Basic Black; 3801; Conversation With Wole Soyinka

You you Well I

say in the became Africa's first nobel laureate winning the prize for literature in nineteen eighty six a prolific writer of essayist fiction and theater. His place had been staged throughout the world. Say in the is also one of Africa's leading pro -democracy activists in nineteen sixty seven during the Civil War in his native Nigeria. He was in prison for his activism. him. He was released two years later and has been in and out of exile since then, but remains a fierce critic of Nigeria's government. Shoyinka's latest work is a memoir. You must set forth at dawn. I'm Robin Chandler, and I'm honored to welcome Woli Shoyinka to Basic Black. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about what set you on the path to writing as a creative person? I think reading did. I was a voracious reader as a child. My father had a small library, and I was just fascinated by books, and I consumed a small library in

no time from my age. I was told. And then I grew up in a very strong storytelling culture, and I found I was not very satisfied, and of course we used to relate those stories among our own siblings and so on. I found that I never repeated the story, which I'd heard in exactly the same way. I love playing around with the characters, creating new situations, moving away from the orthodox pattern of those stories. So gradually, gradually. So your creative imagination was really formed in this African oral tradition of storytelling? Very much so. And so revising these stories set you on the path to actually writing. That's it. Now, you've written two memoirs earlier in your career as a creative person, Ake, the use of childhood. And more recently, you must set forth at Don. Can you tell me a little bit about what memoir and autobiography means to you? Okay. A slight correction. There was

something in between, which I called Ibadon, the Pencalimus Yes. It was never published here. It was a more or less a rather localized edition, you know, version of my life. And it's interesting. I wrote that when I was in a very brief exile, when we were trying to get rid of a dictator, Bangida, and I was my way home, I found I had to go home and join in the efforts to oust him. And it was a very uncertain future, and I remember I wrote it in white heat, just a certain period indicating things which I had done, just to leave some kind of record. Now, I have never been a great believer in biographies. I believe one should not write one's biography up to the age of innocence, which I put around 11 plus, 11 -11, something like that. Up to that age, I think one lacks inhibition. narrate things through a child's eye, at least I try

to enter my projection of phenomenon of events, peoples and so on, try to return to that period and write from a child's point of view, which I think is always, most of the time, very honest kind of perspective. When you grow older, you start hedging, you start editing, you don't, at least you shouldn't tell outright lies. Selective memory. Yes, selective memory. I think that takes over, and so I undertook to myself a long time ago not to write anything beyond the age of 11. So now, why? Why have I done this? First, was Ake, then it was Son of Ake, and now it's Ake writes again. And the reason I wrote this, the reason I felt impelled to write this was again, I was embroiled in, this time, what struck me as a life and death struggle against the most vicious dictator we've ever

had in Nigeria, and compares with Idi Amin and those other monsters. And I was being pursued, even outside Nigeria, because I was mobilizing and organizing to house this dictator, and became a sort of, I wasn't to show what will happen. What year would this be about? This year, when you started becoming involved with activism. How long ago? Well, in your 20s, it must be. Oh, even earlier, think, even earlier, as a student. So anyway, in this instance, finding myself still being pursued outside in exile, while I was being active all over the place, I thought I should start setting, you know, again some more things down. And in addition, and this played an important role, in addition, I was a little bit tired of these assiduous so -called critics who were not content with just what you write, but start taking your life, morsels of your life, and placing them in the wrong context, fantasizing about your life, know, to, you know, maybe earn a

few pounds in the magazines, or simply to pose as the authority on WS, Waleishoyanka. And I got a little bit tired of all the, you know, missing pieces of misinformation delivered that authoritatively, Waleishoyanka did this because, Waleishoyanka was here because. And you wonder, what on earth do they know of your life? What do they know of the context in which you operate? What do they know of the motivations? They're not interested. They have a certain theory of their own, and of course they're mostly non -Africans. And then write these monographs, they go to conferences, you know, where Waleishoyanka sneezed, and the significance of his sneeze in the, you know, I got tired of it. So you wanted to write the definitive first person accounts. at least to say that I know a little bit about this man too. So let me put my own, you know, Penny's worth in this hagiography. begins with your play Dance of the Forest in the 60s, this play that you've written in which you take on this charge of using your art to criticize the government. Can you talk a

little bit about why and how and when an artist, in your case, chooses and decides to use their art for this reason? Because one can also make the opposite choice, you know, to self -censor, to silence oneself and to direct one's art in another path. I think I've always been known, sort of seized my existence first as a citizen, as a member of a community, as a member of the human community, with certain, with the sense of responsibility to my collective, and only then as a writer. in my student days, we were, like, you know, so many young people coming from the political context in which we existed, a colonial background, colonial experience, and with issues of racism so strong at the time. And we saw South Africa as our target, as our ultimate

destination. We dreamt of a brigade which would march with others and, you know, put an end to that racial insult. And Africanism. Yes, that's right. That racial insult was epitomized by the apartheid system, the theology, which is really taking root at the time, talking about the early, the 54, mid -50s. And so we saw ourselves as, we saw our mission as being outward -directed. But then what happened? We began in Nigeria, for instance, as with other African states, to encounter our first -generation leaders who were supposed to take over after decolonization. And what we saw was a little bit alarming. We saw people who were not so much interested in transforming society as in stepping into the shoes of the colonial, departing colonial masters. And that worried me.

And I think that's when I began to use my art. First of all, one of my earliest plays was called The Invention, and it was about apartheid South Africa. Interesting. Yes. So it took place even before I turned my attention to the internal politics of Nigeria. So as a young artist, you were very aware of this continental ethic, this continental politic and the movement towards freedom that would have been happening with the ultimate independence of African nations. In the midst of all of this activity of being an activist and a critic against one's government and the turmoil that was associated with that period in your life, as a very young artist, how did you manage to find time to write, to produce, to sit down, to stop, to allow the vision and the voices to speak through you about these particular issues? Well, how did I do it? at the same time, trying to remember, I was a student. When I actually began this activity, I wrote my earliest plays as a student. So I

took it as part of the totality of one's being, not only studying academically, I was also studying the theatre in which I became passionately involved, interested, and at the same time, reality, the real world, was all around one. When you saw, you experienced every day evidence of color discrimination in the very environment in which you lived, and of course, you transferred that to what was happening on the continent. so you considered yourself a creature of responses to all the phenomena around you, political, mythological recollections, etc., etc. Now, as this is happening in so many places on the continent simultaneously, and you're a young writer and you're becoming more mature in terms of the ways of the world, what direction does your work then begin to take that you continue writing plays? These are very somber issues that

you're dealing with, but on the other hand, as we were mentioning earlier, there's also a certain amount of irony and humor in certain events, and is there a role that humor does actually play in your work? I'm thinking particularly when Joan Little would ask you to play the part of Lamumba, and you didn't speak French, I found that very amusing. Can you speak a little bit about how humor does, and if it does play a role in this kind of political activism? Well, I think that humor is the major guarantor of sanity in the midst of really deep social contradictions and the tug of war, which sometimes exists in all individuals. Shall I really address myself wholeheartedly, almost exclusively, to the problem of politics, or am I yield to the tug of creativity, art, that sort of thing? And what comes to the rescue is a sense of proportion, and humor is a sense of proportion.

So humor has been, for me, the ability to see the comic side of the absurdities of existence has actually been one of my saving graces, I would say, moments of real stark, not despair but pessimism. There's always the danger of taking oneself too seriously, know, entering into a mode of anguish in which you become completely incapacitated. But then also as a student of history, you're able to relate even what is happening now, to you now as an individual in a particular social context, you're able to relate it to what humanity has really been undergoing through various ages, various cultures, and you wonder, does it mean that there is no real evolution, does it mean that humanity has remained the same over thousands of years, the same bellicosity, rationality,

intolerance, bigotry on all levels, and that sort of brings you back a little bit, so while you're engaged in trying to ameliorate certain unacceptable events in your moment, in the present, you also have a relativity and that leads to a sense of humor, proportion, and so on. That's the only way I can explain it. Now, a lot of people use the term public intellectual to describe you and other people who seem to be combining sort of an outspoken position on certain social political events. Do you see yourself as a public intellectual? Well, I think I know what is, I mean, I've been called out to my face and to my back, and I know exactly what they mean, and yes, I think I would say that I fit the bill in that sense. I'm not a closet, ivory tar intellectual, know, writing volumes of theses with half of which would be

footnotes and references and so on, so the kind of academic intellectual, rather, dry as dust, no, I relate intellectualism to the ability to relate theory to actualities and vice versa, but preferably making sure that the theories do fit into the palpable material actuality of one's existence, so it's in that sense, I suppose, that you would call me a public intellectual. Now, in this regard, in climate of fear, you've written about the tug between the rule of law and the rule of terror. You've talked about the competition of atrocities engaged by a lot of different political and leaders and governmental leaders. Can you talk a little bit about what the idea of terror as an assault on human dignity has meant to you in your writing? Because the book is really devoted to that idea of the insistence of human dignity in a world in which it's being removed in so many places. Yes, I

developed a certain axis of understanding between the various tendencies of society, of human society, of, you know, either intra activities within society or between one society and another, between one commonality and another, and I really describe that axis as the axis of power and freedom. It seems to me that when you analyze society completely, as historically as you like, you find one common theme. No matter what are the propulsive events or propulsive theories, there is one constant theme which defines, let us say for instance, a theocratic state or a secular ideological state with a commitment to authoritarianism or totalitarianism. Even between, one will define even liberation movements which sometimes end up

as sometimes more oppressive, sometimes more oppressive than the monstrosities which they set out to remove. And I found that that axis has always been one of power and freedom, two constantly striving tendencies in humanity. And you specifically refer to it as the thrill of power? Yes. Can you speak about this sort of egomaniacal aspect of power? Again, that's just one of the problems, one of the negativities I talk about in humanity, when people are in a position of control, they have a choice either to accept authority or to accept power. Authority is something which you derive from the people over whom you're placed by chance or by your merit or whatever. you exert authority because you have to take decisions because you have to plan and you exert that authority on behalf of people, of a palpable

entity, suffering, understanding productive entity whom you recognize as being your own equal. When however you obsess with power, when you see power almost like like an ontological self -sufficiency in itself when you're obsessed with that sense of domination, no matter in what field you are, whether you're just an office clerk or you're a dictator or you're the head of a university or whatever, you're, all you see, the residuum from your position, your responsibilities, you see only as power. That is when the monster is created and it cuts across, as I said, sexes, race, ideology, religion. You must isolate that power in order to defend freedom, which I believe is intrinsic to all human beings. Now, I want to move a little bit to a discussion out of this idea of pan -Africanism and ask you a little bit about the links between

African Americans in the U .S. and Nigerians and where and when, either now or in the future, you believe there is time for real partnership and collaboration that transcends the idea of oil, which seems to be at the center of the struggle. How is this conversation and this collaboration and this sort of mutual feeling going to be created between African Americans and Nigerians in the same way that many of us have become involved, say, in South Africa? That's a very good question because the relationship between Africans and African Americans has not been of the most understanding or harmonious. We, as Africans, have been periodically shocked, literally, out of our senses to see African Americans align themselves to what we just talked about, power. Wherever there is power on the African continent, many African Americans

feel that their responsibility is towards that zone of power, not to the people themselves. Now, this is quite understandable. It's the result of decades and a couple of centuries of propaganda from, so we say, non -African world, European world, whether west or east, denigrating African peoples, their cultures, and so on. And so, when African Americans, who require, in any case, a kind of center of authority to attach themselves to, they fail to discriminate between, shall we say, the positive African leaders and the negative, the monsters. What they see is a representative of Africa being denigrated by the Western press, by the capitalist world, and so on and so forth. And that created a lot of friction between African Americans and Africans because they were aware, on the receiving end, of these brutes, and we're trying to either reform or else oust. And along come the people

of our own descent who take the side of the brutes and call the resistors agents of imperialism. Is that a generalization that you think It's a a generalization. have always been exceptions. Differentiation, Always been exceptions. But in the main, and this, this is evident, under Idi Amin, there was a black movement leader who actually set up a quasi -consulate operating on behalf of Idi Amin here, and that same individual, please, for this organization, also came on the side of General Sonny Abacha. He was killing, torturing, remember, Ken Saru, we were a victim for audiences. Ken Saru, were the Nigerian writer and activist who was fighting against, ironically, against Shell, the multinational corporation, Ken Saru. But Abacha, who was Abacha? Abacha was the monster, the dictator who came in, watch here again, and it was the end of the 90s, and

actually exerted an iron, iron rule over Nigeria, until he was, you know, kindly took his leave of the world. So he was one of these African strongmen that we heard about. Yes, that mythological strongmen of which the Western world was so fond. But anyway, that period was very painful for many of us as Africans. We had leaders, national leaders, well -respected leaders going to Africa and endorsing, you know, African brutes. I remember one painful moment during the struggle against Sonny Abacha, when a very revered, very respected militant leader in the United States said, who is anyone to tell an African leader who to hang or not hang? It's just like a dagger through our hearts, know, with us, you know, on the receiving end of that place. But anyway, all that has been changing, slowly but very

intelligently. I should say, at the same time, by the way, you also have the positive leaders, including members of House of Representatives here, who took a very principled and strong stand on the side of democracy, on the side of the rights of fundamental human rights of the African peoples. So that's been the pattern of relationship. Now, oil, which is a very crucial resource for many African states. My preference would have been if more African business people became involved in oil production on the African continent, it might then, I believe that then there would be, there would be a more understanding relationship between oil producing companies and the indigenous. So there's a lot more room for bilateral cooperation between African Americans and Native Americans. For dialogue and cooperation. Let's go back to you as we

bring this conversation to a close, unfortunately. I'm very interested in this idea of this sort of parallel trajectory of yours as a powerful activist on behalf of humanity and human dignity and your own countrymen, and also your art and your creativity. And it, of the path of your career leading you around so many places in the world, creates a kind of metaphor for migration, this idea of spiritual migration. Could you speak to that a bit as we close and talk about what it means to be floating above, in a way, for people? Well, it's a very, for me, it's a positive movement that the African American, for instance, require, feel that they require a spiritual anchor on the African continent. But with that comes a lot of responsibilities. I would like to see African Americans get more deeply involved in what is happening in Darfur, in the Sudan. The atrocities being committed there, atrocities which are based on a racial concept. Many people don't like to talk about Arab racism, but Africans,

where this exists, know it for a reality. a spiritual anchor becomes vitiated if the material conditions of those who actually manifest this spirituality, if those material conditions are debased. Thank you so much. You're more than welcome. Thank you for such a rich conversation. it. It's my pleasure. For the Basic Black team, I'm Robin Chandler. Thank you for joining us. For questions or comments, you can email us. Our address is basicblack at wgbh .org. For program information, go to wgbh .org slash basicblack. Thank you.

you.