Orlando Owoh: I doubt if anybody in this generation equals Wole Soyinka. There is hardly any field in the humanities he can't fit in: history, politics, grammar, drama, philosophy, sociology, literature, mysticism, etc.

aasog1:

The same man was shred to pieces by pro-GEJ activists, who called him mad, despite he spent 2 years in prison for their Biafra. The same Shoyinka dared the cabals when GEJ was "Totally alone", and not one of his ally including Dame spoke a word. I think Yorubas have done enough for other tribes in this country. Its time that energy is poured on ourselves alone. Anyways, no sane Yoruba man would fight for any more tribe with the actions and anti-Fashola and anti-Yoruba music that has been sung since Gej became the president. The prof has finally quieten down. We need him to do more for his people rather than some bunch of hapless low-memory ingrates.

aasog1:

The same man was shred to pieces by pro-GEJ activists, who called him mad, despite he spent 2 years in prison for their Biafra. The same Shoyinka dared the cabals when GEJ was "Totally alone", and not one of his ally including Dame spoke a word. I think Yorubas have done enough for other tribes in this country. Its time that energy is poured on ourselves alone. Anyways, no sane Yoruba man would fight for any more tribe with the actions and anti-Fashola and anti-Yoruba music that has been sung since Gej became the president. The prof has finally quieten down. We need him to do more for his people rather than some bunch of hapless low-memory ingrates.

DerideGull:


You should be ashamed of yourself, multitude of forbearers and ilk that only one Yoruba was reasonable enough to understand the plight of Biafrans. Yet you are here playing ever chest beating and arrogating of err of personality peculiarly known about Yoruba people. If the nonchalance exhibited by the Yoruba people was not a crass self-indictment, what else could be?

Orlando Owoh:
Be reasonable for once.

DerideGull:

For the sake of reasonability, please name one additional Yoruba who spent almost 3 years in jail because of Biafran issue.

aasog1:

The same man was shred to pieces by pro-GEJ activists, who called him mad, despite he spent 2 years in prison for their Biafra. The same Shoyinka dared the cabals when GEJ was "Totally alone", and not one of his ally including Dame spoke a word. I think Yorubas have done enough for other tribes in this country. Its time that energy is poured on ourselves alone. Anyways, no sane Yoruba man would fight for any more tribe with the actions and anti-Fashola and anti-Yoruba music that has been sung since Gej became the president. The prof has finally quieten down. We need him to do more for his people rather than some bunch of hapless low-memory ingrates.

DerideGull:


You should be ashamed of yourself, multitude of forbearers and ilk that only one Yoruba was reasonable enough to understand the plight of Biafrans. Yet you are here playing ever chest beating and arrogating of err of personality peculiarly known about Yoruba people. If the nonchalance exhibited by the Yoruba people was not a crass self-indictment, what else could be?

aasog1:

The same man was shred to pieces by pro-GEJ activists, who called him mad, despite he spent 2 years in prison for their Biafra. The same Shoyinka dared the cabals when GEJ was "Totally alone", and not one of his ally including Dame spoke a word. I think Yorubas have done enough for other tribes in this country. Its time that energy is poured on ourselves alone. Anyways, no sane Yoruba man would fight for any more tribe with the actions and anti-Fashola and anti-Yoruba music that has been sung since Gej became the president. The prof has finally quieten down. We need him to do more for his people rather than some bunch of hapless low-memory ingrates.

oride: Culled from Page Turner.

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing. And in a play about a preacher, theatre easily becomes religion. The performance of Wole Soyinka’s 1964 farce “The Trials of Brother Jero,” which I saw recently in Lagos, was not dissimilar to my experience at a Pentecostal church about two weeks later. “The Trials of Brother Jero” centers on a prophet, one of the many freelance Christian clerics of dubious authority that have proliferated in Nigeria. Charlatans are not charlatans all the way through: if they didn’t believe at least a little in what they were selling, it would be difficult for them to persuade others. “In fact, there are eggs and there are eggs,” Brother Jero proclaims in his first soliloquy of the play. “Same thing with prophets. I was born a prophet.”

This element of make-believe is true of both prophets and actors, and so in a play like “Brother Jero” the point is doubled: both acting and religion have an imprecise relationship with the truth. The performance I saw was at a beautiful independent theatre called Terra Kulture, on Victoria Island, an upscale neighborhood of the city. Brother Jero—“Velvet-hearted Jeroboam, Immaculate Jero, Articulate Hero of Christ’s Crusade”—was played with slinky, mellifluous deviousness by Patrick Diabuah as equal parts Hamlet and Wile E. Coyote. The play was fast, funny, wordy, and physical, and it sent up deception for the two-way street that it was: an eyes-half-open transaction between the deceiver and the deceived. “Go and practice your fraudulences on another person of greater gullibility,” says one of Jero’s marks shortly before he, too, is flattered—drawn in with sweet words and gleefully defrauded.

Nigeria, too, is in a season of drama, and words are flying freely. In Rivers State, in the oil-rich Niger Delta, there is a power struggle. This struggle is entirely within the People’s Democratic Party, which is the party of President Goodluck Jonathan, and it centers on the elections of 2015, which the President is interested in contesting. The First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, is from Rivers State, and she has been vocal on one side of the dispute, acting as the President’s proxy. The governor of Rivers State, Rotimi Amaechi, widely liked and seen as an insurgent within the party, is on the other side. President Jonathan has been condemned by Nigerians for being ineffectual, for having a make-believe Presidency that promises much and delivers little, but the Dame (as she is called) has been even more a figure of fun. Her command of English is unsteady: she once addressed a gathering of widows as “my fellow-widows.” A cause for more sustained resentment has been her ostentatious personal style in what is still a desperately poor
country.

In early July, a maneuver by the Dame’s supporters to impeach the Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly devolved into mayhem. In the ensuing brawl, one member of the House, Chidi Lloyd, attacked another, Michael Chinda, with a ceremonial mace, breaking his skull and critically wounding him in full view of television cameras. In the wake of this attack, Dame Patience made a conciliatory statement in which she described Governor Amaechi as her “son” (the difference in their age is seven years). Newspaper commentators found her appeal hypocritical, since she’d been widely credited with a major role in the state’s crisis. After all, she had recently been in Rivers State on an eleven-day visit, with the full security apparatus of the Presidency. Her visit was so disruptive and intimidating that the governor had been pinned down in his lodge, unable to move around his capital city, Port Harcourt. And in the House of Assembly there was a group of members so fanatically loyal to her that one of them, Evans Bipi, had declared to the press, “Why must [Governor Amaechi] be insulting my mother, my Jesus Christ on earth?”

Loudest among the voices of protest raised against the Dame was Wole Soyinka’s. He took her to task for imposing herself on the people and for acting like a “parallel head of state.” Soyinka called a press conference in Lagos and built his case against the President and his wife around an extended and unexpected metaphor: the twelfth-century persecution and murder of Thomas à Becket by the agents of Henry II. Speaking about the way a king might tacitly condone crimes and, thus, making pointed reference to the way Governor Amaechi was being stripped of power in Rivers State, Soyinka asked, “Are we not moving towards absolute monarchism? There are many worrying historical parallels.” A written statement he gave to the press had a more ad-hominem quality, ending with the line “You can extract a hippopotamus from the swamps, but you cannot take the swamp out of a hippopotamus.” This was generally interpreted as an ungentle poke at the Dame, a woman of considerable size. Even some of Soyinka’s supporters squirmed at the analogy.

Political activity has always been as central to Soyinka’s work as theatre has. He was uncensorable right from the start. He was imprisoned for twenty-two months in the late sixties, during Nigeria’s civil war, for his attempt to negotiate a peace between the Federal and Biafran sides. He spent much of that time in solitary confinement, an experience that he wrote about in a memoir, “The Man Died.” In 1994, he fled Nigeria when the military regime of General Sani Abacha threatened his life. His passport had been seized, so he went across the land border into the Republic of Benin, and from there he made his way into exile in the United States. He agitated for a return to democratic rule and was charged with treason in absentia, in 1997. But he returned home after General Abacha died, in 1998, and he lives in Nigeria now.

He remains one of the country’s most fearless defenders of human rights, speaking out on issues from the Boko Haram insurgency to the aggressive legislation curtailing the rights of gays and lesbians. He is famous and respected, and perhaps better known to the ordinary Nigerian for his political activity than for the linguistically intricate and thematically complex plays—among them “Death and the King’s Horseman” and “Madmen and Specialists”—that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986.

Word of Soyinka’s July press conference reached the Dame, and she was not amused. Three days later, she issued a statement in which she called Soyinka “an embarrassment” to Nigeria. And it was this unexpected turning of the tables, this swerve into the theatre of the absurd, that I wished to ask Soyinka about. I got my chance a few days later, when I visited him in Abeokuta, about an hour north of Lagos, in his bucolic home at the edge of the woods. The house was cool, shadowed, and quiet. It had none of the ostentation that one expects from a Nigerian “big man”—no security fence or luxury cars or marble floors. Instead, there was indigo-dyed hand-woven aso-oke cloth on the windows, and there were phalanxes of African sculpture, both Yoruba and otherwise, standing in watchful groups around the living room. It was a reassuring place, a suitable lair for a man whose name, soyinka, literally means “the daemons surround me.” I was reminded of another one of the epithets for him: “child of the forest.” He lived up to this designation as well, often going out hunting and bearing in himself a more congenial relationship with traditional religious belief than most Nigerians, converts to Islam or Christianity, would entertain. Soyinka is a devotee of Ogun—the god of iron and “the first symbol of the alliance of disparities”—and his “Myth, Literature and the African World” is a learned exploration of the links between epic theater, Yoruba ritual, aesthetics, and ethics.

My visit was about a week after his seventy-ninth birthday. He looked vigorous, effortlessly handsome. His famous afro and beard, both a vivid white, looked less like signs of age than evidence of some unending efflorescence. “So, what does it feel like to be an embarrassment?” His eyes closed with mirth.

“It is not only the end of farce. It is the end of all the genres.” Then, still laughing, but with more fight in his voice, he added, “She was unelected—and it is irrelevant if she’s a man or a woman—she is a mere appendage of power. If there’s someone she doesn’t find embarrassing, there must be something wrong with that person.”

Teju Cole is a photographer and writer. His novel “Open City” won the Internationaler Literaturpreis in June. He contributes frequently to Page-Turner.

deridegull:
For the sake of reasonability, please name one additional Yoruba who spent almost 3 years in jail because of Biafran issue.

Jaidey-one:


Is you IQ reducing by the minute Your dumb response failed to adress the fact in the post you quoted. Wole stood up for biafra. He stands for truth and justice. But now he's being percieved as an enemy just because he said the truth about the situation of things in rivers state. Do you know his vehicle was stoned when he visited rivers state afterwards? Adress the facts or shut up