Wole Soyinka

From Philosopedia

Soyinka, Wole (Adkinwande Oluwole Soyinka) (13 July 1934– )

• With the blood-soaked banner of religious fanaticism billowing across the skies as one prominent legacy of this millennium, Martin Luther’s famous theses against religious absolutism struck me early as a strong candidate for the best idea of the last thousand years. By progressive association, so did the microprocessor and its implications - the liberalization of access to knowledge, and a quantum boost for the transmission of ideas. There is, however, a nobler idea that has spread by its own power in this millennium and that has now begun to flourish: the idea that certain fundamental rights are inherent to all humanity.

Thus spake Soyinka, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He wrote such works as Lion and the Jewel (1963); The Interpreters (1965); La danse de la foret (1971); Les gens des marais (1971); Collected Plays (1973); Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976); and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988).

He founded a national theatre, which is now called Orisun Theatre. When he dropped a stage production of Orwell’s Animal Farm, critics attacked him as being a crypto-Marxist. Other critics, however, complain that he is not radical enough. To counter his critics, Soyinka in 1994 published Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, a volume which updates one published in 1988. In it, he states that Islam is not an African religion and reminds readers of “the unspeakable cruelties perpetrated on African humanity in the name of Islamic conversion.” Michael Gorra, of Smith College, feels the “Outrage” of the title is well chosen, for Soyinka “excoriates African intellectuals for both their reliance on ‘Western intellectual caucuses’ and their ‘self-abnegating posture before . . . Eastern Communism.’. . . Yet just when one thinks he might be ready to embrace the banner of African authenticity, Mr. Soyinka repudiates that idea as well, as a ‘rag’ behind which too many authoritarian regimes have tried to hide.” Gorra notes that although Soyinka’s parents were Christian, the Yoruban writer himself takes the Yoruba god Ogun, the deity of creativity and destruction alike, as his patron.”

In 1991, Adewale Maja-Pearce wrote Who’s Afraid of Wole Soyinka? Essays on Censorship, detailing how Soyinka was considered a threat by Nigerian military leaders. Although regarded as a hero by millions of Nigerians, certain leaders of the establishment disliked him for having issued a “call for the abolition of the theocratic ideal in all forms of government.” In the 1960s, he backed what many thought was the wrong side in his country’s civil war, for which he had to spend two years in prison, much of which was in solitary confinement. Soyinka also has written,

• As a state instrument of internal control, and even in the conduct of foreign policies (including terrorism), it is possible to suggest that religious fanaticism has once again attained prime position as the most implacable enemy of the basic rights of humanity. . . . I have one abiding religion: human liberty.

“I have nothing but contempt for religions that kill in the name of piety,” Soyinka wrote in “Why I Am a Secular Humanist.” (Free Inquiry, Fall 1997).

During the 1990s when Soyinka was critical of the military government in Nigeria, he complained that votes in a June 1993 presidential election had not accurately been counted. As a result, his passport was seized and the government refused to let him attend a human rights conference in Sweden.

He then fled in 1994, calling for an international effort to isolate the military government of General Sani Abacha. Charged in absentia with treason, he supported Ken Saro-Wiwa, a human rights activist who upon General Abacha’s orders was executed. Upon Abacha’s death in 1998, Soyinka again called upon the military to step aside and allow Ken Wiwa, son of the executed Nigerian dissident, to become president. In 1998, ever the activist, he announced the creation of a truth tribunal to expose human rights abuses by Nigeria’s military government.

“He’s a humanist, he’s a radical, and he’s always been fearless,” Dudley Thompson, the former Jamaican Ambassador to Nigeria, has said of Soyinka. Thompson resigned his post in 1995 after seeing a man set afire by a mob on the streets of Lagos.

In The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (1995), he summarizes his views about the Abacha regime, which he feels is “yet another circus of political mutants and opportunists” and “back-alley abortionists” of democracy. And he laments that Nigeria has become a “tightly sealed can within cans, within cans of worms.” His most important thesis, however, is that “ethical maps” rather than geographical ones are better for determining national boundaries. As the world becomes more transnational, he declares, nations will of necessity need to be politically progressive in order to withstand the pressures from global corporatism, racial and ethnic squabbles, and a population explosion in which fewer resources will be fought over by more and more human beings.

In 1999, now a member of the Emory University faculty in Georgia, Soyinka addressed the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City at its 101st annual ceremonial. In his Blashfield Address, “Liberty Hall and the House of Correction,” he discussed changes in the English language, remarking about “political correct” objections to words such as human, mankind, and history—hero, he noted, was named after Hero, a female, again without regard to gender. In his indictment of our culture for its compromising truth in light of the proliferation of euphemisms and jargon, he remarked that in our quest to become politically correct we risk losing reality.

(See the article about Soyinka by Ketu H. Katrak of the University of Massachusetts in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism [1994].) {The New York Times, 1 May 1997}