“How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” If justice and hope were in such short supply in the fictional world of African writers, I thought, they were likely to be even scarcer on the ground.
I was already familiar with Soyinka’s essays and fiction, where it is not so much the “oppressive boot” of colonialism that is held up to scrutiny as irreconcilable notions of foreign justice and native spirituality. Yoruba tradition, I learned as I immersed myself in Death and the King’s Horseman, requires that when a chief dies, his personal horseman must commit suicide and follow his leader into the afterlife; otherwise, the chief’s soul will wander aimlessly and create chaos for the people. In the play, Elesin, the dead chief’s horseman, celebrates life to the fullest as he prepares to meet his obligation. However, the British district officer, Mr. Pilkings, intervenes, insisting the ritual is degrading and primitive. The disruptions of community life resulting from this break with tradition are manifold: Elesin is cursed by his neighbours; his son returns from medical school in Europe and, for the honour of his family, commits suicide in his father’s place; the father then kills himself in despair, condemning his soul and bringing disgrace to the community. The blame for Elesin’s failure to complete the ritual remains ambiguous, a complicated mixture of vanity, cultural misunderstanding, fleshly indulgence that saps the hero’s resolve and blind foreign intervention. Pilkings, still in his skeletal party costume and surrounded by the carnage his intervention has created, asks Elesin’s loyal wife, Iyaloja: “Was this what you wanted?” She gives him an earful.
“No, child, it is what you brought to be, you who play with strangers’ lives, who even usurp the vestments of our dead, yet believe that the stain of death will not cling to you. The gods demanded only the old expired plantain, but you cut down the sap-laden shoot to feed your pride. There is your board, filled to overflowing. Feast on it.”
I admired Soyinka’s play for a quality it shared with the plays of Bertolt Brecht: Death and the King’s Horseman was subversive, challenging audiences to rethink issues, question accepted values. I slipped the play into my backpack and removed a collection of interviews, Conversations with Wole Soyinka. In discussion with Jane Wilkinson, Soyinka insisted that change begins one individual at a time and that drama is both a healing process and an agent for the radical transformation of society:
In the black community here, theater can be used and has been used as a form of purgation, it has been used cathartically; it has been used to make the black man in this society work out his historical experience and literally purge himself at the altar of self-realization. This is one use to which it can be put. The other use, the other revolutionary use, may be far less overt, far less didactic, and less self-conscious. It has to do very simply with . . . opening the audience up to a new existence, a new scale of values, a new self-submission, a communal rapport . . . Finally and most importantly, theater is revolutionary when it awakens the individual in the audience, in the black community in this case, who for so long has tended to express his frustrated creativity in certain self-destructive ways, when it opens up to him the very possibility of participating creatively himself in this larger communal process. In other words, and this has been proven time and time again, new people who never believed that they even possessed the gift of self expression become creative and this in turn activates other energies within the individual. I believe the creative process is the most energizing. And that is why it is so intimately related to the process of revolution within society.
In a second interview that caught my attention, recorded fifteen years later, Soyinka was asked about his poetry collection Mandela’s Earth, in particular a poem called “Cremation of a Wormy Caryatid,” which the interviewer suggested was pessimistic. Soyinka objected to the interviewer’s reading: “Whether we like it or not, in terms of effecting change art does have its limitations. And I keep emphasizing that recognition of this is not a negative or pessimistic view of art. For me it is a positive one. Certain kinds of artistic production in my society are left to rot, deliberately. It’s part and parcel of the persona of a work of art that it is meant to vanish, to be destroyed in order to be able to reproduce itself. This is the organic nature of art.” As an example, he offered wood carvings, created in full knowledge of their perishability. “Yes, there is this work of art, and it is quite possible for little termites to eat into it and destroy it. But those termites cannot . . . destroy the creative essence that produced the work of art.” While he acknowledges the sorry state of the world, a view he shares with Achebe, Soyinka has tirelessly promoted democratic values and shamed the reactionary political forces in his country on the international stage, often at great risk to himself. He never advocates putting down the pen and taking up arms, but continues to condemn the corruption and violence eroding the fragile unity of Nigeria.
Having also spent much of my creative life convinced that writing is a subversive act and that literature is one of the healing arts, I was thrilled to have this brief interlude at thirty thousand feet with Wole Soyinka. I knew my ignorance of the necessary languages, history and traditions would be a liability on my travels, but I welcomed the moral support of Soyinka’s company nonetheless.
As our plane descended over Lake Victoria—its brilliant surface illuminated by the moonlight—my seatmate Andrew offered me his copy of the Times and some unexpected advice.
“Don’t believe everything African writers tell you. Half of them are living in the past, the other half prostituting themselves to impress Western intellectuals. Once you give up your own language, you’ve lost both your real audience and your integrity. You’ll get more accurate information about Africa talking to people on the ground through a translator—farmers, miners, teachers, journalists, cassava merchants and especially women, who do most of the honest work on this continent.”
A blanket of moist tropical air enveloped me as I stepped out onto the tarmac, redolent of exotic flowers and decaying vegetation, a primal funk that reached back to the beginning of time. I was here, at last, for whatever might be in store.
I had confirmed but not paid for my connecting flight on RwandAir and was anxious to find the ticketing agents so I could relax, catch a nap and do some reading in preparation for Kigali. I strode the length of the building half a dozen times to stretch my cramped legs, while an airport employee disappeared with my passport and promised to locate the ticket agents.
Despite its centrality and function as a hub for United Nations flights in Africa, Entebbe airport was quiet this morning, a few dozen passengers like myself waiting for connections, two bored Ugandan soldiers making periodic appearances and a solitary cleaning woman barely awake at the handle of her three-foot-wide dust mop. The airport employee escorted me to the RwandAir ticket counter, where I paid my fare by credit card, then went back upstairs again to the departure lounge for the long wait.
I purchased a copy of “Exterminate All the Brutes” by Sven Lindqvist, ordered a coffee and a woeful cheese sandwich at the bar, and found a vacant table next to two backpackers from Illinois who were sucking at bottles of Nile beer and debating the relative merits of trekking to see gorillas in Rwanda or Uganda. As I sipped my tepid coffee and worked towards a negotiated settlement with the stale bread and brittle slab of cheese, the young man addressed me. He was wearing hiking boots, jeans and a bright red T-shirt advertising Roosevelt University and was seated beside a backpack so festooned with gadgets and metal bottles it resembled a tinker’s display.
“Hey, man, you here for the animals, too?”
I thought of the interviews awaiting me—sexual abuse, mutilations, unspeakable atrocities—and considered a smart-assed rejoinder,
