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.