The subject work has a title that puts it firmly in the league of enigmatic works. It has been contrived to encapsulate the meaning of life. It is an injunction that each individual should examine himself thoroughly in adolescence, select his path, examine his talents and embrace a path that best fulfils him and the community to which he belongs. It is an exhortation to youth to start in time to radiate virtue, become concerned with people and leadership, play their parts in evolution of their communities and countries and so shape the world towards higher levels of fulfilment for all partakers in the assets imbued world citizens by Nature.
The work is enigmatic because it positions his personality properly as a unique outcrop of a rich culture that is connected with his past with all its depth into ancestral lore, his unique rejection of received religions, his borderless commitment to art, especially drama, his unrivalled travel round the world to assure expressive art in most forms (drama, prose, sculpture, painting, poetry and well contrived and driven social criticism of poor leadership), his worship of great minds that have made the world better and his visceral revulsion with selfish and despotic leadership of all types. His personality will be constructed from this my effort despite my incapacity to examine the subject competently from a humble stature.
The publishers presented the work with care and concern for the image of its author. Closeness with author’s mission is apparent. Bookcraft did well to choose a shot of the author as he peered with cynical doubt at his object vision, his unique glasses, his grey hair and beard – unmistakable features of a citizen of the world. It is not accidental that the publishers are located in Kongi Layout, Ibadan, Oyo State, that was the seat of Nigeria’s first university and has remained leader of intellectual enterprise in Nigeria for the past 70 years.
Quality of the work is commended as it compares favourably with other great works like Worlds at War by Anthony Pagden, Biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare and Winston Churchill, and similar world figures. In the instant case, Bookcraft offered the title in blood red with loaded word, MEMOIRS in reduced relief, with WOLE SOYINKA in bronze bold capital Times Roman letters. I salute Bookcraft for its excellent presentation. I have cultivated the book as an identity that I must not part with until I have dropped this limiting flesh. The chapters were inventively offered in sharp black brushwork and as if to lighten the burden of effective communication that is terse, with all figures of speech in use, each chapter starts with same brushwork.
Binding of the book is a novelty. It makes reading easy. I suppose it matches products of technology in advanced nations. The back of the book speaks volumes of the author’s ubiquitous credentials and his closeness to powers of leading nations of the world. His Avatar was the first right. The publishers deserve credit for choice of shots that accommodated the past and the future represented by admiring Chimamanda Adichie. It is a tacit mirror of the past, the present and a future that is bound to anchor its quality on thought and expression of the enduring variety.
A teacher of English, Classics and History in any tertiary institution in Nigeria should find the work indispensable for progress. The author expresses himself fully with clear paintwork of his emotions set down in English Language with a clarity that makes speakers of the language bow in reverence to the writer as wordsmith of no equal in the world. I believe that his competence with the language was garnished by his unsurpassed and probably unsurpassable travel to most parts of today’s world. I suspect he could have visited space station if that crossed his mind.
The book speaks clarity into his choice as Nobel Laureate from Africa, nearly two decades ago. His story shows that sustained hard work in any direction that results in human progress broadens each human mind and given capacity to record events, those with the widest span of experience in various disparate theatres of human life will undoubtedly make the best writers. There shall always be themes to share for such and with them, persuasive lessons for readers and critical human consciousness in all races. I came to the conclusion that Wole Soyinka’s commitment and exposure led to his choice as Africa’s number one man of letters. You Must Set Forth at Dawn certainly confirms him as one of the world’s greatest writers. I would have resolved he was the best if I had read all other greats in the literary field. I have read William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Pierre Telhard De Chardin, Leo Tolstoy. I have read autobiographies that are loaded with personal financial gains with little elements of sociological implications of wealth; none has served to connect innate spiritual identity with living environment and the need for each and everyone to regard the total space called Creation as an arena that should evoke constant vigilance and care for the continuum of the human species as Wole’s work.
Professor Chinualumogu Achebe could not come close to Soyinka in the elements of variety in experiencing. Chinua was a pioneer but could not have been a contender for Nobel Prize for Literature beside Wole. This should permanently rest the dilemma of who was greater among the two. I find Wole easily a contender for world crown in more ways than any living writer can command.
