In an age and country where life is short, brutish and nasty, he has outfoxed, outwitted and outlived Father Time, this old man Wole Soyinka, our Nobel laureate who is 90 today!
Wole Soyinka, a name that echoes through the ages. A bard, a rebel, a conscience that engages. The only African to have ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Happy birthday to a great man in all ramifications.
Forty-one years ago, I met him at the then University of Ife where I interviewed him for the Sunday Concord magazine story published on February 27, 1983. How time flies! We sat there for almost one hour talking about his life as a writer. Among the things he talked about was his undergraduate days at the University of Leeds where he was lucky to study under literary giants like Wilson Knight, Arnold Kettle and Fisher. It was a formidable team of lecturers, he said, and the atmosphere was really conducive for any student to drink deep from the Pierian Spring of knowledge in the field of English literature.
Soyinka said after his first degree, he didn’t feel like going for any post-graduate degree. “I was bored. I felt that I had grasped enough of what I wanted from my literature studies,” he explained. “So I felt I wanted to get out and write. I believe that the student period of one’s existence should be short but intense. Mine was very intense. After the three years, I felt I should go out and enlarge from my own perspective on what I had absorbed from my literary discipline.”
Professor Soyinka was of the view that even if he had not gone to study at the University of Leeds, he would still have made his mark anywhere he went. He said that before he ever went to Leeds, he had written the first ever play for the then Nigerian Broadcasting Service. “In the Festival of the Arts, I had already taken a couple of prizes for poems and short stories. So wherever I went I would have kept the literary flame.”
In terms of style, Soyinka is generally perceived as being opaque, impenetrable. I asked if his style of making his literary work hard to understand deliberate. He replied that it is the fate of anybody who uses the public media in any form to be misunderstood. According to him, some people find it difficult to understand his literary works because of the reputation he had acquired in other areas outside literature. “I am so notorious through other activities that everything gets mixed up, both my literature, my creative works, my other activities. Nobody can read a work by me straight any longer. The figure of Wole Soyinka in another context has to be seen. I have seen this tendency.”
He admitted however that on the question of language, “I do use what is considered complex language because I’m reflecting constantly different layers of awareness and other experiences simultaneously, sometimes within the same paragraph. I don’t see life or experience as a linear but a multiple experience and events. And I think part of the problem is that maybe I try to use a language which would express that multiple aspects of experience as I expect it would be.”
“So, how do you get the inspiration to write?”
“Me? I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I think I just get them from events around me. Events have got to move one sufficiently to trigger off the need to place it down in writing.”
After the interview, I went round to gather other people’s perspective of who Soyinka is. According to actor, dramatist and folk singer Jimi Solanke who died on 5 February 2024, at age 81, “Soyinka is a fantastic personality. Beyond the façade of tough, angry and radical man, there is humanity and gentleness in him which you really have to dig through to get and live with to ascertain.”
Mr. Olu Akomolafe, the theatre manager of the Oduduwa Hall thinks of Soyinka as a man who is “too full of the milk of human kindness. He hardly wants to get anybody fired. He is highly considerate to a fault and people tend to overstretch his kindness.”
Mr. Awam Amkpa, former student of Wole Soyinka says he “is accommodating and very accessible. I have never seen him in a violent mood but that does not mean he is not a strict disciplinarian in the theatre. He doesn’t condone lateness. He makes sure discipline is maintained on stage.”
Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, former student of Wole Soyinka at the University of Ibadan says Soyinka “is a misunderstood man. The misunderstanding is partly created by himself but largely by the refusal of people to appreciate that he has his own area of privacy.” He added that it is the source of pride and luck for any university to have Wole Soyinka on its teaching staff. “He is badly sought after across the whole world.”
Dr. Kole Omotosho, Nigerian writer and intellectual who died in Johannesburg on 19 July 2023 described Wole Soyinka as “a source of influence to me and other Nigerian writers. It’s impossible to write the way he writes, but his ideas, the kind of position he has taken over societal issues, the themes he has dealt with have been the source of influence to other writers. He is unconscious of his world reputation. He doesn’t carry it. It’s a relief. He shows that people are human beings first and foremost. It’s a lesson that needs to be imposed on present day Nigeria.”
On the dinner table, Soyinka regaled me with stories as he sipped his red wine. He said he gets embarrassed and irritated when people think he is a millionaire on account of his fame. He cited an instance he offered a challenge to one wealthy man. He told the man they should sign an agreement that the man should take everything Soyinka has in the bank and he in turn would take what the man has in the bank. The man was not ready to sign. This was before Soyinka won the Nobel Prize.
Soyinka told me that even though his books are translated in different languages of the world, he is deprived of his royalties. And even when the royalties come, the amount could be very small. There was a day he got ten naira as his royalty, he recalled. Soyinka said he finds himself “totally unmoved” when his works are being pirated at a hideout in Ajegunle in Lagos. “I am much concerned about the Soviet Union which did not sign the Geneva Convention and has been depriving me of my royalty for years,” he lamented.
Wole Soyinka shares the same initials of W.S. with William Shakespeare. “Do you see yourself stepping into the shoes of William Shakespeare?”
“I do not want to step into the shoes of Shakespeare. I want to remain in the shoes of Wole Soyinka and nowhere else,” he replied as the interview with the great man who is 90 today ended.
