Nigeria
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka visited South Africa for a writers’ festival in Durban. He spoke to Suzy Bell
A distinguished man in black sips a cold Amstel in the retro lounge of the Blue Waters Hotel in Durban. He’s Wole Soyinka, acclaimed playwright, essayist, novelist and memoirist. He’s the quietly spoken winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature – the first African winner in the prize’s history. He jokes about such recognition: “Maybe Africa should set up a Nobel prize and wait for about 100 years before recognising the rest of the world!”
Soyinka grew up in western Nigeria, also the home of Moshood Abiola, presumptive winner of the 1993 elections which were annulled by former despot Ibrahim Babangida, sparking widespread violence and the present chaos under the bunker dictatorship of General Sani Abacha.
Since Soyinka’s passport was confiscated by Abacha in 1994, he now lives in exile in Atlanta, United States, where he teaches at Emory University. He and a United Democratic Front of Nigeria delegation are travelling the world talking to African and other leaders about the Nigerian crisis, which he describes in these terms:”Here is a nation that has locked up its president-elect, has killed democracy activists, has assassinated the wife of the president-elect, clamps down on the media and takes hostages of wives and children.”
Soyinka says vehemently that there can be no “African renaissance” as long as Nigeria is in chains:”There can be no liberation without Nigeria, as long as its people are in danger of their lives, where its intellectuals, thinkers and writers are under threat.”
But “there is a lack of will in the foreign policies of many governments”.
Soyinka’s exiled state is a paradoxical one:”I’m not living outside, but I’m compelled to stay outside. I’m very much in Nigeria on many levels, including the creative level.” And his role is clear: “I’m on a mission. The decision was taken that somebody had to be taken out [of Nigeria], and have the kind of contacts and the capacity for opening doors in government circles on the continent and around the world. So I’m carrying on the struggle from outside. I’ve been kept busy non-stop.
“But I have lots of my colleagues in prison, some are being tortured, a number of them have not seen their families for a long time, and it’s difficult to even monitor where they’ve been put as they’re shifted all the time. The state of exile is a qualitative thing. Someone who is in prison in Nigeria – is he at home or in exile? Those who are totally alienated from any sense of security, who are constantly looking over their shoulders, who speak in whispers, who are compelled to live in the most ruthless, barbaric, brutish dictatorship that Nigeria has ever known, is that person at home or in exile? Before I left I always moved from place to place, being very cautious, but was I at home or in exile?
Soyinka was in Durban to participte in the Time of the Writer festival, though he was only able to give a day to it. “I’m on duty with my obsession for the liberation of a creative space called Nigeria.”
Soyinka sees himself as a writer wearing many hats, “but the fundamental hat is that the writer, as a product of the environment, has no choice but to reflect the conditions of that environment, its contradictions, its little victories or major victories, its potential – so he or she has to be a visionary. But a writer is also a citizen, a political animal, whether he likes it or not. But I do not accept that that means a writer has a greater obligation to society than a musician or a mason or a teacher. Everyone has a citizen’s commitment.”