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

The Cartel ineveitably sacks him for his subversive activities, that is the Prometean revolt which ‘tends to become an ideology , a political programme’. Iriyise is brutally abducted to increase Ofeyi’s punishment. His allies in the Cross-River are massacred by the Cartel’s forces who are mobilized to terminate subversion.Soyinka’s lucid exposition of the Cartel’s atrocities, […]

The Cartel ineveitably sacks him for his subversive activities, that is the Prometean revolt which ‘tends to become an ideology , a political programme’. Iriyise is brutally abducted to increase Ofeyi’s punishment. His allies in the Cross-River are massacred by the Cartel’s forces who are mobilized to terminate subversion.
Soyinka’s lucid exposition of the Cartel’s atrocities, horrors and orchestarted scenes of arson in the debilitating sections of the novel subtitled Harvest and Spores reveals the extent of the predatory actions perpetrated by the Cartel  and this in fact anticipates the horrific acts of repression that subsequent dictatorships evoked on any form of opposition in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. ‘… he now percieved…a display of floating bodies so still they seemed anchored… the bodies were swelled and the faces decomposed’
Femi osofisan described this evolution of horror, which he finds as characterizing Nigerian literature since the war as a ‘literature of anubile… we are undoubtedly in the period of a new heritage of a literature of anubis’, which as I have averred earlier was a conscious invention in Soyinka’s anti-predatory literary and linguistic strategy. But the essential revelation of ruthlessnes and bestiality recalls the inhumanity of the Cartel; of men of power, false farmers who are spiritually dead and who call upon the masses to join the ‘creeping paralysis of flesh and spirit’ . Part of the vision in this novel is that the would-be modern Promethean must be prepared to accept political violence as a preliminary step in his quest for a near- perfect society. In order to jolt Aiyero out of its lethargy, and end the atrocities of the Cartel, Ofeyi, like his creator, must be prepared to shed a part of his humanity. He must accept the use of violence to restore humanity. Political violence is necessary to end further violence. As Kaleb remarks, it is necessary to acquiesce to ‘revolutionary violence, though violently bloody in its effect…to provide a social order in which killing will no longer exist’. This counsels the adoption of Demakin’s code of selective assassination and violence. Even Demakin, an essentially guerrilla tactician, not rooted in the art of politics, is persuaded that violence is not a permanent revolutionary policy.Ofeyi, the rationalist is hesitant to imbibe this principle of expedient violence. This accounts for the failure of his original conception to seek redemption through seminal regeneration epitomized by Aiyero, leading to the massacre of his disciples in the Cross-River. He is later to fall in step with Demakin’s code which emphasizes ‘activity instead of passivity, domination instead of submission, ruthlessness instead of  meekness’, especially when dealing with a maniacal, power-hounding ruling elite, like Batoki who in his brutality, sees solution only in silencing opposition through repression. Batoki, in the lowest ebb of inhumanity declares;
When you have killed a couple of them and keep away some tens behind the bar, the rest will behave themselves and toe the line. If they don’t, add a zero to the numbers. Kill a couple of tens and put a hundred behind bars. If that doesn’t break them, kill a few hundreds and take no more prisoners.
This is faceless, inhuman dictatorship. But it proves the futility of Ofeyi’s dialogue and rationalization; his longing for ‘peace, a just peace’ to retain ‘a remnant of my humanity’.
Yet, Season of Anomy is not an outright legitimation of the principle of reduction, which is a downward course to chaos and nihiliism. Soyinka, like Frantz Fanon, accepts violence as a prelude in the mechanics of liberation and political emancipation. Violence is necessary because Fascism and all forms of oppressive regimes, says Koestler after experiencing Hitler’s Nazism, and as a victim of oppression and long imprisonment terms like Soyinka, ‘can’t be defeated on the battlefield alone,. It has to be defeated inside people’s brains, hearts and glands’ (The Yogi and the Commissar). 
This is the significance of Demakin’s acknowledgemnt of the fact that his single-minded, homicidal activities alone cannot win a revolution. Neither, as he also contends, will Ofeyi’s meditative rationalizations, his ‘seminal rounds of the distant ideals’ do it. What is essential, and which I take as the essential message here, is a synthesis of both practical action with revolutionary ideology and prophetic vision. From his experiences of the horrors and atrocities of the Nigerian Civil War, including his imprisonment, Soyinka’s social vision was greatly and radically sharpened. His ultimate objective is social reform, not a rigid adherence to ideology, a reform that sets human beings free and justly treated. This much he told Biodun jeyifo in an interview;
Ideology, once it departs from humanistic ends, is no longer worthy of the name. The ultimate purpose of human striving is humanity…The political animal protects himself, ultimately by working towards a community of being
It is by and large a liberal reformist vision of structuring social reconstruction on modern prometheans who essentially aims to rouse the slumbering masses to revolutionary action. It is this striving towards seminal and practical reform that powers Soyinka on, even at this ripe age, to engage in social activism and struggle for humanity.
Now, Kongi at eighty battles on with grace and vigour—as new wars confront the Nigeria of his birth—terrorism in the form of Boko Haram and other mindless manifestations of brutalities and assault on our collective humanity. Can Ogun sheath his sword? Soyinka remains a permanent inspiration and the spirit of liberation in our embattled world.
Concluded.