Shattering the Foundations of Thought: Wole Soyinka at 80 (I)

Six years ago, when Soyinka tured 74, I had written about him and the late Madiba thus: I had very little difficulty choosing whom to devote a column to in celebration, out of Wole Soyinka and Madiba Mandela who shortly after, on July 19, turned the ripe age of  Ninety. This is partly because 90 […]

Six years ago, when Soyinka tured 74, I had written about him and the late Madiba thus: I had very little difficulty choosing whom to devote a column to in celebration, out of Wole Soyinka and Madiba Mandela who shortly after, on July 19, turned the ripe age of  Ninety. This is partly because 90 is a grander age and Mandela is unquestionably the symbol and icon of the black man’s aspirations for fulfilment and social redemption, in a world that scarsely reckons with both the black and the African personality. The other reason, of course, is that the celebration of Wole Soyinka, a fellow writer and literary icon, should take a literary form. It needs a more generous space than a column offers. How well, because the great Madiba has departed this earth. And Soyinka is  cruising life in the wintry season at 80. Hence, I am seizing this medium to revist an appraisal of, not his drama, usually the major turf and canvas of his literary exploits, his prose fiction and fictive faction—Season of Anomy and The Man Died, respectively. This piese is a collage from various statements taht I have made in various fora—published and oral—on these works, since over three decades.
The Man Died, as all those who have read the work must know, is a non-fictional account of the man’s physical and psychological survival of the Nigerian Civil War, long periods of incarceration and solitary confinement. The novel reveals, quite unabashedly, his anger at the gusto with which the greedy and ‘sadistic members of society seized the golden opportunity craeted by war time social disruptions’ to prey upon humanity. He also expressed, the courage and self- discipline needed in order to survive when a man is left, as he was, completely at the mercy of such dehumanized power mongers. The novel thus moved from a seering attack on the inhumanity, viciousness and established evil that pervade the Nigerian society, into, what he aptly describes as the ‘resilient area of entity’ in search of a alternative—which he defines as the ‘Third Force’. In the contemplative areas of the novel, Wole Soyinka relects on the role of the revolutionary in social restructuring. This contemplation manifests, mainly through radical metaphors. This is the main area of this novel that interests me most.
I find The Man Died belonging with other stories of imprisonment, such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon,  George Mankagi’s Letters from the Prison (this in fact has telling influences on Soyinka’s novel) and Alexander Solzhennitsyn’s The Gulag Achipelago. All of these novels of war experience share a disproportionate levels of compelling eloquence and narrative lucidity on the one hand and on the other, unhidden bitterness ascerbism against the predatory forces in their various societies.
The Man Died is significant, not only on account of its indictment of the forces that humilaited Soyinka with solitary confinement; nor as a documentation of his political imprisonment.  All these, and his efforts to survive the ordeal of human degradation, horror and privation visited on him in the cell are important. The book protests, vigorously against State- inflicted inhumanity; “I am against any government which permits, under any guise of any Emergency, the persecution of innocent men.”
The anger and raw indictment give way to a re-assessment of his previous approach to the issue of social revolution, namely the individual action of self- sacrifice (the protagonist ego schema), the tragic lure. In The Man Died, Soyinka finds that this is no longer adequate. In a society of privilege and insensitivity, individualist totality is not the solution for the liberation of humanity.The limitation of the human spirit has rendered the indivvidual acts of choice and martyrdom for social redemption undertaken by, for instance, Eman, the protagonist in The Strong Breed, and which re-occurs in the character of Olunde in Death and the King’s Horseman, and indeed Old Man in Madmen and Specialists— have become inadequate because, as he says, “rage is no longer enough to combat the temptation to subside into unproductive, will- slopping wisdoms”. Hence, for Soyinka of the future, since his imprisonment, “the rejection of this process and the saerch for the technical means of avoiding the insidious traps it lays is a necessary undertaking”. But here, that alternative appraoach is still a humanist one; humanity being for him, a “ state of being within which the dimunition of any other beings is a dimunition of and an assault on one’s own being”. He has, however, broadened his rebellion to encompass what Albert Camus described in his essay ‘The Artist and His Time’ in The Myth of Sysiphus as “resistance to forces which threaten the lives of all men, and not merely oneself” by helping the humiliated to become men once more. Hence, in The Man Died, Soyinka metaphorically summons “kindred”spirits and the fraternity of ghosts… victims of power insanity and political scapegoats” to mass action.
This pre-occupation with social transformation, which influences his protest in the novel, takes the form of invectives against the forces of tyranny—what he calls ‘the genocide-consolidate dictatorships.’ Here, he undertakes a down-to-earth accusation of personalities—all those people of power who humilated him, precipitated the war and the undermined social justice in the society—the ruling elite, politicians, University academics and all those who ‘condone the rotten state of the country’s body politic. The choice in The Man Died is between US: “the people to whom I belong”, that is the voices of dissent, who have moved beyond compromise to confrontation –they are ‘the third force , committed to defeat and uproot in its entirety any concepts of any pretension to a mitigating base for inflicting atrocieties on the human mind. This US chooses against THEM: “damned bourgeois capitalists who have already begun to lay profits of a rising war industry”. The declared, new direction is the formulation of a revolutionary programme which will create a new society, a new nation, from the residue of war. Soyinka makes a contrastive exemplification of the Soviet Union which fought their civil war with ‘gun in hand and and political ideology in their heads’ with the Nigerian situation of a war fought ‘without a simultaneous programme of reform and redefination of social purpose’. Even though we find here that the writer still envisions a reformist programme, he laments that nothing has been gained from the war since the nation’s identity remains unchanged. The nation has ‘undergone no revolutionary purge’. Yet, as he contends, a ‘war with its attendant human suffering must be made to fragment more than buildings; it must shatter the foundations of thought and recreate’.