In the latest episode of African Voices Changemakers, CNN’s Larry Madowo meets Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, to discuss his expansive body of work, as well as his political activism and what comes next.
Soyinka recently turned 90, and he reflects on his childhood and how he became politically aware, “I was a great eavesdropper on my parents, on the conversation going on, especially my father’s colleagues.
He was the head nurse, head teacher, and he had sort of coterie of argumentative people. And I was sitting there, I remember, behind an armchair. I was listening.”
Listening, Soyinka says, was his method of becoming politically alert. His involvement then progressed to “passing messages” as he recalls, “When all the rioting was taking place, I became a courier between the various women’s camps.”
The playwright speaks about how his mother’s participation in the Abeokuta riots planted the seed for his life’s work, “Being actually within the environment, that struggle of militancy against an unacceptable situation. That these women coming in, for instance, in the Kuti house, to report their encounters, they were called an Accord, the native police quote, and how their goods were being seized in the marketplaces if they didn’t pay taxes, some of them beaten up, roughed up and so on. And I took this side of the women in the most natural way. So that, yes, that reflected in my writing. No question at all.”
It was the “stress and struggle” life under colonisation that allowed Soyinka to dream of, “What things could be like if society evolved along the kind of discussions which we listened to from the adults.”
He continues that contrastingly, now, life is, “Full of such complexities, such contradictions, such nuances, which involve unfortunately life and death decisions. We didn’t have all those in my childhood. So, there was a sense of greater leisure room for contemplation, and for even dreaming. These days, things happen so fast that I wonder if this young generation even has time to dream.”
Soyinka’s political actions often proved a problem for the Nigerian government. He recalls the time he broke into a radio station as he, “Felt compelled to stop the further broadcast of false results. I was part and parcel of the voting processes I witnessed at firsthand the destruction of polling booths, even the tearing up of results.”
He explains that this was due to the reinstatement of, “The most cynical regime, which went so far as to declare on radio at the time and television had begun to say that we don’t give a damn. If you vote for us, the angels in heaven are already here So, it was part of an ongoing struggle on so many levels.”
While he was tried and acquitted for breaking into the radio station, he later spent 27 months in prison, including 22 months in solitary confinement.
He recounts his time there, saying, “It was a very testing period for me. The prisoner has to survive. I began recollecting those formulae in geometry, trigonometry, which I had hated. I began pulling them back and making calculations on the ground
Soyinka tells Madowo that he wrote the notes for his memoir, The Man Died, in isolation using meat bones, handmade ink, and toilet paper.
It recounts his political activism and imprisonment for an alleged link to the Biafran army at the height of the Nigerian civil war.
His collection of successful writing earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African to receive this prize. Soyinka describes his experience of this time as “isolated.”
He elaborates, “I was most relieved when the next African came because so much was demanded of you. It was like, overnight, your constituency expanded simply because you are an African, you come from the African continent.”
But more than this, it exposed Soyinka to great dangers, “I always remind people that the most brutal dictators were had here, Sani Abacha would’ve gone to his grave a happy man if he’d hanged a Nobel Laureate, if he may able to put on his CV that I hanged a Nobel Laureate.”
This year, for his 90th birthday, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu renamed Nigeria’s national theatre after him, honouring Soyinka’s legacy.
Similarly, his hometown of Abeokuta celebrated him through ‘The Whole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange’ project. Not only is Soyinka recognised for his support of young critical thinkers, but he also helps “promote a number of my student’s work.”
Soyinka ends the interview with a dark-humoured look into his future, “I don’t want to be morbid, but you know that’s the future. But I made an arrangement for that within this estate.”
More optimistically, he says retirement from his vocation means he can, “resume certain activities that will give me pleasure” and “for about a week or two weeks go anywhere in the world and just be a tourist.”
