•But the initiators of the Wole Soyinka Museum, at OAU Ile-Ife, can do with more integrity on the project
For Professor Wole Soyinka (WS), Africa’s first Nobel Laureate for English literature, it is honour well-deserved, for his fresh, fecund and incandescent scholarship; and his lifetime insistence on the primacy and sanctity of human dignity, no matter what. Hence, his immortal quip: the man dies in him, that in the face of injustice keeps quiet, from his Nigerian Civil War prisoner-of-conscience memoirs, The Man Died.
So, when the honours started reeling out, now that the inimitable Kongi is still very much with us, with his brilliance and human rights activism undiminished, everyone knew it was not only the right but excellent thing to do, particularly by two universities, where he started it all.
University of Ibadan (UI), Nigeria’s premier university, just renamed its Arts Theatre, the multi-purpose auditorium for its Theatre Arts practicals and other sundry shows, the Wole Soyinka Theatre. Prof. Soyinka started it all at UI, where he was Drama research fellow, in those exciting early years of Mbari-Mbayo and allied cultural activism.
But the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), formerly the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, has taken the WS cherished legacy a notch higher, by putting in place the Wole Soyinka Museum. That is a fitting honour, as Ife was home to Soyinka at the high point of his academic odyssey and, perhaps, the most fecund season of his literary harvest, before the military-era induced brain-drain turned the Nigerian university system into a mere shell of its old self.
For this alone, no matter how grand or humble this beginning is for the museum, the OAU authorities deserve praise — and this honour is mutual: as OAU has honoured WS while still alive, they are themselves honoured by the sheer nobility of their motive.
Still, there would appear a snag — indeed, an un-Soyinkaesque mutilation of art, just to give the Wole Soyinka Museum life. That is a grim paradox, for it is physical life equating artistic death. It is a tragedy Soyinka himself would flinch from and frown at.
It involves a cannibalised 15-foot Soyinka sculpture, of an ex-OAU visual arts student, now an established international artist, Dotun Popoola. According to a report in The Nation, it was made in 2008 as his final year project — the bust of WS resting on three books, symbolising the three genres of literature: drama, poetry and prose, that earned WS his Nobel.
But then, came the WS museum and the “head” was heft off the sculpture, and transposed to the new museum — how artistically callous and unthinking! For WS himself, known to have written grand poetry railing against the wayward and wanton destruction of nature, that should count for personal affront, if ever there was one.
Of course, Popoola himself can be pardoned, if he appears quite inconsolable, by the brutal mutilation of his creation. An artiste that was hitherto proud to lead his friends, from anywhere in the world, to OAU to sight the work, is now landed with something tantamount to a “headless chicken”. How sad!
That is why the OAU authorities must quickly do the needful. For the honour done Soyinka to be complete, it is either they transpose the whole of the original sculpture, books and bust, to signpost the museum; or restore the complete sculpture to its original site. The present situation, if not immediately rectified, is unbefitting of the rigorous ethical standard and artistic sophistication of a university of OAU’s calibre.
That is the only path of honour left, after this initial but inexcusable blunder. Integrity has been part and parcel of the Soyinka art and persona. Lack of it — and chipping into bits someone’s artistic work is scandalous lack of integrity writ large — cannot sit well with a museum named for our own WS.