The Nobel laureate’s visit to Lagos is the embodiment of hope and as good as a permanent return, Alex Duval Smith reports from Lagos
After four years in exile, Nigeria’s most high-profile campaigner against military rule, Wole Soyinka, came home on Wednesday night. All the men and women guarding Lagos airport made sure their fatigues were shipshape and their boots shiny.
“He is our Great Lion. Welcome Great Lion!” said a private holding his machine gun aloft in the exuberant crowd which flooded the airport.
White-maned, bespectacled and wearing an elegant beige shirt, Nigeria’s 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature strode into the crowd. Never short of a word to say, this time it was just: “It is great to be home. Thank you for the welcome. Now let’s get on with it.”
The Soyinka Welcome Committee – reinforced by hundreds of Lagosians who had heard rumour of the 64-year- old writer’s arrival on a flight from Frankfurt – came in their own uniform: T-shirts and caps marked “Welcome Kongi” – after the title character in Kongi’s Harvest – and “Our own WS”.
It was de rigueur to have a badge marked “WS pass” – in Nigeria, Soyinka is known as “WS” or “the Prof”.
As the crowd became more pushy, the military became more jittery and Soyinka betrayed that he, perhaps, had grown a little unused to African exuberance, a spontaneous unison chorus in his native Yoruba filled the gigantic hall: “She daada le de, e kaabo! [We hope you arrived well, welcome!]”
In four years since he left Nigeria in disgust at the late General Sani Abacha’s ruthless regime, Soyinka’s crusade against “rule by guns, boots, loot, whip, whims, decrees and prison bars” has taken him to dozens of airports all over the world.
But to Africa’s most populous nation, his arrival last night at Murtala Muhammed airport, if only for a six-day visit, was the embodiment of hope and as good as a permanent return.
“We need his clarity of ideas. He is one of the few who can nudge this society in the right direction,” said Odia Ofeimun, whose poetry was discovered by Soyinka and who just retired as president of the Association of Nigerian Authors.
“I was just a labourer and I took him my poems. He said, `Are you sure you wrote these?’ and had them published,” said Ofeimun.
Among the less eloquent, the overwhelming sentiment was that “Soyinka cares about all people,” as Victoria Salia, queuing for a delayed flight to Abidjan, Cte d’Ivoire, said.
“He is not a tribalist, he is like us all – Yoruba, Ibo or Hausa – a Nigerian,” said David Olayiwolaojo, wearing a “Soyinka for democracy” paper sunshade. Such sentiments of unity from Nigerians are usually reserved to the terraces when the Super Eagles, the national football team, are playing.
For Segun Akinwande, a 23-year-old economics student, the return of “the Prof” meant “he will take care of us. He will take care of knowledge and see to it that our teachers and lecturers get paid and that we have fellowships and books again”, he said.
But Soyinka, who was whisked from the airport to the nearby house of the late Chief Moshood Abiola, where he was to pay his respects, returns to Nigeria with mixed feelings.
He left the country in 1994, shortly after Abiola, who died in July, had been jailed by the late Abacha for proclaiming himself victor of the 1993 presidential elections which were annulled by the military.
In New York, three weeks ago, he presented the present Nigerian military leader, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, with a 10-point list of shortcomings he perceives in the current plan to bring about democracy.
In the next few days – Soyinka’s engagements include a lecture at Lagos law school on Friday and several political meetings – he is certain to step up his criticism.
But while Soyinka treads “the road which waits, famished” – the famous line from his poem Death in the Dawn, borrowed for the title of Ben Okri’s novel – the returning exile must also be sensitive to the optimism Nigerians feel for Abubakar’s reform plans.