Author: Wole Soyinka
Category: Non Fiction / Memoirs
Year of Publication: 2006
Publisher: Bookcraft Africa
655 pages
According to Yoruba wisdom, as one approaches elder status, one ceases to indulge in battles. “Some hope!” comments Wole Soyinka, early in his new memoir: “When that piece of wisdom was first voiced, a certain entity called Nigeria had not yet been thought of.” Now past his biblical three-score-and-ten and with a distinctive mass of white hair making him the most recognisable of African writer-elders, Soyinka shows no sign of laying down the cudgels or his pen just yet. Last month’s flawed Nigerian elections to deliver a successor to President Obasanjo had Soyinka calling for a new poll, declaring that: “It is not right to accept the unacceptable.” His love-hate relationship with his homeland testifies to his refusal to back down in the face of injustice and tyranny, possessing as he does “an over-acute, remedial sense of right and wrong, of what is just and unjust”.
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an extraordinary chronicle (the title derives from a Soyinka poem that goes on to promise the traveller “marvels of the holy hour”), as much an insider’s political biography of Nigeria as an updating of the author’s own restless story since the publication over a quarter of a century ago of his first autobiographical work. Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood was a modern classic and fortunately, he was persuaded to abandon his vow not to “pursue the task of recollection and reflection beyond the age of innocence, calculated at roughly eleven and a bit”.
It has been an eventful life, which Soyinka recounts as a practised storyteller blessed with total recall. He guides us skilfully along the twisting road he has travelled – at times alone, at times in company, with some momentous greetings, ambushes and leave-takings along the way. No surprise that his personal demiurge is the many-faceted Ògún, Yoruba god of the road and creativity.
The first African recipient of the Nobel prize for literature, which he won in 1986, Soyinka is universally lauded for his plays, poetry, essays, fiction and memoirs. Since student days in Britain in the 1950s he has also been a political activist and a champion of human rights. His homecoming after a five-year stint in Europe was in 1960, the year of Nigerian independence, and from there his narrative tangles inseparably with the nation’s fortunes. An interesting footnote reveals an admission by a British former colonial officer about the 1959 elections that delivered the first post-colonial government: “It was the British who taught Nigerians the art of rigging.” Soyinka’s commitment to the struggle for democracy brought him into conflict with a series of dictatorial Nigerian heads of state, earning him imprisonment (by Gowon), exile (by Babangida and Abacha), a death sentence in absentia (by Abacha) and silencing (by Obasanjo). Abacha’s death in 1998 was the spur for the writing of this book and made possible the homecoming with which it ends, to a Nigeria he “never should have left”.
There are few familial intimacies or revelations. (The book is tellingly dedicated “To all my stoically resigned children. And to my wife, Adefolake, who, during the season of a deadly dictatorship, demoted me from the designation of Visiting Professor to that of Visiting Spouse …”) Yet we are shown other sides of the man apart from the iconic public persona. When not being the literary celebrity, whom even he refers to in the third person as “WS“, Soyinka comes across as likeable, honourable, at times irascible, and stubborn, with a mischievous sense of humour, an appetite for living and a taste for good food and fine wine.
Tales of international politicking (in 1991 he secretly tried to broker a ceasefire between Mandela‘s ANC and the Zulu leader Chief Buthelezi) are interwoven with literary and theatrical anecdote: of hanging out in Venice with WH Auden and Stephen Spender, who start a rumour that he is an African prince; of being cast in a Parisian production by Joan Littlewood, despite speaking no French; of smuggling frozen bushmeat past Italian customs to treat the Nigerian cast of a play. Here is the loyal friend, writing elegiacally of Femi Johnson, whose absence through death is “a territory of dulled bereavement”. Here is Soyinka the cunning hunter; Soyinka as action man, liberating a prized Yoruba bronze from a Brazilian art collection, only to find it is a British Museum copy. No musical rival to his cousin, the late Fela Kuti, Soyinka is nevertheless proud of being the only Nobel laureate to have made a record, though honest enough to add parenthetically: “For all I know, this may be an unfounded claim, but it makes a good story!”
Possessed of a seemingly indomitable spirit and capable of pulling off risky escapades, such as hijacking a radio station at gunpoint and surviving all manner of physical perils, he yet betrays (in a passage called “A Digression on the Power of Slander”) a vulnerability with which one can identify. When the propaganda unit of the murderous Abacha spews out vicious untruths about him, the outwardly insouciant Soyinka admits: “Several nights I lay awake, wondering if any human psyche was really equipped with an internal armour strong enough to protect the essence of his being against a seepage of such venomous intensity.”
An amazing brick-size book, You Must Set Forth at Dawn is by no means a straightforward read; but go with the flow and you will be rewarded with marvels. At his best, Soyinka is nuanced and lyrical, a master of gripping drama, compelling imagery and forceful character sketches, leavened with a ready wit. This is the most engrossing and unusual memoir I have read for ages.
Margaret Busby is editor of Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writing by Women of African Descent.
Originally published by The Guardian
