By Kola Johnson– July 13, 2024, literary leviathan, social critic, reformer, and world acclaimed winner of the global Nobel diadem, Professor Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka, marks exactly 90 years of eventful sojourn on the earthly hemisphere.
So much had been written about this intriguingly peculiar homo-sapien, that virtually little or nothing is left as a novel realm of exploration.
However, permit me to express, even if by way of recycling familiar old stuff, that one particularly mystifying puzzle that has continued to exact my imagination over the years, about this man, is the exasperating air of mystery he conjures.
Indeed given the truism that every man is inherently unique unto himself, that no two men are exactly similar to each other – one fact which conspicuously stands out clear however,is that Soyinka resides not only in his own unique world, but is infinitely miles apart from the common run.
Consider for instance, the weird conjuration of the Pyrates confraternity and the seismic exudation of far-reaching consequences on the social landscape, coming on the heels of it’s formation, and you seek an originative personification – only to discover a teenage visionary idealist of frail physique, whose bizarre brain-wave several decades ago, as a student of the prestigious University College Ibadan – in those pioneering good old days of Dr. Kenneth Mellamby – had converged towards the emanation of this intriguingly puzzling idea.
And his tigritude? Aah! – a province that borders on something else – or how else do you describe the spectre of a lone gun man in daring defiance,s tealing into the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation – bereft of any extraneous aide or consort of any sort, holding the hosts of functionaries in the broadcasting room, scared stiff in panic – in a frenzy of desperation geared at stalking the broadcast of Akintola’s phoney victory in the tomfoolery of the 1965 Western regional election.
Looking back over the years, one discerns, whether rightly or wrongly, that Soyinka’s tapestry in the sphere of social activism, seems to be woven, whether on deliberately disciplined resolve or even unwittingly, in the contexture for self preservation, not necessarily of phobic escapism to dodge the column, for fear of consequential reprisal of any sort,but for gainful conservation ,in the tripartite mental, physical and emotional, not necessarily as an end in itself, but essentially where and when expedient, solely for fortifying the voltage for the struggle.
For instance, one might wish to note that at a time when there appeared to be an actively engaging harvests of players on the turf of reformational agitation and criticism,as personified in the Awos, Tai Solarins, Ayodele Awojobis, Bala Usmans, Bade Onimodes, Gani Fawehinmis, Ola Onis, Beko Kutis, Femi Falanas, Olisa Agbakobas and co – Soyinka’s tempo appeared somewhat tempered – with flashes of his fangs only drawn at critical moments.
This was very much unlike later, when the collective absence of these illustrious patriots evoked the onus of his full throttle engagements.
It becomes equally apposite to remark in futherance that Soyinka’s emphasis on the fundamental, which at times, impels him to exercise matured restraint at certain expedient moments, contrasts very much with the untramelled free-rein of a Fawehinmi,who for instance would spare no pains in engaging Tinubu in a ruthless fight to finish, during the certificate palaver which erupted shortly after he assumed the Lagos gubernatorial cockpit. This was in spite of Tinubu’s affinal empathy and appreciable propinquity with pro-democracy institutions and libertarian struggles.
In this regard, keen public observers would readily recall the explosive battle of wits which transpired between Fawehinmi on one hand and Beko Ransome Kuti, who chided and brought the inimitable lawyer and social critic to intensely expressed reprobation, insisting that Fawehinmi actually had some surreptitious personal agenda against the then Lagos State governor, while merely feigning the supposedly objective intervention as sheer facade.
One more instance that yet readily comes to mind, was that during the OPC crisis which pitched the Gani Adams faction against its rival counter-poise – that is the Fasheun’s faction – Fawehinmi did not hesitate – as it were at that time – to pitch tent with the Gani Adams faction, while brushing off the Fasheun’s faction with doses of uncomplimentary verbiage.
For Soyinka, it is often not his style, as could verily be discerned, to often pertain his mind on such issues of relative peripheral value, except of course it portends something of ominous consequences to the society.
Again,it need be noted that Fawehinmi’s fistic propensity – as could clearly be seen from the fore-going; which propels him to lock horns, virtually at every perceived quarters that tickled his fancy, contrasts with Soyinka’s strategic selection of pitched battles – which he carries to the very quarters that matter – that is the power cabal of the moment, at the fountain of authority.
Here therefore lies the economic essence of conservation as earlier mentioned, in contrasting comparative allusion to the no-holds-barred propensity of Fawehinmi on the other hand.
At this juncture, it probably might not be out of place, to ascribe to the fore-going, coupled of course with the natural gift of longevity, a quota of relevance, no matter how minute, to Soyinka’s enduring physical preservation, in the sense that while virtually the first generation tribe of social critics and reformers had expired in the carnal sense of the physical, Soyinka today remains the last man standing.
Apart from the fore-going,which perceptually might be ascribed in descriptively lingual categorisation as “the economy of efforts”, one outrightly queer aspect throwing up yet another dimension of his enigma, like the proverbial cat with nine lives, was that this man went through a chemotherapy for cancer and surprisingly dusted the menacing specter of funereal death, often coming in predictably empirical matter of course, via the beguiling wing of that notoriously debilitating infirmity, verily dreaded as a magisterial death announcer.
That he achieved this feat against cancer,the invincible ripper,was in itself, a big deal.Yet,scoring that epic runaway,even at a well advanced age of over 80yrs,passes by every stretch of imagination as a “bigger deal”.
Prior to this,which hitherto may not have availed to popular public knowledge,but for the fact that he ventured to furnish us,of his own free volition,never for once,were the public ever treated to the minutest dosage of news of any supposed set back in health with regards to this mythical persona.
At the level of the wit and intellect, one might well essay a guess , without being off the mark – that the power cabals ever to have defined the space of post-independent politics to date, would in every likelihood, have been disposed to parting with every dime in its coffers, for a dosage of Fawehinmi’s chiding, than the talismanic excoriation of Soyinka’s verbiage, no matter however casually delivered
It was therefore not surprising that this clout of oracular authority and mystique was all it took to dismiss Obasanjo’s frantic bid for the exalted secretary-generalship of the United Nations, years back, immediately after his first phase of leadership as a military ruler.
Indeed, that the Gowon administration could muster the ruthless gut to hound him into the retributive gulag of preventive detention for as much as twenty-eight months or there-about, on charges of alleged conspiracy with Ojukwu, the Biafran war-lord of blessed memory, was aptly corroborative enough of the terror quantity, the Ishara-born Professor of Dramatic Arts posed to successive regimes of the day; especially of the reactionary anti-progressive tendency.
And this much, no less a figure than Gowon, did admit, when some years ago, he openly expressed in an emotive pathos of remorse, an unreserved apology to Soyinka; pleading the alibi that failure to have sentenced him to a spell in the coolers – as they did at that time, might have spelled consequences of ominously disastrous proportions for his government; in view of the seismic bravura and irrepressible idealistic temper – defining his rebellion – of a justified hue of course – against the power cabals of the day.
The Buhari-Idiagbon regime, was all it took, to bring out a markedly contrasting dissonance, within the context of Fawehinmi’s stout supportive stance on one hand, as against Soyinka’s implacably opposed stance to the incumbent military junta, then extant on the seat of power.
And as we, of course, would remember, Soyinka’s magisterial pronouncement on the regime, described by him as a deaf government, was a major jab, which among other concatenation of factors, contributed the most in weathering the defences of that regime of benevolent despots – thus laying it bare for grabs by any ambitious adventurer, tickled by the fancy of power usurpation
Needless to emphasize that on this particularly momentous occasion, the immensely respectable clout of a Fawehinmi could do but nothing to avail by way of a reversal of its fated evanishment.
A similar discordant tune was to play up during the IBB era, which because of its initial liberal democratic pretension, had elicited the ” listening ears” compliments of Soyinka – prior of course, to the tomfoolery of the June 12 annulment – while ironically, the same government it was – that subjected Fawehinmi to the most debilitating buffetting of his existence, courtesy of his experiential near-death encounter in the ogyiigian killer pit, known as Gashua prison.
In retrospect, it becomes pertinent to note that in the past, governments were rather scared of a confrontational ruffling of feathers with Soyinka. This was not unlikely the reason why even when he unleashed the penetrating Barb of “a deaf government” on the benevolently despotic Buhari/Idiagbon regime – the latter, on the score of pragmatic expedience, rather saw enough reasons to tolerate his sacred cow factor, enabled by his literary global clout and celebrated acclaim in social reformation and criticism. But maybe it would have been an altogether different story, had the regime been able to last a reasonable distance
However, with Abacha’s advent on the centre stage of power, Soyinka needed no further signal in the wake of the inquisitorial wave of dastardly assassinations dogging every nook and cranny of the national space – to excite his legs for a marathon – finding himself at the end of the venture – in exilic sojourn, initially to U.K. and subsequently the United States – whereupon he engaged the Abacha governmental creed of the butchery in a fight to finish.
It might also be pertinent to note that at a time when the nation languished in an ominous hypnotic spell as Obasanjo and his happy-go-lucky buffons of sycophantic ego massagers busied themselves with the constitutional perfidy of the third-term agenda – one remembers with a sense of tribute and admiration, how Soyinka’s talismanic commandment on the progressive forces to go back to the trenches, rumbled through the eerie slumbers of the collective national spirit to galvanize the agitational tempo, with every acidic vehemence; to the disposal of the debauchic agenda of the highest order, into the garbage can of stern rejection.
This piece will indeed not be complete without reference, to the literary leviathan of global renown in the context of the recently concluded 2023 election, in which an envious bunch of notorious racial bigots, surreptitiously veiled as obidients, had sought to accomplish their hitherto elusive long-standing ambition to calumniate the eminent literary genius and statesman in the bid to bring him to disrepute, motivated by acrimonious bad blood and tribal envy.
Imagine for instance,the umbrage, devoid of the traditional African deference for old age, befittingly evocative of the landmark “ranting of an ant” of Chuba Okadigbo, in his riposte to the Great Zik at that dark, immediate aftermath of the laughable threadbare phoney of 1983,called election- with which they swooped on Wole Soyinka, just for his reasoned elderly admonishment on the nutsy band of off-hook scoundrels parading as Pyrates fraters; consigning the cultivated virtue of home training to the dogs in their reprobative burlesquing of Tinubu in the heat of the electioneering campaign.
Could one imagine their gibberish rantings effusively showered in their wanton abrasiveness against the Yoruba-born globally acclaimed genius of all times, for no imaginable reason whatsoever for attempting to bring the wisdom of the elders to bear in corrective reproval, urging them to see reason.
Imagine again, the latest in their primitive savage streak, displayed with untamed recklessness in their churlish and pepper-market jabbles unleashed in their brusquely uncouth mannerism against the global literary giant, just because of his latest post-election commentaries in which he made very apt and cogent observations about the notorious band of obidients.
In the same vein of bilious ingratitude to a man evidently noted for his pro-Biafran stance during the civil war, one recalls in aptly analogous precedent, Ibos reciprocal code of appreciation to Lieutenant Colonel Victor Banjo; ditto, Lieutenant Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi despite their epic sacrifices for the Igbo cause.
Indeed looking back decades ago, that moment of destiny, when Soyinka bagged the Nobel literary diadem; unarguably a staggering all-time feat in the annals of black achievements, he had even if unknown to him, stepped on the wounded toes of some inferiority-ridden Ndigbos, who in turn, will never forgive him, just for that singular feat which they had cherished with passionate fervor, that it should have belonged to one of them, or a non-Yoruba, rather than a Yoruba.
On this patrimonial inheritance of genetic anti-Yoruba obsession, Chinua Achebe,a foremost exemplar of anti-Yoruba racial hatred could poignantly be seen as taking the lead, as of course signaly evident in the retrospective play-back 38years ago, when in the wake of the frabjous ambience heralding the exhilarating announcement of the Yoruba-born scholar and world-renowned erudite as the succeeding custodian of the Nobel inheritance, he (Achebe) ascended the rooftop with an unwarranted gaffe that the global literary diadem was by no implicit assumption, a caveat for the Asiwaju title of African literature
Indeed, Soyinka himself could not help but describe the banal effusion of the arch-Igbo tribalist as uncalled for and disappointing.
More-over, one recalls, as it becomes pertinent to express at this juncture, in accentuating the current theme to more poignant grasp, how Soyinka, in an article personally written in an edition of This Day Newspaper, could not help but lament a conspiratorial wave of propaganda insurgently saturating the public space; then being championed by an Igbo-born professor, who animated by a weirdly hunch of diabolism; had mischievously sought to forge an interpretatively suspicious link between Achebe’s fatal accident that rendered him mortally crippled, shortly after one particular edition of his birthday anniversary, to the gift of a white cow presented to him, on that particular occasion by Soyinka – ostensibly as an innocent well-intentioned goodwill gesture to a comrade in the literary fraternity – but which the arch Igbo tribalist and a supposedly enlightened professor had in an unguarded magisterial whims, effectively poisoned the vulnerable willing herd of fellow arch tribalists, who in their bizzare flight of fancy, had to construe in the grotesque coloration of occultic wickedness.
Yet, this was the same Soyinka, whose sacrificial immolation for the Biafran cause, in the thick of the civil war, earned him a harrowing 28-month ordeal in the gulag, during the Gowon era.
Achebe will not allow any moment to slip by without a paludal inveighing of Awo, as the ominous harbinger paving the fenestra for the demonising incursion of the tribal monster into the political hemisphere.
In an inexplicable quibble of revisionism, we would all recall the unrepentant tribal bigot, who was so quick to the post, harassing Awo as the primordial agent of dispersal of tribal infiltration, advancing rather meretricious make-believe that the revered statesman of the Yoruba stock it was, that engineered the parliamentary cross-carpeting that put paid to Zik, in oppilating his visionary misadventure for the leviathan premiership of the old West.
Lamentably, his curious quirk for selective amnesia would least avail to advert in reference to the doctrinaire chauvinism of the great Zik, as of course unfolded in his reprobative heresy way back in 1949, that “the god of Africa has created the Igbo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of ages”
Coming even worse off, and confounding the imagination, was the effusive vituperation in 1945, emitting from Charles Onyeama, a member of the Central Legislative Council, that “Igbo domination of Nigeria is a matter of time.”
Unlike Achebe whose worldview horrifyingly begins and ends with a segregationist chauvinistic creed of pan Igboism, to the extent that he would see nothing bad in Zik, Ojukwu, and the primitively untamed Onyeama, but rather a blanket sweep sentiment of everything good; while in the obverse, he will faint blink an eye, before taking Awo, the foremost heroic symbol of pan Nigerian greatness and unity to the cleaners on sheer sentimental illogic which exposes his grossly deficient intellect – Soyinka on the other hand, had more than sufficiently ample space to literally take the threesome to the hangers by virtue of their incredibly horrifying fumblings, sacrilegious deportment and heretic rantings and vituperations, but he would rather not tow that line, borne of his magnanimous large-heartedness and transcendently unifying propensity.
Similarly,he had the discretion to take on Achebe with his warped and demented intellect, yet he would rather choose to lie low, actuated by sheer pacifist impulse and of course a multi-dimensional all-encompassing vision of a united and indivisible Nigeria.
On an elevated global paradigm, the American general election, that threw up the maverick Trump as president, offered yet another fenestra, evincing the Soyinka enigma.
One recalls in this regard – the grotesquely ugly point during the critical campaign phase – at which the intensely eccentric man came up in an oratorical pulpitry of the most barbaric hue – with his chauvinistic creed of anti-black rhetoric.
Soyinka could hardly swallow the bile, in a cathartic vent – vowing in agitated remonstrance to tear up his green card in the event that Trump ultimately secured the enabling fructification of a presidential destiny.
Not a few,would have dismissed this as an unreckonable gallery-ranting and dramatics, ingeniously contrived and premeditated in the dismissible mould of cheap heroism.
Doubting cynics were to be sent reeling, staggering and confounded under the uncanny spell of his enigma, at that momentous awakening that it became plain and clear that the literary wizard of global acclaim had already hallowed his vow as a sacred article of faith.
Ninety Loud Gbosa For Kongi.
*Kola Johnson is a writer and journalist.
