka’s account becomes cloying.
The blurb to the novel comments: “Soyinka has woven the story of contemporary Nigeria into the tapestry of the lives of four friends whose lives are convulsed by the vagaries and intrigues of public life,” suggesting the work will be structured along similar lines to his first novel, The Interpreters. Chronicles opens, however, with a Seeker’s audience with Papa Davina, a prophet—this in a country that is notorious for its prosperity ministries, the main purpose of which is to milk money from their congregations. The prophet holds forth in a speech that suggests an interesting twist to the theory of entropy and energy: “There are many, including our fellow citizens, who describe this nation as one vast dung-heap. But you see, those who do, they mean to be disparaging. I, by contrast, find happiness in that. If the world produces dung, the dung must pileup somewhere. So if our nation is indeed the dung-heap of the world, it means we are providing a service to humanity.”
Soyinka’s acid satire builds up over the first few pages of Chronicles, with a reference to a Ministry of Happiness, one function of which is “the constant exponential creation of chieftaincy titles”, a process that necessitates “the generation of carnivals almost as a daily event, enabling the growth of tourism, and a boom in the complementary industry of kidnapping for ransom.” This, however, builds up into a 15-page set piece, and there are points at which one’s eyes glaze over, only to be jolted open again by the next cunning wisecrack.
The first entry of one of the central characters is deferred until p53, with the appearance of Duyole Pitan-Payne, “engineer and acknowledged leader of the eccentric Gong of Four” (and yes, that is gong, not gang, for reasons I don’t have space to explain). As a further example of his over-saucing of his material, on Duyole’s meeting with Prophet Davina, whom we bumped into at the beginning of the novel, Soyinka elaborates: “He completed the remaining sixteen steps up the pebbled slope, glossed by myriad feet in the quest for a cure, a fulfilment, search for, or celebration of a preferment, a simple remedy for any of the catalogue of human woes, cravings and inadequacies” (one is reminded how, in David Leavitt’s novel, Martin Baumann, an editor distributes a memo to her staff regarding unsolicited submissions received by the magazine, which classifies “myriad” as one of the words “not to read beyond”).
With the entry of the second of the Gong of Four, the surgeon Menka, Soyinka has an opportunity to explore the grimmest depths of contemporary Nigerian experience as the medic repairs the bodies of casualties of Boko Haram and that of an eight-year-old “housemaid”, the victim of serial rape by a businessman and his 19-year-old son.
At just over the 300-page mark there is an explosion at Duroye’s house. Here something like a conventional (thriller-type) plot emerges, something like briskness. When Duroye is freighted off to Austria for neuro-surgery, the chaotic scene at the airport is very funny; when his wife’s wishes are later discounted—“She counted for nothing”—the cruelties Soyinka recounts are unspeakable.
Menka the surgeon comes from a village called Gumchi, where the Prime Minister’s favorite kola nuts are harvested. In a delightful twist near the end of the novel, the nuts are discovered to contain edible gold. A brilliant final plot twist that has to do with cryptology almost makes the 500-page haul through Chronicles seem worthwhile.
The publisher of the novel, Bookcraft, is situated in Ibadan, Nigeria, and the hardback edition they have produced is one of the most handsome this reviewer has come across in years. No printer is cited; one suspects the physical production of the book may have been carried out in Singapore or some similar high-tech printing center. The ancient art of proofreading has not, however, been brought into play. A checklist of Soyinka’s 70-plus published works at the end has some titles missing and others wrongly classified. Throughout the novel, there are dozens of typos and other minor errors. While his stamina and verve are not in doubt, maybe Soyinka’s attention to detail is beginning to wane. Chronicles is, however, inescapable reading for anyone with an interest in Nigeria as the powerhouse of African writing (and I am using the word “inescapable” here with its connotations of imprisonment, and moreover of a long-term sentence).
Dr. Chris Dunton, formerly Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho, now lives in Bournemouth, England.