From this interview, we learn that Wole Soyinka once enlisted in the army with the aim of going to fight for the freedom of South Africans and Nelson Mandela. However, he deserted on learning he was going to be drafted to defend the Suez Canal…
The life and times of Prof. Wole Soyinka,
especially in a piece that attempts to chronicle his acts of bravery, will be
incomplete without the familiar story of how he broke into the Nigerian
Broadcasting Corporation studio in Ibadan during the Western Region’s political
crisis in 1965.
Soyinka tersely dismisses the question on
that with this:
“I had matured into a period of a people on
the rise, on the move – people of dignity who refused that their voices should
be stolen, arrogantly and contemptuously. There have been quite a few moments
of my existence among people like that… I was one of them, my voice was being
stolen. I could not sit down and accept that somebody should steal my voice. I
felt at one with the majority of the people.”
Wole Soyinka’s involvement in the
Nigeria-Biafra Civil War for which he was sent to prison is even a bigger event
in his life without which his life history will be incomplete. Hear him:
“We were more or less a family of artistes at
Independence. There was a creative family and that family was being scattered.
I was in Stockholm in 1967 for the Scandinavian-African Writers conference. And
one of the saddest moments for me was that so many faces were missing from
Nigeria – expected but not there: Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel
Okara – the Biafrans were missing even in safe Stockholm. The drums of war were
no longer muted.
It was the last chance for us to meet and
talk about what was now inevitable but could still, just maybe, be averted at
the last moment. I returned to Nigeria very sad and I was feeling as if I lost
a limb – several limbs in fact. It was like – was this going to be it? We would
become enemies confronting each other across the line of fire? There were
people who were ready to take up arms – like Christopher Okigbo.
At the time I had already run into
Christopher Okigbo – it took place in Brussels – I even recall the name of the
hotel – Hotel Koenisburg – purely by accident, and I knew he had come to
purchase arms for Biafra. I challenged him and he admitted it. All these
fortuitous encounters impressed on me a sense of urgency. Later I had a meeting
earlier in London – I mention that in my IBADAN – where we talked about the
possibility of going to Biafra on a last-minute mission of intervention. Again,
as I disclosed in my memoirs, Aminu Abdullahi who is now dead, actually
volunteered to go – this was at the meeting in London.
We hooked up around a place called the
Transcription Centre. We didn’t even know which way some of us would go. Would
JP consider himself an Easterner or westerner? It was the breakup of a robust
circle of creativity. We decided that Aminu should not go because he looked so
clearly a northerner. We said, “Look, you won’t even get past the first
roadblock.”
Because at that time, there was such
bitterness, murderous paranoia, and it was understandable… on account of the
pogrom which had taken place earlier…. I went to the conference, my colleagues
were not present and when I returned to Nigeria, the first skirmishes had taken
place – on the northern border, and I realised that soon, it would be
impossible to travel to Biafra. I was restless.
I knew I couldn’t function until I had
crossed the lines in search of them. I said, ‘When I get there, I will find
Christopher (Okigbo) somewhere’ and then get to Ojukwu. That was the reason why
I went, a chance at that last moment that something could be done. Some people
continue to narrate that I went across to persuade Ojukwu to renounce the
secession. No, I didn’t go to persuade Ojukwu to renounce anything – it was far
more complicated.
Some of us still felt that it was still
possible to avoid an all-out shooting war. Let me state this clearly that I
totally disagree with the philosophy of unity at any cost, a simplistic
rendition of that pietistic mantra: United we stand, divided we fall. What
infantile nonsense! It has no basis in logic or rationality whatever.
Sometimes, not only is it that “small is beautiful” but also “small is
perfectible”.
People have the right anytime to say, “We
want to leave this union, whatever it is”, any kind of union, politically or
whatever type of union. Peoples have the right at any time to say, “Let’s have
a referendum in this area.”. That is, for me, part and parcel of democracy.
Look at what’s happening in even England today – Scotland wants independence.
Long, long ago, Cameroon and Nigeria, the people detached themselves from
Nigeria here and went to Cameroon. Ethiopia-Eritrea remains instructive, so
does the even more recent example of the Sudan. Whenever things get to a
certain unmanageable stage, people look at separationist options.
There is nothing – I want to stress this –
absolutely nothing morally wrong or pernicious in a people saying – we want our
own autonomous unit. It’s a childish notion, something which has been implanted
in our brain, to chant or be conditioned by the gospel of: “What white man has
put together, let no black man put asunder.”
What kind of nonsense is that? True, I do
prefer that we stay together, if only because I don’t like to keep spending
time obtaining visas when I want to go see a former next-door neighbour and
collaborators. Also, I am partial to existence within a plurality of cultures.
It offers a richness of resources, a dynamic of infinite sensibilities. But to
say that you must go to war over “unity”? No! Go the civilised way –
plebiscite.
Instead we wasted an estimated two million
lives through bullets, sickness and starvation – to preserve a European myth?
It’s a lack of maturity.
In the interview, Soyinka has a piece of
advice for the Abachas. He also appealed to the then President Jonathan
Goodluck to delete the name of Abacha from the list of recipients of national
honours for the planned centenary celebration:
My advice to young Abacha is “Don’t take on
your betters, you are a neophyte. Don’t try to intervene in what you don’t
understand. Go and learn from my attitude towards your sister whom I met
without any rancour and learn to deal with history in the same way. Above all, don’t
promote calumny”.… We must speak candidly.
It is also a symptom of where we are, that
the son of a thief, an international thief, so attested, documented, whose
crimes are being unveiled every day, should feel entitled to defend the name of
his father at the expense of truth. And that is where I wish to end this theme
– I repeat my call on President Jonathan to have the moral courage to rescind –
I know he won’t do it, but we shall keep saying it at every opportunity – he
must find a way to rescind that Centenary Honours List because that it is a
disgrace and a shame on this nation.
It makes me embarrassed to call myself a
Nigerian; that a sitting president should compile the names of a hundred
supposedly worthy people and include that of a loathsome dictator among them.
It should have been sufficient, if he wanted to honour the military, he should
just have picked one representative of the breed – maybe somebody like Murtala
Muhammed.
So that the military don’t complain that they
were passed over. But to put Sani Abacha on that list side by side with Chinua
Achebe, Emeka Anyaoku, Mike Adenuga etc. etc., is an abomination. That Honours
event was an abomination. Jonathan’s act was a symbolic negation, a desecration
of everything a number of us have stood for in all our lives. Let that list be
discarded and consigned to oblivion to make way for a truly sustainable one.
And no amount of trickle-down or newly inventive calumny will stop that call,
as long as I choose to carry a document of Nigerian citizenship.”
For those who criticise Soyinka’s writing as
being too Eurocentric, too modernist, and of Soyinka himself suffering from
Hopkins Disease, Kongi has these for them:
“I write as the Muse dictates, not the
critic. I distinguish between censorship and criticism. Censorship is telling a
writer you must use this sole ideological prism to view and transmit reality or
your art is engaged in social treachery. For me, that is pernicious,
intolerably arrogant and fascistic.”
From this interview, we learn that Wole
Soyinka once enlisted in the army with the aim of going to fight for the
freedom of South Africans and Nelson Mandela. However, he deserted on learning
he was going to be drafted to defend the Suez Canal:
“I have been obsessed with South Africa since
I was politically conscious. I told you, that was why I entered the military as
a student joining the officer corps for a short while. I fled when they were
going to pack me to the Suez instead of where I wanted to go – which was South
Africa. I packed up my kit, saying “No, I wanted to train for South Africa, not
for the Suez. You go and capture a canal on someone’s land, then declare war
when he resists, and then you call me up to serve. Remember the Anglo-French
invasion? I was called up and I said “No, that was not it”. That was why I left
the officer corps.”
On the granting of pardon to Mohammed Abacha
by Goodluck Jonathan on the N446 billion issue, Soyinka says it’s obscene:
“It is obscene. Whether we are talking about
Alamieyeseigha or we are going backwards to take in Obasanjo’s pardon to Salisu
Buhari when a precedent was set. And it’s sad that Jonathan has continued in
that line of cavalier pardon and especially in Mohammed Abacha who has been
proven to be a torturer in addition to an incontinent receiver of national
loot. Please, all of you bear in mind, it’s not as if these crimes are not in
the public domain.”
[OpinionNigeria]
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