By JAMES TSAAIOR
WOLE Soyinka is a study in exceptionalism. His exceptionalism as Nigeria/ Africa’s Nobel laureate is only equaled by a few Nigerians. Emeka Anyaoku, for instance, as Commonwealth Secretary- General; the late Chinua Achebe, his fellow writer, as the most read African novelist. Soyinka is also known globally for his writings and political activism. However, his literary practice has always come under intense interrogation by the critical establishment, especially the formation that identifies the lack of a clear, unambiguous political dimension to his oeuvre.
In its discursive elaborations, this critical collective accuses the Nobelist of investing enormous agency and epistemological capital in the lone, individual figure who imposes on himself the exclusive preserve of galvanizing society in the kinesis of history. Inevitably, the mass of the collectivity and their communal aspirations and energies for the revolutionary transformation of the patterns of social and cultural production are subsidiarised to the will of the larger-than-life hero. Whether it is in his dramaturgy or poetic output, this critical intellection has become definitive of the attempts to come to grips with Soyinka’s writings.
The critical charge is that Soyinka is enamoured of lone, individual subjectivities who impose the communal will upon themselves and embody history without due recourse to the mass of the people who are the authentic creators of history may be somewhat compelling. However, to pronounce Soyinka guilty and to convict him of ahistoricity is to carry one’s luck too far. Allied to this assumed deficit in apprehending the networks of historical knowledge is the equally perennial accusation that Soyinka’s artistry does not pursue progressive themes that are dialectical and materialist in character. This, too, looks like training the arrow against a pin which is likely to be missed.
This supposed absence of a progressive centre and ideological gravitation to progressive possibilities in Soyinka’s poetics thus becomes the overriding and informing concern which drives this interpretive current. Interestingly, Nigeria’s present postcolonial contradictions issue directly from this lack of a progressive vein in her politics, economics and culture. A culture of elitist predation, oppression, exploitation and corruption has been entrenched and celebrated as national pastime since independence in October 1960.
The critical skirmish concerning Soyinka strikes at the very core of discourses which exist at the interface of the formalist and functionalist approaches to literature and art: the autonomy of art as a self-sufficient, aesthetic creation and its social/ political functionality. I, however, argue that Soyinka has always been a politically active and positioned writer and that critical perspectives which negate this reality have neither been charitable nor able to transcend the concrete dynamic of his art.
Indeed, not to appear to have a clear political/ideological sympathy is itself a political rite. While it may be somewhat difficult to delineate the fine details of the political lineaments inherent in Soyinka’s creative writings, his essays constitute a more crystallizing agent in the determination of his ideological intentions which are thinly disguised in his creative sensibility. For instance, his collection of essays, The Open Sore of a Continent contextualizes and exemplifies Soyinka’s political activism as a writer.
One of the most vociferous and unsparing of the critics has been Femi Osofisan who has interrogated Soyinka’s idealisation and deification of the lone, promethean individual who bears the burdens of history and takes on the forces of society to the mutual exclusivity of the collectivity. Valorising a Marxist consciousness, Osofisan denounces Soyinka’s lack of recourse to clear ideological mooring of his aesthetics in a collectivising partisanship that foregrounds and takes sides with the mass of the people and makes them the true agents and subjectivities of history. Osofisan is particularly disturbed by Soyinka’s deployment of animist metaphysics and the individual Promethean protagonist theorised in Aristotelian poetics.
But Osofisan is not alone. Biodun Jeyifo has also engaged in critical skirmishes with Soyinka’s oeuvre, especially his dramaturgy and identified its ideological limitations in elitist aesthetics. Jeyifo has deconstructed Soyinka’s poetics based on his appropriation of cultural idioms and mythic knowledge grids without fully acknowledging the functional role of the community as veritable makers of history. His grouse pendulates between Soyinka’s ahistoricism and lack of historical dialecticism, especially concerning the latter’s creative daemon, Ogun.
Jeyifo, therefore, rails Soyinka for literary idealization and for lacking true revolutionary potential. At the interface of the two deconstructive appraisals of Soyinka’s poetics, Promethean individualism and the lack of dialectics of historicity are the animating concerns. Tejumola Olaniyan pursues the argument in the same direction of the individuation of history and its currents as hypostasised in the lone figure. Related to this also is the subsidiarisation of the female principle to patriarchal power structures in the gender politics that define the African cultural cartography where women are rendered invisible and voiceless as manifested in the thematisation of the god, Ogun.
It is ironic that Soyinka is himself on the firing range concerning the cultural politics of Negritude of which he has been a fierce critic. He is known to have famously characterised the movement (with its arch-exponents such as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas) as a tiger which does not need to proclaim its tigritude but act it. What Soyinka perhaps does not appreciate is that, before the leopard can pounce, it must declare itself through its growls. The nativist intellection of the bolekaja triumvirate of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike has also been at the receiving end of Soyinka’s polemics and rehearsed vitriol. Many of the critics, however, have increasingly interrogated the fidelity of Soyinka’s cultural politics to Africa, the home continent he claims to strenuously defend in his literary and critical practice.
Soyinka, no doubt, has not helped the discursive trajectory by mapping a fine, crystallising ideological dimension to his corpus. His persevering and sustained avowal negates a pious ideological engagement or artistic attachment to doctrinaire orthodoxies. But this denial itself, to my mind, constitutes a politics, a veritable politics. The politics, however, transcends mere grandstanding and political platitudes. The political dimension of Soyinka’s craft gestures towards a more profound creative manipulation and husbandry of cultural idioms, indigenous cosmologies and mythopoeisis peculiarly Afrocentric in the distillation of themes, construction of subjectivity, flagellation of Africa’s culturality, and the refinement of an artistic vision which is at once compelling and definitive.
Earlier, Biodun Jeyifo alluded to the political and ideological trajectory inherent in, and constitutive of, Soyinkaesque aesthetics when he identified what he called “a hidden class war” in The Road, one of Soyinka’s dramatic specimens. In his exploration of the play in The Truthful Lie, Jeyifo affirms that the ideological complexion of Soyinka’s dramaturgy consists in his unobtrusive representation of political realities and cultural verities though without necessarily erasing and obfuscating the residence of these constitutive elements in his dramaturgic and artistic repertory.
With Soyinka, this political/ideological lineament has become a defining category beginning with his early work, especially A Dance of the Forests through much of his succeeding oeuvre to more recent artistic works and obvious political writings and essays. Thus, in launching into the hinterland of Soyinka’s writings, I am tracing a personal literary biography/ history of Soyinka though with an obvious bias for his political writings after the Nobel. What follows represents a visceral political commitment to democratic ideals and the imperative of good governance in postcolonial Nigeria away from military dictatorship and authoritarian or maximum rulership.
It is, therefore, not an extravagant claim to iterate that Soyinka’s literary and critical practice has been governed and dictated by political activism and patriotic fervor. This practice has found concrete and full-valued manifestation in his political engagements over the years. Perhaps, one of the most foundational of these political rites which etched Soyinka into national consciousness and marked his formal induction into the protest movement was the storming of the Western Radio Broadcasting House in 1965 as part of his interventionist struggle against political opportunism and rascality during Nigeria’s First Republic. This earned him arrest and imprisonment for three months on the varnished charges of “broadcasting false election results on radio and opened the floodgate to other forms of harassment”.
This activist temperament of Soyinka’s was again resonated during the Nigerian civil imbroglio of 1967-1970. The thirty-month strife between the secessionist Biafra and the Federal Government threw the fragile nation into an existential crisis and threatened its corporate essence. Soyinka’s pacifist role in an attempt to reverse the imminent descent into a waiting precipice was again misconstrued by the then Gowon military regime as subversive and hence an act of collaboration with the Biafran enemy.
Soyinka was again hurled into solitary confinement for the better part of the conflict. The Man Died, his memoir, was written as a chronicle of the harrowing experiences of a politically committed writer in active dialogue with his nation, interrogating its sense of national propriety and place in history. It is, therefore, not too difficult to cautiously pick one’s way through the trajectory of Soyinka’s writings and identify in it tapestries of a bold ideological engagement with Nigeria and its tortured social, political and cultural history.
In The Open Sore of a Continent, Soyinka rejects a doctrinaire commitment, as he does in the entire gamut of his literary and critical practice, and rather favours an organic revolutionary ideal. Thus, The Open Sore traces Nigeria’s decline into increasingly inhumane military governments, a deterioration epitomized by the 1995 execution of fellow playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa as well as the death sentence pronounced on Soyinka himself in 1997. But it also comments powerfully on the democratic shenanigans being experienced in the dispensation of “Change” in which political governance has become an exercise in barefaced vendetta and vindictiveness in the name of fighting corruption.
A post-Afrocentric temperament and vision courses boldly through the textual discourses pursued in the The Open Sore. The post-Afrocentric represents a significant shift, a reconstitution of the nativist, return-to-source discourse which romantically delineates traditional Africa as an arcadian cultural space to which the continent must unproblematically and uncritically connect itself if it must surge above the turbulent currents of European modernity and exorcise the demons of Western industrial and consumerist culture sartorially costumed as globalization.
It also rails against the essentialist and binarist construction of global racial and hierarchical power relations by the Western persona, an epistemic arrogance which pervades the totalizing discourses that are produced from the West and routinely circulated to the peripheries of the world. In sum, the post-Afrocentric is a double-edged discourse.
It cuts a deep, fine line in between the Afrocentric and Eurocentric cultural discourses, destabilises and decentres them with the ultimate strategy of transcending their parochial and narcissistic fixities. The post-Afrocentric re-imagines and remaps the boundaries of culture and politics and perceives it not as a border but as a site which opens up vast possibilities for negotiation and renegotiation.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, The Open Sore as a postcolonial text with a post-Afrocentric character is not blandly rooted in the deceptive negritudinist rhetoric of cultural narcissism and the grand idealisation and romanticisation of the self. This is the politics of navel-gazing which is itself as occluding as it is constrictive and deadly. What this means in essence is that it is non-essentialist, self-critical, open-ended and performative, negotiating identity as processual, and selectively borrowing from others to renew and fortify itself, sharing collectively in the cultural pool as it secretes its cultural self and flows in the currents of a common humanity and cultural heritage in an age of global flows.
The pathology of the sore as metaphor for the African condition
The sore is a malaised medical condition which is representative of an even more profound psychological condition. It, therefore, represents the corruption of the physical body but transcends its geography to map other interstitial regions of the human psychology. Besides its obvious debilitating and discomfiting possibilities, it is also an object of social denial and stigma as it hyphenates the individual’s untrammelled participation in community life. It also attracts economic implications as the victim of a sore, particularly one that has persevered, is incapacitated and so cannot actively and fully engage in economic activities.
This has spiralling repercussions on his livelihood and that of family. The owner of a sore, therefore, has many psychological worries as the condition is not only physical. It is worse if the sore has refused the healing power of the herb and other therapeutic permutations. This appears to be the kind of case Soyinka sketches in the The Open Sore of a Continent. Clearly, the open nature of the sore demonstrates sufficiently that it is not been purposively attended to by its owner or those charged with the duty of nursing and ensuring its permanent cure.
The result has been a sore that has festered perennially and continues to invite flies to a bacchanal feast at the expense of the health and well being of the victim. This is the sore of the soul, of conscience which is fast becoming gangrenous and threatening the very life of Africa. In this political treatise, Soyinka indicts successive military despots and their civilian autocrats who have collaborated to pillage the continent of its resources while their nations bleed to death. Beginning with his native Nigeria, Soyinka berates postcolonial African political leadership as visionless, irresponsible, irresponsive and unaccountable to the aspirations and hopes of their peoples.
Though he is particular about the Shagari civilian dispensation (1979-83) and the Buhari military dictatorship (1983-1985), Soyinka painfully implicates successive postcolonial Nigerian governments which have taken turns in pillaging the nation and its prodigious resources, plotted a dismal graph of poverty amidst plenty and have left the house in ruins. Soyinka locates the setting of this jeremiad narrative during the moment of British colonial penetration and domination of the country and its politics of artificial national formation. But beyond this, Nigeria as a narrative, to Soyinka, cannot cohere because political corruption, elitist greed, naked power, and poverty of vision have all combined to deterministically drive the nation to an anti-climactic moment: a yawning precipice perpetually waits for the nation to hurl itself in.
The Open Sore participates in the retrogressive politics of national engineering as a counter-discursive engagement with the levers of warped power apparatuses by speaking back to the political elite which has preyed on the people for so long. In it, Soyinka deplores the reichification of governance. This is the consolidation of state power in the hands of a few people with entrenched personal interests under the pretext of rebuilding a failed republic. In this rebuilding process, national/public interest is subordinated to personal interest and the national patrimony becomes the heritage of the powerful and the rich in praetorian palaces while the rest of the population is consigned to a peripheral and uncertain existence on the fringes of society.
Soyinka negotiates the politics of oil in The Open Sore and laments that what should be an asset to the Nigerian nation upon its discovery in Oloibiri in 1956 has become a disquieting liability. In this regard, the boom in oil has become a doom for the nation and particularly the indigenous communities host to oil production. Soyinka sketches out how this historical continuum of oil production and its politics in Nigeria since Oloibiri has become an unrelieved nightmare the nation has been struggling to release itself from:
It is interesting that colonial Britain is implicated in the politics of Nigeria’s oil and its continued interest in the nation’s mono-cultural economy through companies involved in oil operations like Shell. The activities of international big business embodied in the oil cartels like Shell, Exxonmobil, Chevron, Agip/Eni, etc. have despoiled the fertile farmlands through oil spillages with devastating repercussions on the people’s agrarian economy. The streams, rivers and creeks have been poisoned and marine life decimated thereby threatening the fishing activities of the Delta communities. Gas flaring has degraded the environment and caused hazards while the people are left without job opportunities and infrastructural development.
Against this sordid backdrop, Soyinka viscerally condemns the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha (and I should add those before and after it) which judicially murdered writer and environmental activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others who courageously protested the slow genocide and ethnic cleansing the minority peoples have been subjected to through oil prospecting in the Niger Delta. Saro-Wiwa was to announce to the world the monumental cause to which he would be a martyr and the present hostilities in the Delta are a fitting justification to the debility.
Soyinka has had cause to state elsewhere that the first condition for humanity is justice and that wherever and whenever this condition is violated or compromised, silence becomes synonymous with complicity. As such, the man dies in anyone who maintains silence in the face of tyranny and injustice. The Open Sore represents a transgressive testament against the unjust, ritualised violation of the humanity and the rape of the environment of the oil-producing communities of the Niger Delta by successive Nigerian governments.
On the whole, Soyinka is involved in a synecdochal narrative strategy as Nigeria is a microcosm of Africa and so represents a tiny part of the whole. Much of the crisis of governance and poverty of vision exhibited by Nigerian politicians, in varying degrees and peculiarities, is a powerful reading of the African narrative in how not to invent and engineer nationhood. Many African countries ranging from Ghana, Guinea, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Togo, Congo, DR, Niger, Chad, Uganda, etc. have been disturbed by military dictatorship.
Civil war has been a defining marker of nationhood and national becoming in many African countries with Nigeria leading the pack of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, DR, Rwanda, Burundi, etc. These civil wars have decimated millions, displaced and made them refugees in their home countries. This, no doubt, has diminished the humanity of the ordinary citizens and inflicted open sores on the peoples and the continent, sores that have refused to heal. South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation is a perfect example of this pathology.
Countries that have been spared military interregnum have not fared any better in terms of nurturing an acceptable and enduring democratic culture. In recent history, Kenya was consumed in a bitter post-election crisis which was precipitated by sharp political chicanery, anti-democratic practices and ethnic chauvinism. Cameroon has also been a theatre of war with the pseudo-democratic regime hounding its enemies, real and imagined especially in the South of the country in a tenuous political arrangement which is lopsided and exclusionary. This has generated arrested development in many of these countries with the political elite preying on the mass of the people.
In negotiating the logic of the imperative of a democratic ideal in Soyinka’s literary and artistic practice, what has emerged is the essential cultural particularity and political specificity of his oeuvre which constitutes a dynamic engagement with the perennial throes of the African continent in general and his native Nigeria in particular. Soyinka gestures towards recent national history to distil lessons which are consistent with Nigerian/African modernity with the artistic intent to rankle the sores of the continent so as to administer an efficacious therapy. His argument peaks at two levels: the ideal of a democratic culture which is culturally deep, socially just and politically progressive for the benefits of the people and the perfidy of parasitic and hypocritical elite which has compromised and squelched the cherished dreams of the people.
The Open Sore represents a powerful and compelling political discursive rite which validates the perspective that much of Soyinka’s literary and artistic practice has been underwritten and mediated by politics except that the critical establishment has been oblivious of the political/ ideological lineaments in his corpus of writings. What appears thinly disguised in his imaginative productions has been frontally engaged in his polemical and political commentaries on the ill-health of the Nigerian nation and the African continent as metaphorised in the open sore which has refused the balm of the healing herb of history.
James Tar Tsaaior is a professor of Media and Cultural Communication, School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos.