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Soyinka gives Mau Mau thumbs up
#88 - 0--clubafrika--Soyinka gives Mau Mau thumbs up--2006-06-17 23:49:22
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Story by Evan Mwangi
Publication Date: 6/18/2006
Title: You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir
Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2006
Prof. Wole Soyinka
style="float:right; margin-right:0px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; margin-top:0px;">
A new memoir by the first African winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,
href="http://www.afroarticles.com/portal/modules.php?name=Amazon&asin=0195119215">Wole Soyinka endorses Kenya’s armed
struggle for independence, discusses the use of the World Cup madness by people with a dictatorial mindset to win political
mileage, and salutes the role of Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o in the struggle against dictatorship.
In the memoir, entitled You Must Set Forth at Dawn and to be in stock soon at Bookpoint, Nairobi, Soyinka explains why he
could not visit Ngugi in
detention in the 1970s, and details the role a writers’ association he was involved in requested actor and insurance magnate
Femi Johnson to come to Nairobi, under the guise of attending an insurance brokers’ meeting, to secretly give money to
Ngugi’s family and find out about the writer’s condition in detention. Femi, who acted in Soyinka's Madmen and Specialists,
and later built the only other skyscraper in Ibadan, accomplished his mission with assistance from Micere-Mugo.
"Even more important than immediate monetary relief was the need to establish contact, to get a message to Ngugi that we were
not simply sitting on our hands, indifferent to his predicament," writes Soyinka. -
The Mau Mau
Referring more than once to the armed struggle in Kenya in the 1950s, Soyinka calls Mau Mau liberation effort "a truly indigenous, internally generated
struggle, in which forests favoured the liberation." In the memoir, he shows how the dictatorial regime of Sani Abacha used
the national football team’s participation in the World Cup to raise funds and make political gains.
A trained combatant
Soyinka, a trained combatant who participated in British military efforts and in the Western Nigeria uprising of 1964 and
1965, is famed for taking over a radio station at gun-point and seems to have reflected deeply about the possible use of
armed struggle against the dictatorship of Sani Abacha.
"The question of willingness to take up arms against a cruel despot was one with which I found myself suddenly confronted,"
writes Soyinka. He describes Abacha as "a monster [that] had reduced us, collectively, to a plantation of slaves."
He underscores that there are instances violence may be justified.
To concede genuine revulsion at the phenomenon of violence does not, however, contradict an acceptance of its sometime
necessity, he writes.
The ultimate, for Soyinka, is the celebration of the termination of violence. He justifies war on terrorism, underscoring
that he admires pacificists such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, dalai Lama, Gautama and Aung San Suu Kyi. "But I cannot
aspire to companionship with them," he writes.
The writer, best known in Kenya for his plays, dramatically presents the horrors under the rule of Sani Abacha,
href="http://www.afroarticles.com/portal/modules.php?name=Amazon&asin=0844816701">Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim
Babangida and other Nigerian dictators in a prose that is brimful with irony and humour. The analysis is acute and turns
almost Fanonist as Soyinka laments the betrayal of African independence by the post-colonial leaders. "Some (African leaders)
were stark illiterates, though full of bombast," Soyinka writes, as he chronicles his meetings with the new political class
as a student in England. "This strange breed was a complete contrast to the nationalist stalwarts into whose hands we had
imagined that the country could safely be consigned while we went on our romantic liberation march to South Africa."
The late Fela Anikulapo Kuti in concert
Remarkable is Soyinka’s description of his cousin, musician Fela Anikulapo
Kuti. "A naked torso over spangled pants, over which a saxophone or microphone would oscillate onstage, receiving
guests or journalists in his underpants while running down a tune from his head, in the open courtyard, at rehearsals, or in
any space where he held court – all constituted the trademark of his unyielding non-conformism."
Soyinka describes Fela Kuti’s style as not meant to entice "but to arrest with trenchant messages. Sparse and lithe, Fela
leaped about the stage like a brown scalded cat, whose miaow was a rustle of riffs eased from a saxophone that often seemed
better maintained than his own body," writes Soyinka, a legendary poet, dramatist, and novelist revered for his command of
language.
He mildly accuses Fela Kuti of being so dogmatic as to support of anything that appears anti-Western. "Only Fela would wax a
record according heroic virtues to such an incompatible trio as Kwame Nkurumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea, and – oh yes,
indeed – Idi Amin Dada, the terror of Uganda."
The late Ken Saro-Wiwa
style="float:right; margin-right:0px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; margin-top:0px;">The book contains a moving
tribute to slain writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who on November 10, 1995, alongside eight Ogoni colleagues, was executed by the
Nigerian state for campaigning against the devastation of the Niger Delta by oil companies, especially Shell and
Chevron.
"The verdict – guilty – was fully expected. Very few individuals, however, believed that the sentence – death by hanging –
would ever be carried out," Soyinka writes in a chapter where playfulness is consigned to self-mockery that does not manage
to hide his devastation and sadness at the death of Saro-Wiwa. "I was not among the optimists. Power had mounted the head of
the dictator; it needed its periodic nourishment in blood."
Soyinka also describes an incident in which Nigerian professor and playwright
href="/phpnuke/modules.php?name=Amazon&asin=B0007SEXBM">Ola Rotimi was flogged in front of his family and almost shot
dead by members of the Armed forces at a check point after the civil war. Ola Rotimi, is famous worldwide for his epic play
The Gods are not to Blame, a version of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, and in Kenya for his hilarious play Our Husband Has
Gone Mad Again.
Those who follow Soyinka’s theatre career will enjoy sections in which he describes his description, including one play whose
manuscript he burnt before it could see the light of day because of the harsh criticism it received ostensibly for being too
close to Eugene O'Neill’s drama but in reality because his English teachers did not like its presentation of apartheid white
adherents being eaten by black ants.
Limp handshake
Hilarious is Soyinka’s description of an incident, repeated two times in the memoir, in which he received a limp handshake
from French Socialist president Francois Mitterrand who was frozen by a performance in which Soyinka, who knew little spoken
French because he had not interacted much with Francophone communities, mouthed his lines in bad French. Mitterrand would not
forgive Soyinka for the unintended sacrilege against French even after Soyinka had mastered his spoken French and had won the
Nobel Prize.
Soyinka, who rarely talks about his family, dedicates the book not only to those who have fallen under successive
dictatorships in Africa, but to his wife and children. His wife, Adefolake Soyinka, notes in a dedication page that is as
playful as the rest of the memoir "demoted me from the designation of Visiting Professor to that of Visiting Spouse, but was
still left with only an Invisible Spouse as I was swallowed by my study even in visiting hours."
This article was first published by Evan Mwangi. Mwangi can be reached at evan-mwangi[at]northwestern.edu.
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