Nobel Prize

Wole Soyinka – Podcast

Nobel Prize Conversations

”In a number of my works, I am just narrating a tale for whoever is interested”

In this podcast episode with literature laureate Wole Soyinka, conducted in November 2021, he talks about his photographic memory, his creative process and the question of who he writes literature for. His home of Nigeria figures prominently in his writing, and he looks ahead to the future of his country. Wole Soyinka also tells us about his passion for space and space travel, or as he puts it, ”I am a space nut!”

The host of this podcast is nobelprize.org’s Adam Smith.

Nobel Prize Conversations was produced in cooperation with ZEIT-Stiftung.

Wole Soyinka – Photo gallery

Like many Nobel Laureates before him, Wole Soyinka autographs a chair for the Nobel Prize Museum during his visit to the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm on 4 October 2018.

© Nobel Media. Photo: A. Mahmoud

Wole Soyinka – Banquet speech

Wole Soyinka’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1986

Your Majesties, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It was inevitable that the Nordic world and the African, especially that part of it which constitutes the Yoruba world – should meet at the crossroads of Sweden. That I am the agent of such a symbolic encounter is due very simply to that my creative Muse is Ogun, the god of creativity and destruction, of the lyric and metallurgy. This deity anticipated your scientist Alfred Nobel at the very beginning of time by clearing a path through primordial chaos, dynamiting his way through the core of earth to open a route for his fellow deities who sought to be reunited with us, mortals. I covered that event for my publishers – well, taking a few poetic licences, naturally – under the title IDANRE. You may have run into that reportage which has been translated into Swedish under the title, OGUN SKUGGA. If you have not, I recommend that you proceed to the nearest bookseller for this piece of pre-history which makes Ogun, very definitively, the progenitor of your great inventor, Alfred Nobel.

I urge this especially because, if you happened to take a casual walk through the streets, or peer into the hotel lobbies of Stockholm, you might get the impression that my nation, Nigeria, has tried to solve some of its many problems by shifting half its population surreptitiously to Sweden. I assure you, however, that they have merely come to satisfy a natural curiosity about the true nationality of this inventor. For they cannot understand why their Ogun should have transferred such a potent secret to a Swede rather than to his Yoruba descendants. The mountains of Sweden are a tempting habitat for this deity, we know, but the Swedish winter and long midnights are hardly congenial to his temperament. And while the local acqua-vitae might help to infuse some warmth into his tropical joints, we do know that he tends to stick to his favourite palm wine.

Some day, I suppose, we will unravel this mystery. In the meantime, however, we will content ourselves with saluting the vision which made our presence here today a positive event, since it was Alfred Nobel’s hope that the humanistic conversion, even of the most terrible knowledge, can improve the quality of life for mankind. That also is the lesson of Ogun, that essence of the warring duality of human nature. And we join in the endeavour that the lyric face of that demiurge will triumph in our time, snaring for all time that elusive bird – peace – on our planet earth.

Wole Soyinka – Poetry

Wole Soyinka – Bibliography

Works

Plays

A Dance of the Forests. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1963

The Lion and the Jewel. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1963

Three Plays. – Evanston, IL, 1962. – Content: The Trials of Brother Jero ; The Strong Breed ; The Swamp Dwellers

Five Plays. – London : Oxford Univ Press, 1964. – Content: A Dance of the Forests ; The Lion and the Jewel ; The Swamp Dwellers ; The Trials of Brother Jero ; The Strong Breed

The Road. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1965

Kongi’s Harvest. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1967 (1966?)

Three Short Plays. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1969

Madmen and Specialists. – London : Methuen, 1971

The Jero Plays. – London : Eyre Methuen, cop. – 1973. – Content: The Trials of Brother Jero ; Jero’s Metamorphosis

Camwood on the Leaves. – London : Eyre Methuen, 1973

Collected Plays. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1973-1974. – 2 vol.

Death and the King’s Horseman. – London : Eyre Methuen, 1975

Opera Wonyosi. – Bloomington : Indiana Univ. Press, 1981

A Play of Giants. – London : Methuen, 1984

Requiem for a Futurologist. – London : Rex Colling, 1985

From Zia, With Love ; and, A Scourge of Hyacints. – London : Methuen drama, 1992

King Baabu : a Play in the Manner – Roughly – of Alfred Jarry. – London : Methuen, 2002

Poetry

Idanre & Other Poems. – London : Methuen, 1967

Poems From Prison. – London : Rex Collings, 1969

A Shuttle in the Crypt. – London : Rex Collings/Eyre Methuen, cop. – 1972. – Expanded edition of Poems from Prison

Ogun Abibimañ. – London : Rex Collings, 1976

Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems. – New York : Random House, cop. – 1988

Early Poems. – New York : Oxford University Press, 1997. – Content: Idanre & Other Poems ; A Shuttle in the Crypt

Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known. – London : Methuen, 2002

Novels

The Interpreters. – London : Andre Deutsch, 1965

The Man Died : Prison Notes. – London : Rex Collings, 1972

Season of Anomy. – London : Rex Collings, 1973

Other

Myth, Literature and the African World. – Cambridge : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976

Aké : the Years of Childhood. – London : Collings, 1981

Art, Dialogue & Outrage : Essays on Literature and Culture. – Ibadan : New Horn Press, 1988

Ìsarà : a Voyage Around “Essay”. – New York: Random House, 1989

Ibadan : the Penkelemes Years : a Memoir: 1946-1965. – London : Methuen, 1994

The Open Sore of a Continent : a Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis. – New York : Oxford University Press, 1996

The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. – London : Oxford University Press, 1998

Salutation to the Gut. – Ibadan, Nigeria : Bookcraft Ltd, Pocket gifts, cop. – 2002

The Climate of Fear : the Reith Lectures 2004. – London : Profile, 2004

You Must Set Forth at Dawn : a Memoir. – Random House, 2006

Critical studies (a selection)

Critical perspectives on Wole Soyinka / ed. by James Gibbs. – London : Heinemann, 1981

Larsen, Stephan, A Writer and His Gods : a Study of the Importance of Yoruba Myths and Religious Ideas to the Writing of Wole Soyinka. – Stockholm : Stockholm Univ., 1983

Maduakor, Obi, Wole Soyinka : an Introduction to His Writing. – New York : Garland, 1986

Before Our Very Eyes : Tribute to Wole Soyinka, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature / edited by Dapo Adelugba. – Ibadan : Spectrum Books, 1987

Research on Wole Soyinka / edited by James Gibbes & Bernth Lindfors. – Trenton : Africa World Press, 1993

Wright, Derek, Wole Soyinka Revisited. – New York : Twayne, cop. 1993

Wole Soyinka : an Appraisal / edited by Adewale Maja-Pearce. Oxford : Heinemann, 1994

Ojaide, Tanure, The Poetry of Wole Soyinka. – Lagos : Malthouse Press, 1994

Msiska, Mpalive-Hangson, Wole Soyinka. – Plymouth : Northcote House, 1998

Conversations with Wole Soyinka / edited by Biodun Jeyifo. – Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2001

Ebewo, Patrick, Barbs : a Study of Satire in the Plays of Wole Soyinka. – Kampala, Uganda : JANyeko Pub. Centre, 2002

Jeyifo, Biodun, Wole Soyinka : Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism. – New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005

The Swedish Academy, 2006

Wole Soyinka – Prose

Excerpt from Aké. The Years of Childhood

(Pages 25-28)

Mr Olagbaju’s bachelor house behind the school became a second lunch-hour home. His favourite food appeared to be the pounded yam, iyan, at which I soon became his keen accomplice. Through the same iyan, I made my first close school friend, Osiki, simply by discovering that he was an even more ardent lover of the pounded yam than either Mr Olagbaju or I. It seemed a simple matter of course that I should take him home or to Mr Olagbaju’s whenever the meal was iyan; moreover, Mr Olagbaju was also teaching me to play ayo,** and this required a partner to play with. It was with some surprise that I heard my mother remark:

‘This one is going to be like his father. He brings home friends at meal-times without any notice.’

I saw nothing to remark in it at all; it was the most natural thing in the world to bring a friend home at his favourite meal-time. So Osiki became an inseparable companion and a regular feature of the house, especially on iyan days. One of the house helps composed a song on him:

Osiki oko oniyan
A ti nwa e, a ko ri e***

which she began singing as soon as we appeared, hand in hand, on the path leading from the school. But the pounded yam was also to provide the first test of our friendship.

There were far too many aspects of the schoolroom and the compound to absorb in the regular school hours, moreover, an empty schoolroom appeared to acquire a totally different character which changed from day to day. And so, new discoveries began to keep me behind at lunch-time after everyone had gone. I began to stay longer and longer, pausing over objects which became endowed with new meanings, forms, even dimensions as soon as silence descended on their environment. Sometimes I simply wandered off among the rocks intending merely to climb a challenging surface when no one was around. Finally, Osiki lost patience. He would usually wait for me at home even while Tinu had her own food. On this day however, being perhaps more hungry than usual, Osiki decided not to wait. Afterwards he tried to explain that he had only meant to eat half of the food but had been unable to stop himself. I returned home to encounter empty dishes and was just in time to see Osiki disappearing behind the croton bush in the backyard, meaning no doubt to escape through the rear gate. I rushed through the parlour and the front room, empty dishes in hand, hid behind the door until he came past, then pelted him with the dishes. A chase followed, with Osiki instantly in front by almost the full length of the school compound while I followed doggedly, inconsolable at the sight of the increasing gap, yet unable to make my legs emulate Osiki’s pace.

Finally, I stopped. I no longer saw Osiki but – Speed, Swiftness! I had not given any thought before then to the phenomenon of human swiftness and Osiki’s passage through the compound seemed little short of the magical. The effect of his dansiki which flowed like wings from his sides also added to the illusion of him flying over the ground. This, more than anything else, made it easy enough for the quarrel to be settled by my mother. It was very difficult to cut oneself off from a school friend who could fly at will from one end of the compound to the other. Even so, some weeks elapsed before he returned to the pounded-yam table, only to follow up his perfidy by putting me out of school for the first time in my career.

There was a birthday party for one of the Canon’s children. Only the children of the parsonage were expected but I passed the secret to Osiki and he turned up at the party in his best buba. The entertain ments had been set up out of doors in front of the house. I noticed that one of the benches was not properly placed, so that it acted like a see-saw when we sat on it close to the two ends. It was an obvious idea for a game, so, with the help of some of the other children, we carried it to an even more uneven ground, rested its middle leg on a low rock outcrop and turned it into a proper see-saw. We all took turns to ride on it.

For a long time it all went without mishap. Then Osiki got carried away. He was a bigger boy than I, so that I had to exert a lot of energy to raise him up, lifting myself on both hands and landing with all possible weight on my seat. Suddenly, while he was up in his turn, it entered his head to do the same. The result was that I was catapulted up very sharply while he landed with such force that the leg of the bench broke on his side. I was flung in the air, sailed over his head and saw, for one long moment, the Canon’s square residence rushing out to meet me.

It was only after I had landed that I took much notice of what I had worn to the party. It was a yellow silk dansiki, and I now saw with some surprise that it had turned a bright crimson, though not yet entirely. But the remaining yellow was rapidly taking on the new colour. My hair on the left side was matted with blood and dirt and, just before the afternoon was shut out and I fell asleep, I wondered if it was going to be possible to squeeze the blood out of the dansiki and pump it back through the gash which I had located beneath my hair.

The house was still and quiet when I woke up. One moment there had been the noise, the shouts and laughter and the bumpy ride of the see-saw, now silence and semi-darkness and the familiar walls of mother’s bedroom. Despite mishaps, I reflected that there was something to be said for birthdays and began to look forward to mine. My only worry now was whether I would have recovered sufficiently to go to school and invite all my friends. Sending Tinu seemed a risky business, she might choose to invite all her friends and pack my birthday with girls I hardly even knew or played with. Then there was another worry. I had noticed that some of the pupils had been kept back in my earlier class and were still going through the same lessons as we had all learnt during my first year in school. I developed a fear that if I remained too long at home, I would also be sent back to join them. When I thought again of all the blood I had lost, it seemed to me that I might actually be bed-ridden for the rest of the year. Everything depended on whether or not the blood on my dansiki had been saved up and restored to my head. I raised it now and turned towards the mirror; it was difficult to tell because of the heavy bandage but, I felt quite certain that my head had not shrunk to any alarming degree.

The bedroom door opened and mother peeped in. Seeing me awake she entered, and was followed in by father. When I asked for Osiki, she gave me a peculiar look and turned to say something to father. I was not too sure, but it sounded as if she wanted father to tell Osiki that killing me was not going to guarantee him my share of iyan. I studied their faces intently as they asked me how I felt, if I had a headache or a fever and if I would like some tea. Neither would touch on the crucial question, so finally I decided to put an end to my suspense. I asked them what they had done with my dansiki.

‘It’s going to be washed,’ mother said, and began to crush a halftablet in a spoon for me to take.

‘What did you do with the blood?’

She stopped, they looked at each other. Father frowned a little and reached forward to place his hand on my forehead. I shook my head anxiously, ignoring the throb of pain this provoked.

‘Have you washed it away?’ I persisted.

Again they looked at each other. Mother seemed about to speak but fell silent as my father raised his hand and sat on the bed, close to my head. Keeping his eyes on me he drew out a long, ‘No-o-o-o-o.’

I sank back in relief. ‘Because, you see, you mustn’t. It wouldn’t matter if I had merely cut my hand or stubbed my toe or something like that – not much blood comes out when that happens. But I saw this one, it was too much. And it comes from my head. So you must squeeze it out and pump it back into my head. That way I can go back to school at once.’

My father nodded agreement, smiling. ‘How did you know that was the right thing to do?’

I looked at him in some surprise, ‘But everybody knows.’

Then he wagged his finger at me, ‘Ah-ha, but what you don’t know is that we have already done it. It’s all back in there, while you were asleep. I used Dipo’s feeding-bottle to pour it back.’

I was satisfied. ‘I’ll be ready for school tomorrow’ I announced.

** A game played on a wooden board with dug-out holes, and seeds.
*** Osiki, lord of the pounded-yam seller
we have sought you everywhere but failed to find you.

Excerpt from Aké. The Years of Childhood
Copyright © Wole Soyinka 1981

Wole Soyinka – Nobel Lecture

Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1986

This Past Must Address Its Present

A rather curious scene, unscripted, once took place in the wings of a London theatre at the same time as the scheduled performance was being presented on the actual stage, before an audience. What happened was this: an actor refused to come on stage for his allocated role. Action was suspended. A fellow actor tried to persuade him to emerge, but he stubbornly shook his head. Then a struggle ensued. The second actor had hoped that, by suddenly exposing the reluctant actor to the audience in full glare of the spotlight, he would have no choice but to rejoin the cast. And so he tried to take the delinquent actor by surprise, pulling him suddenly towards the stage. He did not fully succeed, so a brief but untidy struggle began. The unwilling actor was completely taken aback and deeply embarrassed – some of that tussle was quite visible to a part of the audience.

The performance itself, it should be explained, was an improvisation around an incident. This meant that the actors were free, within the convention of the performance – to stop, re-work any part they wished, invite members of the audience on stage, assign roles and change costumes in full view of the audience. They therefore could also dramatize their wish to have that uncooperative actor join them – which they did with gusto. That actor had indeed left the stage before the contentious scene began. He had served notice during rehearsals that he would not participate in it. In the end, he had his way, but the incident proved very troubling to him for weeks afterwards. He found himself compelled to puzzle out this clash in attitudes between himself and his fellow writers and performers. He experienced, on the one hand, an intense rage that he had been made to appear incapable of confronting a stark reality, made to appear to suffer from interpretative coyness, to seem inhibited by a cruel reality or perhaps to carry his emotional involvement with an event so far as to interfere with his professional will. Of course, he knew that it was none of these things. The truth was far simpler. Unlike his colleagues together with whom he shared, unquestionably, the same political attitude towards the event which was being represented, he found the mode of presentation at war with the ugliness it tried to convey, creating an intense disquiet about his very presence on that stage, in that place, before an audience whom he considered collectively responsible for that dehumanizing actuality.

And now let us remove some of the mystery and make that incident a little more concrete. The scene was the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1958. It was one of those Sunday nights which were given to experimentation, an innovation of that remarkable theatre manager-director, George Devine, whose creative nurturing radicalised British theatre of that period and produced later icons like John Osborne, N. F. Simpson, Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, John Arden, etc., and even forced the then conservative British palate to sample stylistic and ideological pariahs like Samuel Beckett and Bertold Brecht. On this particular occasion, the evening was devoted to a form of “living” theatre, and the main fare was titled ELEVEN MEN DEAD AT HOLA. The actors were not all professional actors; indeed they were mostly writers who jointly created and performed these dramatic pieces. Those with a long political memory may recall what took place at Hola Camp, Kenya, during the Mau-Mau Liberation struggle. The British Colonial power believed that the Mau-Mau could be smashed by herding Kenyans into special camps, trying to separate the hard cases, the mere suspects and the potential recruits – oh, they had it all neatly worked out. One such camp was Hola Camp and the incident involved the death of eleven of the detainees who were simply beaten to death by camp officers and warders. The usual enquiry set up, and it was indeed the Report which provided the main text on which the performance was based.

We need now only to identify the reluctant actor, if you have not guessed that by now – it was none other than this speaker. I recall the occasion as vividly as actors are wont to recollect for ever and ever the frightening moment of a blackout, when the lines are not only forgotten but even the moment in the play. The role which I had been assigned was that of a camp guard, one of the killers. We were equipped with huge night-sticks and, while a narrator read the testimony of one of the guards, our task was to raise the cudgels slowly and, almost ritualistically, bring them down on the necks and shoulders of the prisoners, under orders of the white camp officers. A surreal scene. Even in rehearsals, it was clear that the end product would be a surrealist tableau. The Narrator at a lectern under a spot; a dispassionate reading, deliberately clinical, letting the stark facts reveal the states of mind of torturers and victims. A small ring of white officers, armed. One seizes a cudgel from one of the warders to demonstrate how to beat a human being without leaving visible marks. Then the innermost clump of detainees, their only weapon – non-violence. They had taken their decision to go on strike, refused to go to work unless they obtained better camp conditions. So they squatted on the ground and refused to move, locked their hands behind their knees in silent defiance. Orders were given. The inner ring of guards, the blacks, moved in, lifted the bodies by hooking their hands underneath the armpits of the detainees, carried them like toads in a state of petrification to one side, divided them in groups.

The faces of the victims are impassive; they are resolved to offer no resistance. The beatings begin: one to the left side, then the back, the arms – right, left, front, back. Rhythmically. The cudgels swing in unison. The faces of the white guards glow with professional satisfaction, their arms gesture languidly from time to time, suggesting it is time to shift to the next batch, or beat a little more severely on the neglected side. In terms of images, a fluid, near balletic scene.

Then the contrast, the earlier official version, enacting how the prisoners were supposed to have died. This claimed that the prisoners had collapsed, that they died after drinking from a poisoned water supply. So we staged that also. The prisoners filed to the water waggon, gasping with thirst. After the first two or three had drunk and commenced writhing with pain, these humane guards rushed to stop the others but no, they were already wild with thirst, fought their way past salvation and drank greedily the same source. The groans spread from one to the other, the writhing, the collapse – then agonized deaths. That was the version of the camp governors.

The motif was simple enough, the theatrical format a tried and tested one, faithful to a particular convention. What then was the problem? It was one, I believe, that affects most writers. When is playacting rebuked by reality? When is fictionalizing presumptuous? What happens after playacting? One of the remarkable properties of the particular theatrical convention I have just described is that it gives off a strong odour of perenniality, that feeling of “I have been here before”. “I have been a witness to this.” “The past enacts its presence.” In such an instance, that sense of perenniality can serve both as exorcism, a certificate of release or indeed – especially for the audience, a soporific. We must bear in mind that at the time of presentation, and to the major part of that audience, every death of a freedom fighter was a notch on a gun, the death of a fiend, an animal, a bestial mutant, not the martyrdom of a patriot.

We know also, however, that such efforts can provoke changes, that an actualization of the statistical, journalistic footnote can arouse revulsion in the complacent mind, leading to the beginning of a commitment to change, redress. And on this occasion, angry questions had been raised in the Houses of Parliament. Liberals, humanitarians and reformists had taken up the cause of justice for the victims. Some had even travelled to Kenya to obtain details which exposed the official lie. This profound unease, which paralysed my creative will, therefore reached beyond the audience and, finally, I traced its roots to my own feelings of assaulted humanity, and its clamour for a different form of response. It provoked a feeling of indecency about that presentation, rather like the deformed arm of a leper which is thrust at the healthy to provoke a charitable sentiment. This, I believe, was the cause of that intangible, but totally visceral rejection which thwarted the demands of my calling, rendered it inadequate and mocked the empathy of my colleagues. It was as if the inhuman totality, of which that scene was a mere fragment, was saying to us: Kindly keep your comfortable sentiment to yourselves.

Of course, I utilize that episode only as illustration of the far deeper internalised processes of the creative mind, a process that endangers the writer in two ways: he either freezes up completely, or he abandons the pen for far more direct means of contesting unacceptable reality. And again, Hola Camp provides a convenient means of approaching that aspect of my continent’s reality which, for us whom it directly affronts, constitutes the greatest threat to global peace in our actual existence. For there is a gruesome appropriateness in the fact that an African, a black man should stand here today, in the same year that the progressive Prime Minister of this host country was murdered, in the same year as Samora Machel was brought down on the territory of the desperate last-ditch guardians of the theory of racial superiority which has brought so much misery to our common humanity. Whatever the facts are about Olof Palme’s death, there can be no question about his life. To the racial oppression of a large sector of humanity, Olof Palme pronounced, and acted, a decisive No! Perhaps it was those who were outraged by this act of racial “treachery” who were myopic enough to imagine that the death of an individual would arrest the march of his convictions; perhaps it was simply yet another instance of the Terror Epidemic that feeds today on shock, not reason. It does not matter; an authentic conscience of the white tribe has been stilled, and the loss is both yours and mine. Samora Machel, the leader who once placed his country on a war footing against South Africa, went down in as yet mysterious circumstances. True, we are all still haunted by the Nkomati Accord which negated that earlier triumphant moment on the African collective will; nevertheless, his foes across the border have good reason to rejoice over his demise and, in that sense, his death is, ironically, a form of triumph for the black race.

Is that perhaps too stark a paradox? Then let me take you back to Hola Camp. It is cattle which are objects of the stick, or whip. So are horses, goats, donkeys etc. Their definition therefore involves being occasionally beaten to death. If, thirty years after Hola Camp, it is at all thinkable that it takes the ingenuity of the most sophisticated electronic interference to kill an African resistance fighter, the champions of racism are already admitting to themselves what they continue to deny to the world: that they, white supremacist breed, have indeed come a long way in their definition of their chosen enemy since Hola Camp. They have come an incredibly long way since Sharpeville when they shot unarmed, fleeing Africans in the back. They have come very far since 1930 when, at the first organized incident of the burning of passes, the South African blacks decided to turn Dingaan’s Day, named for the defeat of the Zulu leader Dingaan, into a symbol of affirmative resistance by publicly destroying their obnoxious passes. In response to those thousands of passes burnt on Cartright Flats, the Durban police descended on the unarmed protesters killing some half dozen and wounding hundreds. They backed it up with scorched earth campaign which dispersed thousands of Africans from their normal environment, victims of imprisonment and deportation. And even that 1930 repression was a quantum leap from that earlier, spontaneous protest against the Native Pass law in 1919, when the police merely rode down the protesters on horseback, whipped and sjamboked them, chased and harried them, like stray goats and wayward cattle, from street corner to shanty lodge. Every act of racial terror, with its vastly increasing sophistication of style and escalation in human loss, is itself an acknowledgement of improved knowledge and respect for the potential of what is feared, an acknowledgement of the sharpening tempo of triumph by the victimized.

For there was this aspect which struck me most forcibly in that attempt to recreate the crime at Hola Camp: in the various testimonies of the white officers, it stuck out, whether overtly stated or simply through their efficient detachment from the ongoing massacre. It was this: at no time did these white overseers actually experience the human “otherness” of their victims. They clearly did not experience the reality of the victims as human beings. Animals perhaps, a noxious form of vegetable life maybe, but certainly not human. I do not speak here of their colonial overlords, the ones who formulated and sustained the policy of settler colonialism, the ones who dispatched the Maxim guns and tuned the imperial bugle. They knew very well that empires existed which had to be broken, that civilizations had endured for centuries which had to be destroyed. The “sub-human” denigration for which their “civilizing mission” became the altruistic remedy, was the mere rationalizing icing on the cake of imperial greed. But yes indeed, there were the agents, those who carried out orders (like Eichmann, to draw parallels from the white continent); they – whether as bureaucrats, technicians or camp governors had no conceptual space in their heads which could be filled – except very rarely and exceptionally – by “the black as also human”. It would be correct to say that this has remained the pathology of the average South African white since the turn of the last century to this moment. Here, for example is one frank admission by an enlightened, even radical mind of that country:

“It was not until my last year in school that it had occurred to me that these black people, these voteless masses, were in any way concerned with the socialism which I professed or that they had any role to play in the great social revolution which in these days seemed to be imminent. The ‘workers’ who were destined to inherit the new world were naturally the white carpenters and bricklayers, the tramworkers and miners who were organized in their trade unions and who voted for the Labour Party. I would no more have thought of discussing politics with a native youth than of inviting him home to play with me or to a meal or asking him to join the Carnarvon Football Club. The African was on a different plane, hardly human, part of the scene as were dogs and trees and, more remotely, cows. I had no special feelings about him, not interest nor hate nor love. He just did not come into my social picture. So completely had I accepted the traditional attitudes of the time.”

Yes, I believe that this self-analysis by Eddie Roux, the Afrikaaner political rebel and scientist, remains today the flat, unvarnished truth for the majority of Afrikaaners. “No special feelings, not interest nor hate nor love”, the result of a complete acceptance of “traditional attitudes”. That passage captures a mind’s racial tabula rasa, if you like – in the first decade of this century – about the time, in short, when the Nobel series of prizes was inaugurated. But a slate, no matter how clean, cannot avoid receiving impressions once it is exposed to air – fresh or polluted. And we are now in the year 1986, that is after an entire century of direct, intimate exposure, since that confrontation, that first rejection of the dehumanizing label implicit in the Native Pass Laws.

Eddie Roux, like hundreds, even thousands of his countrymen, soon made rapid strides. His race has produced its list of martyrs in the cause of nonracialism – one remembers, still with a tinge of pain, Ruth First, destroyed by a letter bomb delivered by the long arm of Apartheid. There are others – André Brink, Abram Fischer, Helen Suzman – Breyten Breytenbach, with the scars of martyrdom still seared into their souls. Intellectuals, writers, scientists, plain working men, politicians – they come to that point where a social reality can no longer be observed as a culture on a slide beneath the microscope, nor turned into aesthetic variations on pages, canvas or the stage. The blacks of course are locked into an unambiguous condition: on this occasion I do not need to address us. We know, and we embrace our mission. It is the other that this precedent seizes the opportunity to address, and not merely those who are trapped within the confines of that doomed camp, but those who live outside, on the fringes of conscience. Those specifically, who with shameless smugness invent arcane moral propositions that enable them to plead inaction in a language of unparalleled political flatulence: “Personally, I find sanctions morally repugnant”. Or what shall we say of another leader for whom economic sanctions which work against an Eastern European country will not work in the Apartheid enclave of South Africa, that master of histrionics who takes to the world’s airwaves to sing: “Let Poland be”, but turns off his hearing aid when the world shouts: “Let Nicaragua be”. But enough of these world leaders of double-talk and multiple moralities.

It is baffling to any mind that pretends to the slightest claim to rationality, it is truly and formidably baffling. Can the same terrain of phenomenal assimilation – that is, one which produced evidence of a capacity to translate empirical observations into implications of rational human conduct – can this same terrain which, over half a century ago, fifty entire years, two, three generations ago produced the Buntings, the Roux, the Douglas Woltons, Solly Sachs, the Gideon Bothas – can that same terrain, fifty, sixty, even seventy years later, be peopled by a species of humanity so ahistorical that the declaration, so clearly spelt out in 1919 at the burning of the passes, remains only a troublesome event of no enduring significance?

Some atavistic bug is at work here which defies all scientific explanation, an arrest in time within the evolutionary mandate of nature, which puts all human experience of learning to serious question! We have to ask ourselves then, what event can speak to such a breed of people? How do we reactivate that petrified cell which houses historic apprehension and development? Is it possible, perhaps, that events, gatherings such as this might help? Dare we skirt the edge of hubris and say to them: Take a good look. Provide your response. In your anxiety to prove that this moment is not possible, you had killed, maimed, silenced, tortured, exiled, debased and dehumanized hundreds of thousands encased in this very skin, crowned with such hair, proudly content with their very being? How many potential partners in the science of heart transplant have you wasted? How do we know how many black South African scientists and writers would have stood here, by now, if you had had the vision to educate the rest of the world in the value of a great multi-racial society.

Jack Cope surely sums it up in his Foreword to THE ADVERSARY WITHIN, a study of dissidence in Afrikaaner literature when he states:

“Looking back from the perspective of the present, I think it can justly be said that, at the core of the matter, the Afrikaaner leaders in 1924 took the wrong turning. Themselves the victims of imperialism in its most evil aspect, all their sufferings and enormous loss of life nevertheless failed to convey to them the obvious historical lesson. They became themselves the new imperialists. They took over from Britain the mantle of empire and colonialism. They could well have set their faces against annexation, aggression, colonial exploitation, and oppression, racial arrogance and barefaced hypocrisy, of which they had been themselves the victims. They could have opened the doors to humane ideas and civilizing processes and transformed the great territory with its incalculable resources into another New World.

Instead they deliberately set the clock back wherever they could. Taking over ten million indigenous subjects from British colonial rule, they stripped them of what limited rights they had gained over a century and tightened the screws on their subjection.”

Well, perhaps the wars against Chaka and Dingaan and Diginswayo, even the Great Trek were then too fresh in your laager memory. But we are saying that over a century has passed since then, a century in which the world has leapt, in comparative tempo with the past, at least three centuries. And we have seen the potential of man and woman – of all races – contend with the most jealously guarded sovereignty of Nature and the Cosmos. In every field, both in the Humanities and Sciences, we have seen that human creativity has confronted and tempered the hostility of his environment, adapting, moderating, converting, harmonizing, and even subjugating. Triumphing over errors and resuming the surrendered fields, when man has had time to lick his wounds and listen again to the urgings of his spirit. History – distorted, opportunistic renderings of history have been cleansed and restored to truthful reality, because the traducers of the history of others have discovered that the further they advanced, the more their very progress was checked and vitiated by the lacunae they had purposefully inserted in the history of others. Self-interest dictated yet another round of revisionism – slight, niggardly concessions to begin with. But a breach had been made in the dam and an avalanche proved the logical progression. From the heart of jungles, even before the aid of high-precision cameras mounted on orbiting satellites, civilizations have resurrected, documenting their own existence with unassailable iconography and art. More amazing still, the records of the ancient voyagers, the merchant adventurers of the age when Europe did not yet require to dominate territories in order to feed its industrial mills – those objective recitals of mariners and adventurers from antiquity confirmed what the archeological remains affirmed so loudly. They spoke of living communities which regulated their own lives, which had evolved a working relationship with Nature, which ministered to their own wants and secured their future with their own genius. These narratives, uncluttered by the impure motives which needed to mystify the plain self-serving rush to dismantle independent societies for easy plundering – pointed accusing fingers unerringly in the direction of European savants, philosophers, scientists, and theorists of human evolution. Gobineau is a notorious name, but how many students of European thought today, even among us Africans, recall that several of the most revered names in European philosophy – Hegel, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire – an endless list – were unabashed theorists of racial superiority and denigrators of the African history and being. As for the more prominent names among the theorists of revolution and class struggle – we will draw the curtain of extenuation on their own intellectual aberration, forgiving them a little for their vision of an end to human exploitation.

In any case, the purpose is not really to indict the past, but to summon it to the attention of a suicidal, anachronistic present. To say to that mutant present: you are a child of those centuries of lies, distortion and opportunism in high places, even among the holy of holies of intellectual objectivity. But the world is growing up, while you wilfully remain a child, a stubborn, self-destructive child, with certain destructive powers, but a child nevertheless. And to say to the world, to call attention to its own historic passage of lies – as yet unabandoned by some – which sustains the evil precocity of this child. Wherein then lies the surprise that we, the victims of that intellectual dishonesty of others, demand from that world that is finally coming to itself, a measure of expiation? Demand that it rescues itself, by concrete acts, from the stigma of being the wilful parent of a monstrosity, especially as that monstrous child still draws material nourishment, breath, and human recognition from the strengths and devises of that world, with an umbilical cord which stretches across oceans, even across the cosmos via so-called programmes of technological co-operation. We are saying very simply but urgently: Sever that cord. By any name, be it Total Sanction, Boycott, Disinvestment, or whatever, sever this umbilical cord and leave this monster of a birth to atrophy and die or to rebuild itself on long-denied humane foundations. Let it collapse, shorn of its external sustenance, let it collapse of its own social disequilibrium, its economic lopsidedness, its war of attrition on its most productive labour. Let it wither like an aborted foetus of the human family if it persists in smothering the minds and sinews which constitute its authentic being.

This pariah society that is Apartheid South Africa plays many games on human intelligence. Listen to this for example. When the whole world escalated its appeal for the release of Nelson Mandela, the South African Government blandly declared that it continued to hold Nelson Mandela for the same reasons that the Allied powers continued to hold Rudolf Hess! Now a statement like that is an obvious appeal to the love of the ridiculous in everyone. Certainly it wrung a kind of satiric poem out of me – Rudolf Hess as Nelson Mandela in blackface! What else can a writer do to protect his humanity against such egregious assaults! But yet again to equate Nelson Mandela to the archcriminal Rudolf Hess is a macabre improvement on the attitude of regarding him as sub-human. It belongs on that same scale of Apartheid’s self-improvement as the ratio between Sharpeville and Von Brandis Square, that near-kind, near-considerate, almost benevolent dispersal of the first Native Press rebellion.

That world which is so conveniently traduced by Apartheid thought is of course that which I so wholeheartedly embrace – and this is my choice – among several options – of the significance of my presence here. It is a world that nourishes my being, one which is so self-sufficient, so replete in all aspects of its productivity, so confident in itself and in its destiny that it experiences no fear in reaching out to others and in responding to the reach of others. It is the heartstone of our creative existence. It constitutes the prism of our world perception and this means that our sight need not be and has never been permanently turned inwards. If it were, we could not so easily understand the enemy on our doorstep, nor understand how to obtain the means to disarm it. When this society which is Apartheid South Africa indulges from time to time in appeals to the outside world that it represents the last bastion of civilization against the hordes of barbarism from its North, we can even afford an indulgent smile. It is sufficient, imagines this state, to raise the spectre of a few renegade African leaders, psychopaths and robber barons who we ourselves are victims of – whom we denounce before the world and overthrow when we are able – this Apartheid society insists to the world that its picture of the future is the reality which only its policies can erase. This is a continent which only destroys, it proclaims, it is peopled by a race which has never contributed anything positive to the world’s pool of knowledge. A vacuum, that will suck into its insatiable maw the entire fruits of centuries of European civilization, then spew out the resulting mush with contempt. How strange that a society which claims to represent this endangered face of progress should itself be locked in centuries-old fantasies, blithely unaware of, or indifferent to the fact that it is the last, institutionally functioning product of archaic articles of faith in Euro-Judaic thought.

Take God and Law for example, especially the former. The black race has more than sufficient historic justification to be a little paranoid about the intrusion of alien deities into its destiny. For even today, Apartheid’s mentality of the pre-ordained rests – according to its own unabashed claims, on what I can only describe as incidents in a testamentary Godism – I dare not call it Christianity. The sons of Ham on the one hand; the descendants of Shem on the other. The once pronounced, utterly immutable curse. As for Law, these supremacists base their refusal to concede the right of equal political participation to blacks on a claim that Africans have neither respect for, nor the slightest proclivity for Law – that is, for any arbitrating concept between the individual and the collective.

Even the mildest, liberal, somewhat regretful but contented apologists for Apartheid, for at least some form of Apartheid which is not Apartheid but ensures the status quo – even this ambivalent breed bases its case on this lack of the idea of Law in the black mind. I need only refer to a recent contribution to this literature in the form of an autobiography by a famous heart transplant surgeon, one who in his own scientific right has probably been a candidate for a Nobel Prize in the Sciences. Despite constant intellectual encounters on diverse levels, the sad phenomenon persists of Afrikaaner minds which, in the words of Eddie Roux, is a product of that complete acceptance of the “traditional attitudes of the time”.

They have, as already acknowledged, quite “respectable” intellectual ancestors. Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, to cite just my favourite example, found it convenient to pretend that the African had not yet developed to the level where he

“attained that realization of any substantial objective existence – as for example, God, or Law – in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being”.

He continues:

“This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence, has not yet attained: so that the knowledge of absolute Being, an Other and a Higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting”.

Futile to waste a moment refuting the banal untruthfulness of this claim, I content myself with extracting from it only a lesson which escapes, even today, those who insist that the pinnacle of man’s intellectual thirst is the capacity to project this universality in the direction of a Super-Other. There is, I believe, a very healthy school of thought which not only opposes this materially, but has produced effectively structured societies which operate independently of this seductive, even productively, inspiring but extravagant fable.

Once we thus overcome the temptation to contest the denial of this feat of imaginative projection to the African, we find ourselves left only with the dispassionate exercise of examining in what areas we encounter differences between the histories of societies which, according to Hegel and company, never conceived of this Omnipotent Extrusion into Infinite Space, and those who did – be these differences in the areas of economic or artistic life, social relations or scientific attainment – in short, in all those activities which are empirically verifiable, quite different from the racial consequences of imprecations arising from that post Adam-and-Eve nudist escapade in the Old Testament.

When we do this, we come upon a curious fact. The pre-colonial history of African societies – and I refer to both Euro-Christian and Arab-Islamic colonization – indicates very clearly that African societies never at any time of their existence went to war with another over the issue of their religion. That is, at no time did the black race attempt to subjugate or forcibly convert others with any holier-than-thou evangelizing zeal. Economic and political motives, yes. But not religion. Perhaps this unnatural fact was responsible for the conclusions of Hegel – we do not know. Certainly, the bloody histories of the world’s major religions, localized skirmishes of which extend even to the present, lead to a sneaking suspicion that religion, as defined by these eminent philosophers, comes to self-knowledge only through the activity of war.

When, therefore, towards the close of the Twentieth Century, that is, centuries after the Crusades and Jihads that laid waste other and one another’s civilizations, fragmented ancient cohesive social relations and trampled upon the spirituality of entire peoples, smashing their cultures in obedience to the strictures of unseen gods, when today, we encounter nations whose social reasoning is guided by canonical, theological claims, we believe, on our part, that the era of darkness has never truly left the world. A state whose justification for the continuing suppression of its indigenes, indigenes who constitute the majority on that land, rests on claims to divine selection is a menace to secure global relationship in a world that thrives on nationalism as common denominator. Such a society does not, in other words, belong in this modern world. We also have our myths, but we have never employed them as a base for the subjugation of others. We also inhabit a realistic world, however, and, for the recovery of the fullness of that world, the black race has no choice but to prepare itself and volunteer the supreme sacrifice.

In speaking of that world – both myth and reality – it is our duty, perhaps our very last peaceful duty to a doomed enemy – to remind it, and its supporters outside its boundaries, that the phenomenon of ambivalence induced by the African world has a very long history, but that most proponents of the slanderous aspects have long ago learnt to abandon the untenable. Indeed it is probably even more pertinent to remind this racist society that our African world, its cultural hoards and philosophical thought, have had concrete impacts on the racists’ own forebears, have proved seminal to a number of movements and even created tributaries, both pure and polluted, among the white indigenes in their own homelands.

Such a variety of encounters and responses have been due, naturally, to profound searches for new directions in their cultural adventures, seeking solaces to counter the remorseless mechanization of their existence, indeed seeking new meanings for the mystery of life and attempting to overcome the social malaise created by the very triumphs of their own civilization. It has led to a profound respect for the African contribution to world knowledge, which did not, however, end the habitual denigration of the African world. It has created in places a near-deification of the African person – that phase in which every African had to be a prince – which yet again, was coupled with a primitive fear and loathing for the person of the African. To these paradoxical responses, the essentiality of our black being remains untouched. For the black race knows, and is content simply to know, itself. It is the European world that has sought, with the utmost zeal, to re-define itself through these encounters, even when it does appear that he is endeavouring to grant meaning to an experience of the African world.

We can make use of the example of that period of European Expressionism, a movement which saw African art, music, and dramatic rituals share the same sphere of influence as the most disparate, astonishingly incompatible collection of ideas, ideologies, and social tendencies – Freud, Karl Marx, Bakunin, Nietzsche, cocaine, and free love. What wonder then, that the spiritual and plastic presence of the Bakota, Nimba, the Yoruba, Dogon, Dan etc., should find themselves at once the inspiration and the anathematized of a delirium that was most peculiarly European, mostly Teutonic and Gallic, spanning at least four decades across the last and the present centuries. Yet the vibrant goal remained the complete liberation of man, that freeing of his yet untapped potential that would carve marble blocks for the construction of a new world, debourgeoisify existing constrictions of European thought and light the flame to forge a new fraternity throughout this brave new world. Yes, within this single movement that covered the vast spectrum of outright fascism, anarchism, and revolutionary communism, the reality that was Africa was, as always, sniffed at, delicately tested, swallowed entire, regurgitated, appropriated, extoiled, and damned in the revelatory frenzy of a continent’s recreative energies.

Oscar Kokoschka for instance: for this dramatist and painter African ritualism led mainly in the direction of sadism, sexual perversion, general self-gratification. It flowed naturally into a Nietzschean apocalyptic summons, full of self-induced, ecstatic rage against society, indeed, against the world. Vassily Kadinsky on his part, responded to the principles of African art by foreseeing:

“a science of art erected on a broad foundation which must be international in character”.

insisting that

“it is interesting, but certainly not sufficient, to create an exclusively European art theory”.

The science of art would then lead, according to him, to

“a comprehensive synthesis which will extend far beyond the confines of art into the realm of the oneness of the human and the ‘divine'”.

This same movement, whose centenary will be due for celebrations in European artistic capitals in the next decade or two – among several paradoxes the phenomenon of European artists of later acknowledged giant stature – Modigliani, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, Brancusi etc. worshipping with varying degrees of fervour, at the shrine of African and Polynesian artistic revelations, even as Johannes Becher, in his Expressionist delirium, swore to build a new world on the eradication of all plagues, including –

“Negro tribes, fever, tuberculosis, venereal epidemics, intellectual psychic defects – I’ll fight them, vanquish them.”

And was it by coincidence that contemporaneously with this stirring manifesto, yet another German enthusiast, Leo Frobenius – with no claims whatever to being part of, or indeed having the least interest in the Expressionist movement, was able to visit Ile-Ife, the heartland and cradle of the Yoruba race and be profoundly stirred by an object of beauty, the product of the Yoruba mind and hand, a classic expression of that serene portion of the world resolution of that race, in his own words:

“Before us stood a head of marvellous beauty, wonderfully cast in antique bronze, true to the life, incrusted with a patina of glorious dark green. This was, in very deed, the Olokun, Atlantic Africa’s Poseidon.”

Yet listen to what he had to write about the very people whose handiwork had lifted him into these realms of universal sublimity:

“Profoundly stirred, I stood for many minutes before the remnant of the erstwhile Lord and Ruler of the Empire of Atlantis. My companions were no less astounded. As though we have agreed to do so, we held our peace. Then I looked around and saw – the blacks – the circle of the sons of the ‘venerable priest’, his Holiness the Oni’s friends, and his intelligent officials. I was moved to silent melancholy at the thought that this assembly of degenerate and feeble-minded posterity should be the legitimate guardians of so much loveliness.”

A direct invitation to a free-for-all race for dispossession, justified on the grounds of the keeper’s unworthiness, it recalls other schizophrenic conditions which are mother to, for instance, the far more lethal, dark mythopoeia of Van Lvyck Louw. For though this erstwhile Nazi sympathizer would later rain maledictions on the heads of the more extreme racists of his countrymen:

“Lord, teach us to think what ‘own’ is, Lord let us think! and then: over hate against blacks, browns, whites: over this and its cause, I dare to call down judgement.”

Van Lvyck’s powerful epic RAKA was guaranteed to churn up the white cesspools of these primordial fears. A work of searing, visceral impact operating on racial memory, it would feed the Afrikaaner Credo on the looming spectre of a universal barbaric recession, bearing southwards on the cloven hooves of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the black.

There is a deep lesson for the world in the black races’ capacity to forgive, one which, I often think, has much to do with ethical precepts which spring from their world view and authentic religions, none of which is ever totally eradicated by the accretions of foreign faiths and their implicit ethnocentricism. For, not content with being a racial slanderer, one who did not hesitate to denigrate, in such uncompromisingly nihilistic terms, the ancestral fount of the black races – a belief which this ethnologist himself observed – Frobenius was also a notorious plunderer, one of a long line of European archeological raiders. The museums of Europe testify to this insatiable lust of Europe; the frustrations of the Ministries of Culture of the Third World and, of organizations like UNESCO are a continuing testimony to the tenacity, even recidivist nature of your routine receiver of stolen goods. Yet, is it not amazing that Frobenius is today still honoured by black institutions, black leaders, and scholars? That his anniversaries provide ready excuse for intellectual gatherings and symposia on the black continent, that his racist condescensions, assaults have not been permitted to obscure his contribution to their knowledge of Africa, or the role which he has played in the understanding of the phenomenon of human culture and society, even in spite of the frequent patchiness of his scholarship?

It is the same largeness of spirit which has informed the relationship today of erstwhile colonial nations, some of whom have undergone the most cruel forms of settler or plantation colonialism, where the human degradation that goes with greed and exploitation attained such levels of perversion that human ears, hands, and noses served to atone for failures in production quota. Nations which underwent the agony of wars of liberation, whose earth freshly teems with the bodies of innocent victims and unsung martyrs, live side by side today with their recent enslavers, even sharing the control of their destiny with those who, barely four or five years ago, compelled them to witness the massacre of their kith and kin. Over and above Christian charity, they are content to rebuild, and share. This spirit of collaboration is easy to dismiss as the treacherous ploy of that special breed of leaders who settle for early compromises in order to safeguard, for their own use, the polished shoes of the departing oppressors. In many cases, the truth of this must be conceded. But we also have examples of regimes, allied to the aspirations of their masses on the black continent, which have adopted this same political philosophy. And, in any case, the final arbiters are the people themselves, from whose relationships any observations such as this obtain any validity. Let us simply content ourselves with remarking that it is a phenomenon worthy of note. There are, after all, European nations today whose memory of domination by other races remains so vivid more than two centuries after liberation, that a terrible vengeance culturally, socially, and politically is still exacted, even at this very moment, from the descendants of those erstwhile conquerors. I have visited such nations whose cruel histories under foreign domination are enshrined as icons to daily consciousness in monuments, parks, in museums and churches, in documentation, woodcuts, and photo gravures displayed under bullet-proof glass-cases but, most telling of all, in the reduction of the remnants of the conquering hordes to the degraded status of aliens on sufferance, with reduced civic rights, privileges, and social status, a barely tolerate marginality that expresses itself in the pathos of downcast faces, dropped shoulders, and apologetic encounters in those rare times when intercourse with the latterly assertive race is unavoidable. Yes, all this I have seen, and much of it has been written about and debated in international gatherings. And even while acknowledging the poetic justice of it in the abstract, one cannot help but wonder if a physical pound of flesh, excised at birth, is not a kinder act than a lifelong visitation of the sins of the father on the sons even to the tenth and twelfth generations.

Confronted with such traditions of attenuating the racial and cultural pride of these marginalized or minority peoples, the mind travels back to our own societies where such causative histories are far fresher in the memory, where the ruins of formerly thriving communities still speak eloquent accusations and the fumes still rise from the scorched earth strategies of colonial and racist myopia. Yet the streets bear the names of former oppressors, their statues and other symbols of subjugation are left to decorate their squares, the consciousness of a fully confident people having relegated them to mere decorations and roosting-places for bats and pigeons. And the libraries remain unpurged, so that new generations freely browse through the works of Frobenius, of Hume, Hegel, or Montesquieu and others without first encountering, freshly stamped on the fly-leaf: WARNING! THIS WORK IS DANGEROUS FOR YOUR RACIAL SELF-ESTEEM.

Yet these proofs of accommodation, on the grand or minuscule scale, collective, institutional, or individual, must not be taken as proof of an infinite, uncritical capacity of black patience. They constitute in their own nature, a body of tests, an accumulation of debt, an implicit offer that must be matched by concrete returns. They are the blocks in a suspended bridge begun from one end of a chasm which, whether the builders will it or not, must obey the law of matter and crash down beyond a certain point, settling definitively into the widening chasm of suspicion, frustration, and redoubled hate. On that testing ground which, for us, is Southern Africa, that medieval camp of biblical terrors, primitive suspicions, a choice must be made by all lovers of peace: either to bring it into the modern world, into a rational state of being within that spirit of human partnership, a capacity for which has been so amply demonstrated by every liberated black nation on our continent, or – to bring it abjectly to its knees by ejecting it, in every aspect, from humane recognition, so that it caves in internally, through the strategies of its embattled majority. Whatever the choice, this inhuman affront cannot be allowed to pursue our Twentieth Century conscience into the Twenty-first, that symbolic coming-of-age which peoples of all cultures appear to celebrate with rites of passage. That calendar, we know, is not universal, but time is, and so are the imperatives of time. And of those imperatives that challenge our being, our presence, and humane definition at this time, none can be considered more pervasive than the end of racism, the eradication of human inequality, and the dismantling of all their structures. The Prize is the consequent enthronement of its complement: universal suffrage, and peace.

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Wole Soyinka – Other resources

Links to other sites

On Wole Soyinka from Pegasos Author’s Calendar

‘Writing, Theater Arts, and Political Activism’ – Conversation with Wole Soyinka (video and text version) from Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Wole Soyinka: The Climate of Fear – Reith Lecture 2004 from BBC Radio 4

On Wole Soyinka from American Academy of Achievement

Video

‘Conversations with History: Wole Soyinka’ from University of California Television (UCTV)

Wole Soyinka – Interview

Interview transcript

Professor Wole Soyinka, Nobel Literature Laureate 1986, welcome to our interview.

Wole Soyinka: Thank you.

Let’s start right at the very beginning. What were the circumstances of your birth, your early upbringing?

Wole Soyinka: I was born into a Christian household, in a parsonage in fact, so I grew up in sort of a missionary atmosphere but it was an environment which involved both the traditional religions as well as the Muslim religion, so we were exposed to all the various facets of faith, micro cultures which existed within those beliefs, and even though I’ve lost whatever Christian faith was drummed into me as a child, I still maintain very good relationship with all the various religions.

And you were born in a Nigerian town called, how do you pronounce it, Ake?

Wole Soyinka: Ake, Ake Abeokuta, I was born in the Ake sector of Abeokuta. Abeokuta is a nation city, it means literally “under the rocks” and it’s a very rocky kind of environment and very lush, lots of greenery, of course, because it’s a very tropical belt. It is a small town with the monarch, the Alake of Abeokuta, a mixture of traditional and western kind of cultures. My father was a schoolteacher and so I had the advantage of both western educational instruction in the school, as well as what you might call the process of imbibing the traditional processes of education instruction around me.

And this was colonial Nigeria. What were the forces that shaped the society?

Wole Soyinka: First of all it was a society which was very deeply steeped in its own cultures. Those cultures were never eradicated by contact with the missionary society. It was also a birth place of a lot of political agitation. While there was a pretty reasonable harmonious co-habitation with the European, the British specifically, British colonial forces, there was also a very keen sense of nationalism. In fact, the Egba kingdom, which Abeokuta is more or less the capital city, the Egba kingdom was one of the very last to be ceded to the British protectorate. It remained almost an independent entity within what is now known as Nigeria, simply because of its own traditional structure of governance.

You talk about political agitation … You talk in some of your writings and in your Nobel Lecture about the very, very young experience of your mother participating in a tax agitation against what was perceived as a very unfair tax. Did this political agitation, this very overtly political life, influence you from a very early age?

I grew up with a very strong sense of what is just and what is not …

Wole Soyinka: There’s no question at all, I grew up with a very strong sense of what is just and what is not or, to put it this way, I grew up with a keen sense of a division, the reality of a division of perception in people’s lives between those who govern and those who govern. The Alake of  Abeokuta, for instance, was a revered individual, traditionally, was a powerful monarch and the institution of Obaship. Many people don’t understand this outside, but actually the Yoruba system of Obaship, that’s kingship, is really a pretty democratic one. There are severe limitations to what a king can do and not do. There is a council of chiefs who wield a lot of power, they’re like a cabinet and if the king misbehaves or uses excessive power, this Ogboni council can actually meet, the enclave can meet and dethrone him. So the kind of autocratic notion which people have about Obaship, your system of kingship or that applies in other parts of Africa, of course, but this Yoruba is the example we’re dealing with, it’s not quite as rigid as they imagine.

When the Oba became somewhat high handed, autocratic, imposed what the women considered an unfair taxation on them, they rebelled and their protest was organised principally by my aunt, Mrs Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and one of her lieutenants was my mother and I was fascinated by the conflict. I was interested in the causes, and I found myself on the side of the women, maybe I got moved into it because my mother was involved, but I think I understood sufficient about what was happening and I became the courier between various groups, demonstrating groups, and I got really caught up, physically and mentally, in the entire conflict and I’ve no doubt at all that early lesson left its mark on my political awareness.

Your life has been defined, punctuated by political incidents, some more benign and some very cruel and threatening, even to you personally. Can you describe some of that process?

Wole Soyinka: The process of decolonisation was a very untidy one. The British, when they were leaving finally and knew exactly who they wanted to take over, they wanted pliant government, figures, structures, they wanted to continue indirectly in effect their control over much of their colonial possessions and this was one of the very early causes of conflict. The British inclined more towards the feudal mentality, the feudal structures rather than the more radical progressive elements who would re-shape society and institute pretty egalitarian systems of governance with opportunity for even disadvantaged people and so I found that decolonisation was not just the end of political struggle.

There always are internal divisions which impose choice on citizens and those who were politically aware and so I found myself thrown into that division within bound society in the west of Nigeria especially and I wrote, used street theatre, we call it guerrilla theatre, wrote political sketches, performed them in open spaces and halls in which corrupt authority was attacked and this led eventually to even more activist action.

There was the incident where a radio station which was the result of my intervention in the attempt of the government to rig the elections and pronounce, you know, broadcast totally false results after inflicting violence on the voters, after intimidation failed completely and so I intervened in that. This ended me my first spell, you know, of conflict with the law because I was tried for allegedly holding up a radio station and substituting the Premier’s state with mine, which more or less invited the Premier to get out of town sort of thing, but I was acquitted and then later things got even more serious. We had our first experience of a military coup which was very bloody. There were reprisals, there was a counter coup and all this led to a civil war.

I consider the civil war very unjust because the breakaway state of Biafra, I mean the conflict led to Biafrans, the Igbo people breaking away from Nigeria and while I thought that this was politically unwise, I found that it was not morally wrong because they had been decimated. There’s no other word for it. It was an act of genocide which was perpetrated against the Igbo people. The causes, of course, are more complex than straightforward right and wrong but you could not escape the fact that there was an act of genocide and so I took position against the war, I allied with others who were like minded and we tried to intervene.

This led to my imprisonment for two years and four months, nearly two years of which was in solitary confinement, so that was like an escalation of risks, escalation of intensities of the cause of conflict. Then, after that, when I thought it was more or less all over, everything was stabilised, we were moving up to serious military dictatorships which were not acceptable but with which you had to live and even trying to obtain, keep something useful for the nation, for the people, with the more amenable of these, the less obnoxious of some of them. Then the move towards democracy began all over again and suddenly it was aborted and aborted by a very singularly repellent kind of military individual and so I had to take action against him also which led eventually to my exile, my being placed on trial for treason, a price being placed on my head and so on and so forth. Part of occupational risk of one’s endeavours.

Has this process been part of your perceived duty as a writer or as a citizen?

Wole Soyinka: The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer as happened to my colleague, Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni environmental activist who was hanged after a kangaroo trial by this brutal dictator, Sani Abacha, he and eight of his companions. When an event like that happens, and even lesser events of lesser gravity, the citizen comes to the fore, the citizen overtakes the writer because literature has proved or is proving inadequate and then forms of citizen action, whether it’s demonstrations or sometimes, in the case of Christopher Okebo, another colleague of mine who lost his life, that’s, you know, he went to war, he went on the Biafran side because he found that his poetry could not answer his sense of intense wrong and he perished on the front.

So writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities …

So writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it’s hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.

It’s a very intense fire in which your craft, your art has been forged. Has it had a very powerful affect on your writing? Has it made your writing more intense?

Wole Soyinka: Could be. One thing I am certain of is that it has made me create and recreate different tempo or different tempi of writing. I’ve had to adjust to … I mean, ideally, for instance, I think most writers would like a quiet space, complete isolation, in which they control their own time. Spaces of creativity in which there’s very little interruption. I think that’s the idea and this perhaps is how I began as a writer, finding that space, that intense period in which I’m completely alone, completely alone.

But as you get drawn more and more into other activities, like political activities, very demanding, you have to find different rhythms of writing; I think that’s the word I’m looking for, rhythms of creativity which then, of course, become very intense. I think your writing then tends to be very intensified simply because there are other demands which seem equally important. You know, if they were just trivial demands and so on then it wouldn’t matter at all, you can hive off a certain section of the mind and deal with that, but if it’s something which consumes you, then there’s a competition which concentrates your writing.

Did you find it easy to start writing or was it a struggle? Are you a natural writer?

Wole Soyinka: That’s a very good question. I think I’m a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don’t struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don’t feel a compulsion to write. Of course, when I start writing then it becomes a compulsive activity, because I’ve begun something and I want to continue, want to finish it. The characters in my play are crowding my head, demanding to be let out or demanding to be allowed to complete what they’ve set out to do, so there is compulsion there and of course I can carry an idea with me in my head, it just is there for months, years.

I remember doing ‘The King’s Horseman’, when I first heard of that story, I wanted, I was so fascinated by it, I wanted to write it immediately but I didn’t have time for it and other things came in between. Then one day I was teaching in Cambridge, and this is a play which is set in a colonial period, and my college was Churchill College and I used to come down the stairs, you know, towards the dining hall or going outside and there was this bust of this great genius of a colonialist and all the more hated for being such a genius at his work, at that kind of work, Winston Churchill.

I used to look at him and I felt each time like pushing the bust over the edge of the stairs and it was during that period that one day I recalled this story which had been in my head for – how many years? Maybe five, ten years, yes, about ten years and I sat and after that I just couldn’t rest until I could sit at my typewriter then and start work on it and that’s where I wrote it and wrote it, for a play of that complexity, virtually record time. Within the week I’d completed it and I brought people in to read it, so writing comes like in … it has its own creative rhythm, you know, you can’t force it. At least I don’t. I know there are other writers who sit down religiously every morning, they take their espresso, they put a clean sheet of paper there and they sit looking at that paper until they’ve finished or covered at least a number of those pages. No, I’m not like that. I have to be ready. It has to gestate it for quite a while and then it’s ready to burst forth.

And you talk about completing a play, is it complete until it’s performed?

Wole Soyinka: That’s again a good question but then, for many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they’ve got to be, the work has been started, it’s got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I’m exactly like that. Yes, I’m not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.

Is that part of your African tradition? Because obviously you’re writing for very diverse audiences and audiences with diverse literary capacities. Some of your audiences may be completely illiterate. Is it important to you that you reach all of those audiences and is theatre a strong vehicle for that?

Wole Soyinka: That’s where I think those of us who work in the theatre have an advantage over the novelists and the prose writers and, to some extent, those who write only poetry. With theatre, you can interpret the most complex play on stage for it have meaning to an audience because you’re dealing in images, you’re dealing in action, you can use different idioms to interpret and clarify something which is obscured in the reading and of course there are different kinds of play, there are mythological plays, there are what I call the dramatic sketches, direct political theatre which is virtually everybody, but I find that you can use the stage as a social vehicle, you know, which any kind of audience.

And when you have already the tradition of theatre in your society and we have these travelling companies, we call them folk opera companies, they travel all over the place in a lorry; they arrive there in the morning, they drum, dance around the town to announce their presence. In the evening, to say where the venue will be, it can be just an improvised hall. By evening everybody’s already, you know, swarming in that direction so the tradition of theatre already exists in my society and that is an advantage.

Does it give you a special joy to have your work performed in front of a Nigerian audience, say the Orubo audience?

I come alive when I have assisted in bringing out the printed word on the stage …

Wole Soyinka: Joy is not the word, I don’t think, it’s just that’s my occupation, you know, I come alive, let’s put it that way, I come alive when I have assisted in bringing out the printed word on the stage, you know, and I enjoy directing plays. It’s a tactile process, theatre, unlike a number of other forms of the creative work.

You talk about diverse audiences, diverse influences?

Wole Soyinka: My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience. I never know who’s influencing me at any time. I mean, I can take a play by Brecht and adapt it, I’m consciously adapting that play, or, as I’ve done with the Greek classics, Euripides and Oedipus, and I’m consciously adapting that play. Whether it influences me or not, I think it’s the critics, the analysts who have to decide that. Me, I don’t feel that I’m under the influence of any such sources.

But you have rather diverse forms. If you look at something like myth literature in the African world, you analyse and deconstruct those different belief systems, those different structures.

Wole Soyinka: My interest in culture generally is a comparative one, comparative one, and I think that’s where the word joy, I think, can be applicable. There’s joy in actually seeing the relatedness, the connectedness of different cultures or recognising, for instance, your own culture in another or another culture in your own culture and feeling an air to all of them.

You draw lots on your Yoruba culture, you draw a lot on Ogun, you draw a lot on the cosmology of your people. How does that distinguish your work from other writers?

Wole Soyinka: Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world. At a reading which we had, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison … Once Derek Walcott read a play of his which is based on the Cyclops myth. Intensely political play with direct correlation and purpose to the Greek tyranny in the episode of the Greek General, but I also rarely use mythology for its own sake because, as a theatre person, the mythological figures are in fact humanity to the ninth degree and Yoruba mythology in particular has fascination of being one of the most humanised mythologies in the world.

The gods in Yoruba mythology are not remote at all. They’re benign, they’re malign, they are mischievous, like Eshu for instance, tricksters, rascally, fornicators, that’s a similarity to Greek mythology, for instance, you know. They’re not saints, they’re not saints. They’re powerful. It’s why they’re not tyrannical. Of course, a number of them are also very, you know, benevolent, you know, there are saintly virtues to be found in them. In other words, you have the entire gamut of human experience captured in the mythology of the Yoruba. This is what makes the Yoruba mythology a natural source material for me in my creative endeavours.

Do you feel a duty, do you feel bound to give a voice to your community? Yesterday at the reading you talked about reinforcing the civic voice.

Wole Soyinka: Yes, I do. I do, but I were part company with certain schools of writers that I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer. I don’t believe that. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you’re not writing, when your writing’s not dealing with a concrete political situation.

The very function of creativity, of the elaboration of the human condition only enlarges the human spirit and, I mean, as a writer I don’t want to read political literature all the time. It would be terribly boring and, you know, abrasive, but just reading the insights, you know, partaking of the insights of a writer into phenomena, into society, into human relationships, both on a micro level and on a macro level, is already a function. For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society. But I happen to be unfortunately temperamental. No, my temperament is also, what you describe to rainfalls, the will of society, to combat a number of contradictions. That happens to be my creative temperament.

When did these issues move away from specific to universal?

Wole Soyinka: I think all, well … no, let me correct what I was about to say. I’m very conscious when I’m being specific, like my street theatre, my guerrilla theatre for instance. It’s created and the themes and the methodology of the delivery of the content is specific. It’s to an immediate issue. But when I sit down to craft a play or a novel or a poem, I’m now dealing more consciously, perhaps, perhaps, on more universal issues. But even those specific issues contain sometimes universal applications, so I don’t say I’m only going to be specific but what motivates that particular work at that moment is a specific issue and I try to address it as much as possible.

To move onto the Nobel Prize, 1986, the first African writer to get the Nobel Prize.

Wole Soyinka: In literature.

In literature. Tell us about the event. Did you have intimations beforehand? How did it all come about?

Wole Soyinka: No. Not only didn’t I have any intimations, I was extremely irritated the year before by speculations in the Nigerian media. I mean, it really boiled up to a hysterical pitch. I believe that prizes are useful, you know, are useful things for the disciplines, whether we are talking about chemistry or we’re talking … It motivates, it, you know, inspires, it encourages and it brings, in the case of literature, it brings literature, the arts, it brings the arts out of the ghetto, out of the ghetto. People respond … “Oh there’s a prize for this? Oh yes. Oh, I must take a look into that.”

But as a matter of fact, I was nominating other writers. During that period where, in my group, the institution to which I belonged, we moved between … and Senghor, Léopold Senghor, and I frankly thought that one or the other was going to get it and we were going to celebrate with them. So my mind was never at any time, at any time, you know, on the notion of considering myself as a candidate just, you know, because I had other writers I loved, and not just African writers. I mean, like, I’m a consumer of literature and so I had candidates quite apart from even the African candidates whom I thought, you know, who are going to get it before they got to me at all. So it was quite a shock and a surprise. Pleasant one, but the shock was the same.

The event itself, your Nobel Lecture, you used the platform, it was a very overtly political speech. It was a very powerful lecture and there was, among the more conservative elements in society, there was some grumbling about using that platform for such an overtly, and I come from South Africa and of course at that time the reaction was fantastic because it really put the apartheid government into a flap, you know, it disturbed them.

I felt my racial fount was being sullied and insulted as long as, you know, the apartheid situation existed. …

Wole Soyinka: I have been obsessed by South Africa since, oh, way back. My very first play which was put on at the Royal Court Theatre in London as a student, I wrote it as a student, was called ‘The Invention’ and it was a racial thing but I felt my racial fount was being sullied and insulted as long as, you know, the apartheid situation existed. It just didn’t make sense to me. There was no way I would not have used that platform, you know, I couldn’t conceive. My mind immediately shot to South Africa the moment I sat down to think what I was going to write, what I was going to say. There was no other choice.

I wasn’t interested in discussing my craft. I mean, South Africa had always been mixed up with my work, with my literature, so you can talk about South Africa, I am talking about my work, my play ‘The Invention’, other poems I had written, the very issue of creativity. I was speaking about the whole fate of literature, the exiled South African writers with whom I used to mix in London and other places. /—/, Lewis Nkosi, /—/ etcetera. I mean, for me this was literature. I had no ambiguity at all about what I was going to say. I wasn’t that I felt it was my duty. No, it was just my literature.

Do you think that that lecture had a powerful influence? Do you think that it has contributed towards changing things?

Wole Soyinka: You know, I was so impressed when you said just now that it really had the South African government in a flap. I didn’t follow, you know, up the consequences or whatever, I was always more interested in looking forward to the day when, as I wrote in another article, I would present a copy of Mandela’s poems, ‘Mandela’s World and other poems’, and I swore that one day I was going to present it to him in his living room and read him one or two poems.

So once I’d given that speech, well for me, I was more interested in doing other things in the same connection and maybe that and the work of others, cumulative effect, political bargaining. I wrote, if you remember Ogun Abibima which was a construction of Ogun, moving down to the south to join hands with Shaka, both mythological figures, one is real of course but in a sense, two ancestral figures, you know, joining hands to go down and smash apartheid and I wrote this epic of projection … so I just went back to my work, I continued my work.

How has being a Nobel Prize Laureate affected your work, your writing, your creative space?

Wole Soyinka: Let me again cite Bernard Shaw, who is reputed to have said that, when he was given the Nobel Prize, that he could forgive the man who invented dynamite but it took the most diabolical mind in the world to invent the Nobel Prize for Literature. I agree with that to a certain extent because it swelled my constituency. It was already sufficiently, you know, swollen because I’ve always, you know, agitated on the world stage one way or the other but it really made life virtually impossible. It’s with astonishment that I discover that I’ve actually completed a new work, you know, ever since the Nobel I would sit down and look at it like some strange object … Oh, did I really manage to finish this?

So it’s mixed with … Of course I’ve enjoyed having the Nobel Prize, the prestige that goes along with it, the money that came with it in particular. I was the typical, still am to some extent, impecunious writer, you know, just struggling to make ends meet, so that, you know, nobody’s going to deny that at all. In fact, if they want to give it to me a second time, I’m standing by, ready to receive it, but as I said now, it’s a problem, it’s a real problem and then expectations and then you have monsters like Sani Abacha who come up from time to time and who would have died a happy man if he’d succeeded in hanging a Nobel Laureate for literature. I mean, that’s a fact and it can be attested by some of his close associates so it brings, in this particular case it brought certain additional risks when it should have been what most people correctly think, a kind of protection.

It’s a new century. You’re writing ‘Climate of Fear’, you’re addressing very current issues. You’re addressing a new threat. Can you tell us a little bit about the last lecture in here ‘I am right, you are dead’, it talks about intolerance.

Yes, intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today …

Wole Soyinka: Yes, intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it’s taken on lethal proportions. I mean, intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance. But the sense of self assuredness that, you know, ideologists, you have all the structure of the world in your hand, whether you’re viewing it from material world or from the extra terrestrial lofty position and it’s become accentuated because of genuine as well as perceived injustices.

Religion has really spawned some monsters. It always has, historically. Go all the way back to the Inquisition, you know, the Crusades, the Jehad and so on. It’s all based on the mentality of “I’m right”, but now today it’s moved from even the question of “I’m right and I’m willing to tolerate those who agree that I am right or those who don’t disturb me anyway”. Now, it’s a question of “If you do not accept that I’m right, I have a right to kill you”. That is the mentality of religious fundamentalism today. That is the meaning of the kind of terror which we are witnessing today, that everybody is expendable who do not actually physically line up behind me.

And one of the most distressing aspects of this is to see that kind of mentality also manifested by the leadership of so called democratic countries, and I refer specifically to the United States of America, where the President uses a kind of language which becomes indistinguishable from that of Osama Bin Laden. “I’m right, it doesn’t matter whether the world thinks I am wrong, I know that I am divinely ordered to do this”. It’s that kind of language, that’s the language of intolerance, intolerance of opinion – those who are not with us are against us, you know. And this is, of course, we’ve got to be honest, that the more dangerous is that of religious fundamentalism, those who feel that, you know, the kind which led to Beslan, one of the most horrendous chapters of Iraq’s contemporary experience. That really, I think, has reached, has breached the very barriers of the unimaginable.

People seem to have a very short memory for history, that things recur over and over again in an endless cycle. Do you think that your role as a writer is to try and help people to understand, to deconstruct history?

Wole Soyinka: Whenever that is possible, I consider it my duty to do. Whenever circumstances point, reactions, events point to this short changing of memory, then I think it is the duty of the writer to say: Look, the material we’re working on, whether citizens or writers, is not new, you know, and to bring the mind back and see that there’s a repetition of this cycle of stupidity. I think I’ve used that expression somewhere else before and to think now why do we have to tread the same spores over and over again? It’s almost a kind of self defense. You’re saying you’re making my work as a writer difficult for me because you’re not paying attention, you’re not recollecting and I have to keep reminding you, so yes, I think even from the point of view of self defense, one must bring up, you know, pull up memories from where it’s short changed.

Finally, you teach as well, you have young aspiring writers. In short, what do they have to do?

Wole Soyinka: I always tell them get ready a basket first of all, in which to collect all your rejection slips and you must continue until that basket is full or your work is accepted. In other words, you just must continue writing; and once you accept that, then we can talk about what you want to write insofar as I can assist. I’m not a very good teacher of creative writing and I always warn them about that. What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that’s my function, but from time to time it’s possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

But over and above all, I also tell them don’t get carried away by the ideologs. Don’t feel that you have to tailor your literature a particular way to please any school of ideology. There will emerge in its own right, effortlessly, some kind of ideological direction which is a reflection of your thinking and you want your thinking, above all. We wasted a lot of creative energy in that immediate post colonial era, when there was a struggle between, you know, the Cold War between the capitalism and communism. Many writers just wasted their energy and their talent because they want to be ideologically correct and of course all they produced was propaganda. Absolute tawdry uninteresting, oh, full of excitation, yes, you know, full of ra-ra-ra but they were short changing their own talent and I used to tell them and now that they’ve become ideological orphans, they’re now trying to recover their own true voice and have produced some very good work but they could have produced excellent work and at the same time, you know, be truthful to their ideological convictions if they hadn’t allowed that ideology to take primary place and that’s what I tell all writers.

Great. Professor Soyinka, thank you very much indeed. Been a real pleasure to speak to you.

Wole Soyinka: Thank you.

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Wole Soyinka – Facts