A day with Wole Soyinka

It is a rarity that anybody catches Professor Wole Soyinka napping with a question. The highly cerebral Nobel laureate was always at home with interrogations, which he readily fields extempore, articulately and brilliantly. He is virtually a mobile encyclopaedia, especially on the arts.     However, on Friday, July 14, 2017 in Kaima, Bayelsa State, […]

It is a rarity that anybody catches Professor Wole Soyinka napping with a question. The highly cerebral Nobel laureate was always at home with interrogations, which he readily fields extempore, articulately and brilliantly. He is virtually a mobile encyclopaedia, especially on the arts.

    However, on Friday, July 14, 2017 in Kaima, Bayelsa State, a question to the prolific writer sort of rattled him, in a manner of speaking. The question came off a page of his direct constituency –  authorship – and from a most unlikely quarter that wouldn’t have appeared literarily evolved enough to probe so deep.

     The occasion was A DAY WITH THE NOBEL LAUREATE and IJAW LITERARY ICONS. A day earlier, Thursday July 13, 2017, Soyinka had clocked 83 years and the Governor of Bayelsa State, Henry Seriake Dickson, had deemed it important to honour the globally acclaimed literary hero the next day. 

 As Gov Dickson pointed out before students of the Ijaw National Academy (INA), Kaima, on the Friday, Soyinka wasn’t one given to the frivolities of celebrations, so how to honour him?  Dickson himself had been in a celebration mood all week. He had invited former Head of State, retired general Yakubu Gowon to commission, on Wednesday July 12, the new, N3.3 billion Bayelsa State Government House, an architectural tour de force that the governor joyously flaunted as presently the best in the country.

 The governor had also been celebrating a panoply of projects, including roads and bridges, and an ultra-modern, well-equipped Bayelsa Diagnostic Centre (BDC) that his administration had built to further lift Bayelsa off the backwaters of underdevelopment. As he explained, the BDC was built to undertake all kinds of diagnosis so Nigerians don’t have to travel abroad anymore to do them. The centre was described as the best in West Africa for X-ray, mammography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), CT Scan, ultra scan, endoscope and cardiovascular investigations.

 But it is the Ijaw National Academy, which hosted Soyinka on the Friday and where he cut his birthday cake, that Gov Dickson was so upbeat about, because as he rationalised, it was one thing to spend billions of naira to develop physical structures, it was another to produce the intellectual minds that would not only maintain the structures, they would also sustain the development legacy. An uneducated population, the governor stressed, would only result in the destruction of facilities now deemed ultra-modern.

   The INA is a full secondary academic institution with a capacity for 1000 students, all boarders. Well-equipped with laboratories and other facilities, it comes completely free for all students of Ijaw origin from Bayelsa State and beyond.

 Its location, Kaiama, is where the Ijaw nationalist Major Isaac Adaka Boro, was born. Boro had in 1966 employed Kaima as the springboard for the proclamation of the unsuccessful Niger Delta Peoples Republic, from which the Ijaw agitation for their own independent nation had sprung.

  On 11 December 1998, more than 5000 Ijaw people representing over 40 Ijaw clans had gathered at Kaiama to demand an end to what they called 40 years of environmental damage and underdevelopment in the region. There at the event, the younger elements formed the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) and articulated their demands in what has since become known as the Kaiama Declaration.

   So it was to Kaima, the Ijaw National Academy specifically, that Gov Dickson pulled the Nobel laureate to satiate the latter’s literary bent as a form of a birthday celebration for he whose dissentient philosophy shuns worldly inanities.       

  What a celebration it turned out to be for Prof Soyinka as his teenage hosts took him through a probing colloquium. The students had been seated in the huge hall all morning to noon eagerly awaiting the arrival of the mystery genius they had never had the opportunity to behold, though some of them said they had read some of his books.

    As Gov Dickson ushered his guest into the Academy’s hall by 1pm, the hall erupted into a frenzy of cheers, the students on their feet to welcome their hero, their eyes saying, ‘Wole Soyinka at last’. Also in were literary giants from Ijawland, Professor John Pepper Clark Bekederemo, accomplished poet Gabriel Okara and a well-celebrated historian who has extensively documented Ijaw history, Ebiegheri J. Alagoa. Truly, it was a Day with the Nobel Laureate and Ijaw Literary Icons.

  Directing affairs was Odia Ofeimum, who many people won’t even remember now was private secretary to the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Ofeimum, having morphed into literary activities thereafter so engagingly. Ofeimum is always in his elements where the poetry and stage are alive. At Kaima, the two were very much alive when Wole Soyinka came calling.

 Ofeimum wouldn’t allow the opportunity to pass without doing a poem reading, which he did on If Nigeria Were A Woman. Poem reading is a passion for Ofeimum any day and it was so enthralling watching him romance the Nigeria woman so figuratively.

  The Bayelsa State Council for Arts and Culture did a wonderful stage execution of Abiku, a poem by Wole Soyinka, as was flawless a rendition of the poem itself by a student of the Ijaw National Academy, Ojiako Faith.

 A most captivating rendition was from Dr Sophia Obi-Apoko, who read the poem, Oloibiri, from her collection of poems, Tears in a Basket. Obi-Apoko poetically painted a gripping picture of the misfortune that has been the lot of the Oloibiri community in Bayelsa State since crude was discovered there in 1956. In a very chilling delivery, the poet read,  

I lay on the altar of faded glory,

Oily tears rolling through my veins,

…Yet I quench the thirst of the desert dwellers

 …While my children wallow

in the crude mud peculiar to my swamp

Now with my fertility gone,

I carry a begging bowl, unable to form

A sovereign body to build a monument

to my forsaken glory.

 The students, blossoming artistes they may be, also came to the fore to display applauded renditions that reinforced Gov Dickson’s assertion that quality education resides in the creeks. Gabriel Okara, now 96 years old, watched nostalgically as the students read his The Call of the River Nun, a multiple award-winning ode to the Nun River which runs through Nembe, his home town.

 Beside him, J.P. Clark would also listen admiringly as they also read his The Casualties.

  Then the students began the colloquium with Soyinka. The first question, from Benstowe Justice, came easily for the laureate. What was the feeling immediately he learnt of the Nobel prize award? “It was unexpected. It was at the airport when I returned to the country that it began to sink in. My friend, J. P. Clark was there.”   

 Then the jolt from Ebiye Praise: “Sir, which comes first in writing? The title of a story, the idea or the structure? 

 One would think that an author of Soyinka’s literary stature would just shoot affirmatively right away. But no, the Nobel winner was so direct, honest and humble in his reply. “That is a difficult question. I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t,” he said. Then, he proceeded to explain his response to the audience. An idea, he said, may come but you may go out and it remains in the subconscious. The structure is determined by events on the streets but all are not in any particular order. So there is no hard and fast rule about the arrangement, actually. 

 Another student, Johnny Juliet, asked him what it takes to be a Nobel Laureate and how many books must the winner write. Soyinka: “It is not the quantity but quality and relevance. A lot also depends on the literary taste of the jury deciding the winner.” And how has the Nobel prize affected him? Soyinka said he has lost his anonymity and his priorities have been affected by pressure. 

  By the masterstroke of bringing Soyinka and the Ijaw literary icons before the Ijaw National Academy students, Gov Dickson appears to have achieved a major objective of his in establishing the school in the first place. The governor had emphasised he was determined to, during his tenure, lay an educational quality that would produce students that can interrogate their leaders. Education that is not attended by ability to reason most logically, Dickson said, is “absolutely meaningless”.