The Writer as a Prophet and Social Reformer

                Soyinka’s The Interpreters was published in 1964 and was a recommended title for A’ 

Level students of Literature in English of those days. Somebody rightly compared the work with James Joyce’s Ulysses. 

                Soyinka’s dream for the greatness of a newly born nation Nigeria was vivid and clear. He saw in the dream a country devoid of corruption, nepotism, tribalism, pretension to any ideology and elitist hypocrisy, especially as could be seen exhibited in aping the British. He saw a nation where the young intellectuals had the freedom to unleash the power of the mind; he saw the ability of the young turks in their different skills and professions that must be left unfettered to flourish in order to pursue and overtake the world. He saw so far to those youngsters as well as to the leadership of the country that must shun the dominance of foreign culture and embrace Africa. But then, the realities stared him in the face and he woke up to fight the prevalence of corruption and the other ills in th society. He rose up with his bazooka of satire. By the time he was through with the Chief Winsalas, the Sir Derins, -  the Ex-Judge whom he de-robbed and stripped naked even in death -  the fastidious Faseyis, the phonetic affecting Oguazors and the hypocrite Dr. Lumoyes of this world and their ilks in the Nigeria setting of the sixties, few years after independence, these characters of the novel, they were battered and badgered.

What makes The Interpreters especially unique among the novels of that age was that it was about the sophisticated elites of the society. To be able to get along with this novel then, one must be able to pry into the great minds of those men who had returned from the Western world – young and virile, as they say. Today, I cannot but wonder how the author feels about his predictions of more than five decades ago that have come to pass in their various forms.

 He is today still active in writing articles full of wisdom and counsels. It is like he has been telling himself, It is not yet time to rest. Th, to me, is is a blessing of a kind because as a boy myself in those days, I was not privileged to lay my hands on his writings; but now, he comes often in this or that intervention, thanks to the Internet and such papers like the Sahara Reporters and Premium Times Nigeria.

                    The Writer as a Patriot Par Excellence

             In that first time encounter with Wole Soyinka in his The Interpreters, I was intellectually hooked to his work  for life.  He and another professor  were to me the first horses, who I must look up to and watch to run the course of life straight and successfully. Professor  Awojobi, the  other one, was a great friend from the pages of the Daily and Sunday Times of Nigeria newspapers. He was – apart from being a professor of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Lagos (which made that Citadel of Learning the best place in Africa to acquire great knowledge in Mechanical engineering in those days), a scholar, a physicist,  a mathematician and an inventor – and, crowning it all, an Essayist and an author. – Those were the days of men  of universal scholarship.  What then immediately attracted me to him was the ease with which he quoted Shakespeare and, of course, the lucidity of his writing. His column bore the hallmark of his passion and life: a miniature picture of him donning his academic gown and cap. I was to learn to later in life connect the Professor with a unique character in The Interpreters.

           Tai Solarin took the third angle of this tripartite mentors. He was a great columnist of whom Soyinka was to comment, in his answer to Mallam D., the man who was quizzing him about his trip to the East to see Ojukwu, in his The Man Died:

“Tai Solarin does not claim to be an intellectual. He is a dedicated and selfless social reformer whose thinking is original but sometimes confused. The country could do with a lot more confused but original thinkers like Tai.”

          In one age, the police was looking for Awojobi to arrest. They could not locate him anywhere on earth. He was like the prophet being sought after by King Ahab of Israel and could not be located. The man was simply having a nice time with Tai at the Mayflower College premises. But I am far out of my subject matter.

Nowadays, I am hardly able to remember that Wole Soyinka has joined the Octogenarian Club. I  am only barely able to remember because of the shock of his white hair and the beard. He has hardly slowed down a bit in his doughty intellectual soldiering. He is constantly in the air like a bird, his continual headlong rush to danger non-abating which necessarily triggers off horror of a kind from us his admirers.

His patriotism winged him away to Biafra to salvage a nation on the path to bulkanisation; propelled him out of the campus of the University of Ibadan for that radio-hold up; swirled him around like a whirlwind only to be caught in the infamous Araba war cry of the north. . . and, down to the days of the locusts of Abacha, shut him in the midst of the dead massacred by Abacha goons, made him stand to count the deads and to tell reporters later that he counted more than two hundred. Then came the days of exile!

 His life activities defined for me what a nation is. And so in my twenties, I did not have to define myself as a tribe. In any gathering where there was any need to introduce oneself and mention where one hailed from, I simply mentioned my name and proudly introduced myself as a Nigerian.

         The Writer as a Mentor

        My anger spumes… and I reel to and fro, a drunk.

        I am really reeling with spuming anger!

    My face is set hard as a piece of steel at the great man with an eternal youthful looks and attributes. I am mad with Wole Soyinka, that relentless partridge always in celerity of motion. He is more than the common human race that we all are. He simply outpaces that human level of existence, as he would wont to do, with those his long strides. As a scholar, a writer, an activist and a constant conscience of nation and the world, he has set the standards of scholarship and conscience to despairing heights for the creature called the human kind.

          I should suspect it coming the year I met him in the pages of newspapers in my formative years in Imade College, Owo. It was the year Kalakuta Republic came into the national news, when it was invaded by soldiers and sacked. Soyinka was around to make one railing or the other against the military government. It was also the year of sudden surge in the price of cocoa world wide. My parents , cocoa farmers, made an even break and I had more than the usual pocket money. So I sneaked out of the boarding house to the best-stocked bookshop in town.

Wole Soyinka – the name grabbed my attention immediately as I looked across the bookshelves. It was also appealing. So I bought two of his tittles along with several others including Chukwuemeka Ike, Alex Laguma, Sonela Dipoko, Lenrie Peters and several others of the Heineman’s African Writers’ Series. Soyinka’s The Interpreters was published by Fontana Books as also was Chukwuemeka’s The Naked Gods and Toad for Supper. The other title of Soyinka was The Man Died but this one was published by Pengiune.

           Niran Olowofela, my friend and classmate, wanted, when I arrived with my load of books to the school, and had The Interpreters. Bode Abulatan, and Benson Aruna and several other  friends, including the notorious Popusco, Samuel Oluwole Oritsa came around to pick their own choices. In those days, exchanging of books among young friends was the real life like the modern generation’s exchanging of video films and other digital devices.

           Niran O'Fela quickly returned to me the second day with the one he borrowed with a dejected look, commenting, I cannot understand a single line and he [the author] seems to be abusing God here.  And he returned the novel, pointing out in the first line, of Egbo’s statement.

 I read the line: “I don’t need his pity. Someone tell God not to weep in my beer.” I had no comment on that. So my friend dropped the novel and picked another. It was the lot of Ristian Kunle Olakunori, another classmate and friend - he died as a lecturer at Nnamdi Azikwe Universwity, Awka - to pick this novel and stay with it until he finished it. He came back to argue that the writer was deliberately hard in the first few pages of the book; and that was vantage Ristian. He was a great critic of works of literature and no writer, however great, escaped his criticisms. Well, I still had nothing to say yet.  

            When Miss Mary Stansfield became our teacher in English in Literature, she started with Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation. It was a complete departure from those poems we had read and mastered. It was fierce, defiant and unconventional. The rhythm ran riot and had no discernible rhyme scheme. These constituted the training we had: rhyme scheme, division of stanzas, regular rhythm – like the beating of the heart, you know – theme, tune and mood. God, were we hard put to it to fit the poem into these and many more! We could not even determine the mood. It was jagged and grating.

The price seemed reasonable, location/ Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived//. . .  Silence. Silenced transmission of/ Pressurised good-breeding. Voice, when it came,/ …What was the need of repeating the same words, even when nuanced: Silence. Why that period after just a word?  Could a word of just three syllables, SILENCE, make a complete sense or statement? Then again, SILENCED TRANSMISSIN OF,/. . .

The teacher pointed out to us that the poet was a dramatist and a playwright; this explained the conversational mode of the satirical poem. That introductory beginning put us into a better state of mind not to run away from Literature in English.

            “You see,” explained Miss Stansfield, ” Soyinka is a very wise man. He is compressing so many thoughts in a single compound-word.” Now, I was a science student and was on the way to becoming a scientist, or an engineer or a medical doctor. But this re-orientation was insidiously settling on me and coalescing. Who would not want to be like this great man of amazing cerebral excellence?  “You see, Soyinka is a very wise man…l” In no time, I was imitating his cerebrated writing of using monosyllable to stand for “compressed thoughts.” Miss Stansfield who also doubled as my English was horrified and warned me to desist forthwith if I did not want to fail English Language. I was flummoxed. How possible? If I wrote like this man of great depth of thought, how come WAEC would not recognize the worth of me and give me distinction! However, I followed the advice of my friend-teacher towards the end of my studies and barely escaped scoring a bad failure in WASCE. I was to know later in life that  WAEC with all its glory was not as bright as Soyinka; in fact it could not decipher some of his "complex thoughts" which is why I am unhappy with him: my hankering after him swayed my destiny which was to be a scientist or medical doctor. And now, of all my efforts, I have not come any where near him. I am mad with Soyinka. If anybody sees him, tell him that I am angry with him for his pricing everything too high for other mortals.

           I was too much in love with Soyinka; too much in love with the literary world because of him. I thought one could only become a universal scholar like him if he did literature. As a matter of fact, I collected the form of the University Joint Matriculation of Great Britain. My choice was the University of Leeds where the man himself schooled. I simply wanted to trail him around. But then, that university could not take me as I did not have so much money to offer for my education. What a pity!

            That was a long time ago, close to four decades now.

 Let me pick the story of my reading the works of Soyinka where I left off. Our life as secondary students in those days was interspersed with hard class works and reading for pleasure. One of those days, I picked my copy of The Interpreters  and flipped open the first page and read, “Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes.” This was Sagoe grumbling as he stuck fingers in his ears against the mad screech of iron tables. In just a chapter the novelist has shown us the dramatic personae of Sagoe, Egbo, Kola, Sekoni and Bandele, all intellectuals which the writer shows to be interpreting the society, our nation. The complexity of the book makes it the more appealing to me. Soyinka’s books and essays are just the works I could be caught reading over and over and again. In 1996, I used these characters in my collection of stories. But that is for another day.

           I read and savoured the grace of the “intellectual and modern” novel. It appealed, I now know, to my sinful intellectual pride.

 I got to the second chapter and read:  They left the club towards morning. Two years later, while waiting to get a job before I would succeed in travelling to Leeds I started writing my own novel.  I wrote in the opening line: They returned in the early hours… in fact the title of the novel was The Searchers. It was cute to be intellectually sound and modern like this prodigy of a man, a man of letters.

          Of course, my convergence with one of the greatest minds to traverse the planet earth, the man called Soyinka, is not in all things though he has helped sharpened my adolescent age in a very dramatic  way. I still want to possess the ability to bring out thoughts in lucidly flowing  and flowery language like him and have always striven to solve all my personal and national and other-world-view problems and difficulties by, like him, the applications of my intellect. I am a very simple man who always wants to be up and running around for justice like the indefatigable man. I am still working on the "complexity" of my mind so as to be able to appeal to the depths of the sound-minded young ones.

        The convergence ends here. I am what he will think suffers from “bornagainism.” Yes, I am a Christian who is in full worship of my elder brother Jesus as he, he once said in an interview, his elder brother, Ogun.

                May God bless this great one who has traversed our earth and our hearts, blazing forth like lightening. May Nigeria have him around for a long time to come and may he be blessed with the face of Yaweh