Category: Tuesday

There is no better occasion than the birthday of great and famous persons for tributes and reminiscences from friends, admirers, acquaintances and even those who have had only the most tangential encounters with them.

It is in the context of an admirer, and one who has had only the most tangential but deeply affecting encounters with the Nobelist, Wole Soyinka, that I conceived this essay when he turned 89 on July 14.

His occasional visits to Rutam House to see his friend and protégé Yemi Ogunbiyi always caused a stir on the premises.  Even before the Nobel, you sensed that a person of immense presence was around and you seized on any pretext to meet him and greet him.  I had to introduce myself on each occasion, persuaded that I had no right to expect that my name and my work as a columnist for The Guardian, and later editorial page editor and chair of its Editorial Board, had registered in his consciousness.   

Read Also: Davido owes Muslims no apology – Wole Soyinka

His response always seemed perfunctory, but hey, he has no obligation to be warm to a person who for was for all practical purposes a total stranger.  Plus, he has been exposed            to danger, primal danger, so many times and from so many quarters that he would have learned to take nobody’s goodwill for granted.

One evening in late 1996, I went to  see Dr Doyin Abiola, wife of the imprisoned MKO Abiola, winner of the 1993 presidential election, in her flat at Abiola’s sprawling mansion in Opebi, Lagos, to discuss – what else? – the state of the “June 12 struggle” and to review our ongoing efforts to keep the cause and his privations splendidly in focus at home and abroad.

Then, apropos of nothing, she asked:  “What is it between you and Professor Soyinka?”

I was alarmed.  To the best of my knowledge, nothing, I replied. The mere thought of there being an issue between the Nobelist and me was  frankly unsettling.

Dr Abiola told me the Nobelist had left moments before I arrived.  They had been strategizing on “June 12,” and were drawing up a list of persons of proven commitment to serve on various panels or to carry out specific tasks, and Dr Abiola had brought up my name.

Only for the Nobelist to interject vigorously, “No, no, no, we don’t want any of Obasanjo’s friends in the group.”

At that time, Obasanjo and I were no longer on speaking terms, Dr Abiola told Soyinka.  I had broken with him over “June 12.”  I could not reconcile myself  with his waffling on the matter, and his acceptance of the annulment as a fait accompli, to say nothing of his unquestioning acceptance of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s laboured pretext for  it.

I should add that Obasanjo and I made up when he was jailed by the repellent dictator, Sani Abacha, and that he numbered me among those he designated to run some important errands for him.

Shortly after Doyin Abiola cleared my bona fides with him, Soyinka went into exile in the United States,  just several steps ahead of Sani Abacha’s murder machine.  I followed later.  Courtesy  of his son Makin, an avid fan of my Guardian column, I informed him of my arrival in America.

His email response was distinctly warm.  He said he was glad to learn that I had joined the exile train, and urged me to feel free to use the platform of Radio Kudirat to contribute to debates on the future of Nigeria. 

My only meeting with him in America took place at Knox College,  in Galesburg, Illinois, some 40 miles from my Peoria base.  He was on hand for the final night of the staging of his globally-acclaimed play, Death and the King’s Horseman before an overflow audience.  Gone was the reserve, the perfunctory response of previous years.  He not only greeted me warmly, it was clear that he had followed news about me closely.  He said he thought I was right not to have taken up President Obasanjo’s offer appointing me managing director and chief executive of the moribund Daily Times.

And since then, his responses to my occasional messages  have never lost their glow.  To the point that, when I was applying for a full professorship at Bradley, I felt emboldened to ask whether he could enter a letter of support for my quest.  Weeks passed, and my mail went unanswered.  I began to fear that I might have overplayed my hand, more so when people who can claim greater familiarity with Soyinka said I should not have made such a request.  They said he rarely acquiesced in such matters.

Then, just when I had almost lost all hope, his email bobbed up on my computer screen.  He said he had stayed longer than he had planned on a trip to Nigeria,  To my request, he said “Of course.”  And he asked for the address to which he should send his letter.

The day it arrived, the letter created quite a sensation.  It was all of one page, generous, unstinting, and priceless.   Word spread quickly around our compact campus that the 1987 Nobel Laureate in Literature had endorsed my candidature.

My stock rose steeply among my colleagues.  The prizes and recognitions I had garnered over the years almost paled beside the fact  that a Nobel Laureate knows me well enough to vouch unequivocally that I was on every count qualified to be appointed a professor.

It would be hard to find a worse example of institutional pettiness outside the university system, particularly its Personnel Committee or the Appointments and Promotions Committee, its Nigerian equivalent.  It is a forum where resentments and grievances play out.

Having regard to this notorious fact, a senior colleague asked me to rest easy.  If anyone on the Personnel Committee seemed inclined to vote against your candidature,  he assured me, he would ask the person whether he had ever had any interaction with a Nobel Laureate to the point that the Laureate would strongly endorse his quest for a higher position.

The deliberations were brief, and the vote was unanimous at the departmental and faculty levels, and at the conclave of deans.

Whenever it seemed to me that I had come up against a brick wall on a self-assigned task of considerable import, I would, like many others, hide behind Soyinka’s immense stature to press forward.   I will cite  two instances.

General Ibrahim Babangida, one of the most reviled persons in the Yoruba country, was going to be invited to chair the launch of a volume of essays Awo:  On the Trail of a Titan to mark the centennial of the Chief Obafemi Awolowo, generally regarded as the greatest figure of the nationality.   Unable to dissuade the organisers, I took the matter to Soyinka, who had contributed the preface to the book.

His intervention scuttled the proposal.

As the 2011 General Elections loomed on the political horizon, it was widely bruited that the National Leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, would not endorse the high-achieving  Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, for a second term. Each passing day seemed to lend wings to  more intimations of efforts at mediation by friends of both parties seemed to be going nowhere.

I brought up the matter with Soyinka and urged him to intervene in the interest of the progressive cause in Lagos State.   During a visit to Lagos, he had lunch with Tinubu and Fashola separately, probed deftly, but found no evidence of a rift between them that would threaten the progressive cause.   If I found hard evidence of a split, he said, I should let him know.

Shortly thereafter,  he found abundant evidence of a rupture.  He worked closely with like-minded persons to restore amity.  It was from him that I learned  that Tinubu had finally but enthusiastically endorsed Fashola for a second term.

In both instances, our interests had coincided.

On one occasion, however, he declined my entreaties to him to dissuade a respected public figure from accepting an appointment  from the Jonathan administration that I was sure would ruin his reputation.

“You are wasting your time, Tunji,” he replied tersely, adding that there was no dissuading the star-struck fellow.  The personage, name withheld, took on the job, and his reputation took some hard knocks.

In Soyinka, you could never have a stronger ally for a worthy cause nor a more formidable adversary in an ignoble cause.  To his health and happiness as he approaches 90.