Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, whose landmark birthday fell on Saturday, 13 July, has continued to be celebrated and serenaded in diverse circles within Nigeria and across the world and there is no sign the joyous drum beats will cease anytime soon. Indeed, it is instructive that the University of Abuja, under the aegis of its immediate past Vice Chancellor, Professor Abdulrasheed Na’Allah, established a Centre of Wole Soyinka studies just as it did for other phenomenal thinkers like Chinua Achebe, Kolawole Omotosho and Usman Dan Fodio’s daughter, Nana Asmaou. Soyinka has become a legend even in his lifetime. Although the book, ‘The Politics of Wole Soyinka’ by Professor Tunde Adeniran had been on my bookshelf for a couple of years, it is perhaps unsurprising that it was in July that I commenced reading what turned out to be a seminal offering on the life and times of the literary colossus.
There are so many interesting aspects to this book, published by BOOKCRAFT, which spans 241 pages and is segmented into 13 chapters. Although a political scientist specializing in international relations, Professor Adeniran is himself a literary writer who has written four volumes of poetry and two novels, and a keen enthusiast of the arts and various dimensions of culture. His work on the politics of Soyinka makes as exciting reading as the epochal life he has chosen to focus on. The author had actually written the book to commemorate Soyinka’s 60th birthday on 13 July, 1994, and updated it with an additional three chapters when the Laureate turned 80.
As Adeniran notes in the preface to the first edition of the book, “Questions about Wole Soyinka will persist even after volumes have been written about the man, his life, his times, his works and so on. The decision to zero in on one aspect of his life was informed by the need to acknowledge the role he has played in that aspect of human endeavor whose antenna sends out and receives the kind of electromagnetic waves that determine the quality of human existence”. It is impossible to write about the politics of Nigeria without giving a sizable place to the role and contributions of Wole Soyinka who has been a prominent actor in many of the episodes of the country’s unfolding national drama.
Of course, Adeniran’s book does not limit itself to Soyinka and the politics of Nigeria. Rather, as he writes, “Soyinka’s personage locates him in many “worlds”. He is black, he is African and he is a human being. To be a black man and an African requires black and African consciousness, an involvement in the type of literary creativity through which creative actions are processed for effect through the written word”. Again, in his words, “Wole Soyinka, with his massive creative imagination, would be expected to demonstrate, quite clearly, not only his awareness but an understanding of the implications of these which sum up to constitute the African condition, for his society and the human race”.
As a political scientist, Adeniran analyses in considerable depth various themes in the political thought of Soyinka such as justice, power, equality or liberty as exemplified in the literary works and life of the writer. It is interesting that Professor Adeniran himself is a leading politician who had served as Ambassador to Germany and later Minister of Education in the government of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during the tenure of President Olusegun Obasanjo as President. He has held several other positions at diverse levels and never had his name or integrity tainted by the sordidness and venality that characterizes public life in Nigeria.
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In the preface to the second edition of the book, Adeniran writes about his meeting with Soyinka in the process of his preparations to update the first edition. He notes that “His anguish at Nigeria’s leadership deficiency and current state of the nation was palpable. In spite of this, he was pleased that I had not given up on campaigns for the National Secretary of my political party (the Peoples Democratic Party) and was ready for any legitimate actions on his part that could enhance my chances”. The politics of WS is far more nuanced and complex than often unfairly insinuated by those who thoughtlessly try to clothe him in partisan garb.
It is perhaps inevitable that a work on the politics of WS cannot be indifferent to the spiritual elements of his thought for the writer can be said to be deeply spiritual and, perhaps unconsciously esoteric, even if strongly irreligious. Thus, as he prepared for his interview with WS, Adeniran avers that “My mind was made up that I would neither ask WS questions about God nor debate his ‘The Credo of Being and Nothingness’ or man’s religious affairs generally…But, based on the ceaseless change throughout the universe and the impermanence of thought even concerning self, I was instinctively contemplating checking the extent that age had accelerated or mellowed his religious skepticism and indifference”.
Adeniran refers to a statement credited to WS at an event at Hay Xalapa that “If religion was to be taken away from the world completely, including the one I grew up with, I’d be one of the happiest people in the world. My only fear is that maybe something more terrible would be invented to replace it, so we’d better just get along with what there is right now and keep it under control”. Interestingly, Adeniran had the intention nevertheless that “since he was always interested in my career and well-being, I was going to testify to the word of God as my weapon and Jesus Christ, the Doctor of my soul, Mediator and Father in Nigeria’s deadly politics where we constantly witness a distressing disregard for God as a working hypothesis”.
In the first chapter of the book, Adeniran examines the role of ‘The Artist as Politician’ across time and space. He takes a panoramic view of the role of artists – writers, sculptors, painters, architects etc in the politics of the societies and eras in which they practiced their art. The relative obscurantism of this chapter reminded me of Professor Adeniran’s international relations classes at the University of Ibadan which I always found overly abstract and difficult to follow, perhaps partly because that area of politics was not particularly my favorite. But I remember that his office was clustered, alongside his collection of books, with diverse art works and graphic images of his favourite artistes and revolutionaries.
Much more accessible and pleasurable to read are chapters two and three where he focuses on the early years of WS, the political influences he was exposed to early in life, the forces that shaped his emergent political and social consciousness as well as the roots of his strongly non-conformist disposition first at Government College, Ibadan, and later was to glow into full bloom at the University College, Ibadan, where he was admitted in 1952.
In three subsequent chapters, Adeniran interrogates WS’s politics through his plays, poems and novels. He quotes WS in an interview with John Agetua in 1975 where the writer submits that “we haven’t begun actually using words to punch holes inside people. But let’s do our best to use words and style when we have the opportunity to arrest the ears of normally complacent people, we must make sure we explode something inside them which is a parallel of the sordidness which they ignore outside”. That succinctly encapsulates the use to which Soyinka has deployed his art as a vehicle for societal change many times necessitating risky political activism on his part.