renaissance’
Wole Soyinka
Just as in Kosovo, or Rwanda, Algeria, or indeed Angola, there are horrors in today’s arenas of conflict that defy the accommodativeness of the Muse, traditional or contemporary.
Sierra Leone has into turned the land of terminal censorship, abrupt and unregulated, where the voices of memory are brutally censored, mindlessly, terminally, not even under a project of religious doctrinaire cleansing as in Algeria, ethnic cleansing as in Kosovo or Rwanda, or ideological cleansing as in unbelievable Cambodia and other aberrant projects for the conditioning of the mind.
We may be tempted to take consolation from the fact that traditional cleansing rituals have been exhumed to assist in the project of reintegrating child-soldiers – that is, juvenile killers, torturers and even rapists – into the community, but this is several steps yet away from the artistic conversion of such rites.
And the strident, benumbing afflictions of the dialogue of arms – Rwanda, Congo, Angola and so forth – often serve to obscure the more insidious, and ultimately more enduring incapacitation of the arts and their producers in other parts of the continent. The general response is: at least, in these other arenas of political turmoil, the artists have a voice of some kind, however muted. They are not actually subjected to that level of directionless devastation that does not even distinguish between radical and progressive, between priest or peasant, trader or journalist – at least, until they are cynically hanged by the state like the Ogoni writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa.
>From the Uganda of Idi Amin and Milton Obote to present-day Sierra Leone, from Siad Barre’s Somalia and Mariam Mengistu’s Ethiopia to Liberia, the dismal story has been wearisomely repeated. It is time, I think, that we began to stare into the cold face of statistics. Time, surely, that we began to consider, for instance, how much each day of warring costs us in Sierra Leone, Sudan or Angola, and then compare this to the entire budget of African nations, not merely for their cultural, but for their routine educational and professional training programmes. The most recent assessment of Nigeria is that that nation expends a million dollars a day for its operations in Sierra Leone.
With Ethiopia and Eritria – erstwhile partners, indeed brothers in a liberation struggle – breathing life into the arms industries of both the Western and the dismembered Eastern blocs, not forgetting making multimillionaires of ever obliging arms traffickers who pray for just this kind of belligerent idiocies of Third World leaders, I believe that some structured attention is due to the expropriation of cultural life, specifically, by the unchecked rapacity of arms. This should constitute, surely, its own specific study, within the various arena of stocktaking that accompanies the usual observances of a millennial approach.
The land of Syl Cheney-Coker, poet, who declares himself content to be ”the breakfast of the peasants”, ”the hands that help the fishermen bring in their catch”, ”a hand on the plough that tills the fields”, is silenced. This land also of the playwright Yulisu Amadu Maddy, of the urbane critic Eldred Jones, of skilled silver and goldsmiths, of the sublime sculptures of the Nimba peoples and timeless lyrics of their griots (a traditional musician/poet or minstrel), has been turned into a featureless landscape of rubble, of a traumatised populace and roaming canines among unburied cadavers.
How does a sculptor begin to carve with only stumps for arms? How does a village griot ply his trade with only the root of the tongue still lodged at the gateway of memory? The rest has been cut out – often the hand that wields the knife is the hand of the future, the ubiquitous child-soldier – and the air is bereft even of the solace of its lament.
A lament can be purifying, consoling, for a lament still affirms the retention of soul, even of faith, yes, it is a cry of loss, of bereavement, an echo of pain but it is, therefore, an affirmation of humanity, a reaching out to a world that is still human or to forces that shape humanity. A lament does not emerge from atrocities, for an atrocity is the very silencing of the human voice. It deadens the soul and clogs up the passages of hope, opening up in their place only sterile accusations, the resolve of vengeance, or else a total surrender to the triumph of banality. We can no longer speak of wars on the continent, only of arenas of competitive atrocities.
Where a yet unmatured generation becomes conditioned to indiscriminate slaughter and systematic dehumanisation, where abominations become a way of life, even violence becomes – it sounds impossible but it is true – even violence does become degraded. No poetry can emerge from such horrors, only records, the keeping of ledger sheets, a balance that must some time be rendered. In vain therefore we shall await the heart-rending but uplifting lament of a Costa Andrade:
The Mothers of Angola
have fallen with their sons
No, what the poet will find weighing on his tongue, unutterably heavy but true, are the lines: ”The mothers of Africa/Are violated by their sons.”
I do not hear, in this travesty of the creative process, the annunciation of a renaissance, nor read the first flickers of its regenerating fires on our ever-receding horizons.
An extract from a speech Wole Soyinka, playwright, presented at the TBDavie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town