The title of Wole Soyinka’s Memoirs is worth contemplating in depth. ‘You’ implies everyone. What he has written is an exhortation to all citizens of our contemporary world. He has allowed no exceptions. He has no listening ear for alibis, and he does not brook extenuating circumstances of any reductive effect. There is, in his psyche, an obligation imposed on everyone to look around himself for his talent and seek to bring such talent to bear on the human condition. One has to have a rounded knowledge of Creation and its immensity of challenges and fruits to adopt this as title to a classical work that marks the apogee of a brilliant career in multiple fields of endeavour.
‘Must’ is a key word in the title. There is no option. It implies a mandate that cannot be waived for any reason. People incarnate mother earth with a spirit that combines qualities of mother and father from whom an individual human spirit issues. Both parents are subject to other human beings in a community despite their unique characteristics. Parents come into Creation with their own graces and burdens, and their own children qualify for both graces and burdens in accordance with their spiritual density. Wole seems to invoke this uncommon yet eternal law of attraction of homogenous species. Having been born into a setting, one is obliged to examine the circumstances of the parents and other actors within the ecosystem – people, plants and animals, physical features like hills, rocks and valleys, streams and birds and, myths and legends and realities of life – and use the total lessons for mapping out one’s unique trajectory while there is time and set upon that trajectory.
Nothing should be taken for granted. Spiritual forces of traditional times have a part to play in lives of current humanity in local idiom. Received religion does not have to approve a course which each individual sets for himself or herself. No location lacks a repository of wholesome activities that bears potentials for bettering the human condition.
‘Set Forth’ is equivalent to ‘commence’ your role. He here implies that roles await players in Creation. When the awareness lights upon a spirit, he or she should start or commence action to correct or show the way to recovery. When situations go wrong, it is blameworthy to be passive! Start corrective action or fight the wrong before it proliferates into communal doom or discomfort of any type. This represented the motivation for Wole’s activism. His intuitive perception could not have chosen a better title for his memoirs. He was continually guided to activism of one type or another and he did not for once shy away from the near spiritual call to set forth on the path of repair. In fact, this is the summary of his life. He criss-crossed continents in a bid to find resolution to so many oddities of the human condition, and by these commitments etched himself firmly into the memories of literary, stage and academic colleagues, friends, allies and totally strange people who come across him of whatever class or persuasion. He showed up with a character that had been moulded through time by constant examination of truth-motivated conviction. He thought through small and big issues and invariably took a stand to go or quit, with sounds he received from his intuitive perception, from his gods, or from his active brain. His exposure assisted him to smell danger at a distance.
‘Dawn’, for him, represents when daylight comes upon every human. When enlightenment about what is wrong or right is apprehended by the mind. For him, it also represents when negative events start to mature into incommoding reality. The author’s simile of dawn is heavy. It is similar to revelation of untoward trend in a community of people no matter how limited or broad. It relates to Nigeria’s drift during the military regime. Dawn represents general awareness of a deleterious course. Wole intervened at various stages of Nigeria’s evolution with his plays and many levels of dialogue he powered or personally spearheaded with recidivist forces of all grades. Dawn actually came when Sani Abacha’s destructive trajectory was identified. The annulment of June 12, 1993 election was a call to trenches for battle against forces of recidivism. The author was among those who set forth at dawn to preserve life and limb and the Nigerian state.
Although he fraternised with all who came across him, even most informally, he kept his distance from people of doubtful antecedents and demonic inclinations which he had the gift of smelling out before it hurt. He writes about eating with a devil with long spoons and did not feel it was worth it at all where he found opportunity so to do.
He made near eternal friendship based on common characteristics shared and enjoyed. He found great minds around him without straining to belong to those minds. He had a few friends that were closer than family members – one of who betrayed him while he was thought to have gone down the corridor of no return during his detention spell.
He was short-tempered with mediocre individuals and people without verve. He was impatient with dull and hollow heads and cowards. His wits are sharp and he pulled them up to escape zombies of power elite and their schemes to give him discomfort or eliminate him. He respected creative people and their organisations and went an extra mile to fulfil obligations arising from loyalty to any group to which he belonged. His travels, which I have found rare in the whole world, were conducted in reverence to multiple commitments to several organisations to which he voluntarily owed loyalty. The reward for these crystallised in the Nobel Prize which he eminently deserved.
The lucid account by his friend, Femi Johnson, of their relationship clearly shows that he did not have enough of family concern in his wanderings through the world. He related with older people and earned their reverence and admiration and trust. He believed he was in touch with gods and goddesses of his land of birth and relished their guidance through tremendous obstacles, and even while on hunting expeditions that foretold the end of a tortuous regime. He did not think much of General Olusegun Obasanjo like General Alabi Isama before him.
It would appear that he lacked restraining love and relished that total detachment. I could deduce from his offering that he was some kind of demolisher of feminine essences of a restraining quality. He let his own children set forth on their courses at dawn. One established his preference and hung close to the moment. I need not stretch the positive impact that decision might have favoured him with. Wole was a wall gecko who would gladly lose a portion of its tail to any woman who sought to possess him. There is no account whatsoever of such a possibility. His creative power that soared into production of the book with its impeccable details resulted from that kind of distance. And this is my view.
I still bow and tremble at the gift of this man to Nigeria.