Chris Dunton
THE OPEN SORE OF A CONTINENT: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF THE NIGERIAN CRISIS by Wole Soyinka (Oxford University Press, R161)
IT has been a steady, cynical process over the last few years, Soyinka’s harassment by the Nigerian authorities, the confiscation of his passport and the attempt to seize the United Nations documents he was then provided with, his exile – voluntary (whatever that means) but necessary to keep body and soul together – and now, on March 12 this year, his arraignment for treason, a charge that carries the death penalty.
A steady, cynical process, too, Nigeria’s deterioration into its present condition: a succession of civilian and military regimes reducing the economy to rubble and the bulk of the population to impoverishment, succeeding in building only an increasingly brutal apparatus of power, as Soyinka puts it “routinely handed down from villain to villain and extended retroactively to shield past villains”.
No doubt of that, one thing Nigeria certainly possesses, and in trumps, is continuity. Soyinka’s new book – a collection of inter-connected essays – traces the present crisis back to British maladministration, through to the hamstrung independence of the neo-colony, and the civil war of the late 1960s. In particular, surveying the foundation stones for the present regime, Abacha’s (how did it come to be like this?), he focuses on a six-year period, the civilian regime of Shagari (1979-1983) and the two-year military presidency of Buhari that followed.
The squandermania of the former regime is legendary; Soyinka concentrates rather on its suppression of political opponents and the fossilisation of the processes of government (he calls it the “Shagaritic era”). He admits the achievements of Buhari, but lambasts the brutality, shallowness and partisan nature of that supposedly corrective regime.
Moving forward (though his account is very freely structured, sweeping from one epoch to another to highlight connections), he dissects the farce of military ruler Babangida’s transition programme: years long, costing vast sums of money, the eventual election universally acknowledged as fair and true, but its results cancelled (in June 1993), its winner, Moshood Abiola, still in prison today.
Then Abacha. Here Soyinka’s polemic comes into its own – a polemic nourished by acute analysis. Abacha, a man of enormous wealth and power who has no idea of Nigeria; a mimic of “men of iron resolve” who governs by violent reflex; the head of a military government that boasts of its resolve to ensure the unity of Nigeria and yet in so many of its actions drives the country into fragmentation and bitter dissent.
Soyinka would, on the whole, prefer Nigeria to remain one unified state. But, as he asks, is the point to keep it one or to make it one through government predicated on human values?
Beyond the expos of the callousness and ineptitude of successive regimes, this book investigates the nature of the state. What defines a nation, asks Soyinka, when is a nation, what does it cost to achieve? His overview stretches to Northern Ireland, the Basque and Kurdish movements, testing the continuities and tensions between notions of “people” and “nation”. The nation state in Africa he sees as being in “a halfway state of purgatory”, a view that echoes apocalyptic assessments sounded elsewhere. Even in this bleak account, though, hope is expressed quite confidently: and that hope lies in “the critical perceptiveness of the ruled, who reject the actuality of social retardation that continues to be their portion”.
This is a book of fierce invective, potent because linguistically it is so precisely imagined, and because it derives from so sincere a recoil from injustice. On Babangida and Abacha and on their collaborators, Soyinka is devastating, no more so than in his lab report on the current Minister of Information, Walter Ofonagoro. The polemic sometimes constrains the analysis that feeds it, but this problem drops away in the final chapter, on the possibilities of a meaningful reconstruction of the value of “nation” in Nigeria.
This chapter, like the rest of the book, is informed by anguish and by an unhealable rage against the dictators. The book is not – though Soyinka’s enemies would probably wish it were, so they could dismiss it – a manifesto for the 1993 election winner Abiola: Soyinka is candid in detailing his failings and his contribution to the illegality of state procedures.
Another Commonwealth fact-finding mission goes to Nigeria later this year (another one). Perhaps they should take this book with them. Sure as hell they won’t find a copy there.
Chris Dunton is the author of two books on Nigerian theatre, Make Man Talk True and the forthcoming Nigerian Drama in English (both published by Hans Zell)