Wole Soyinka’s Christian Moment, 1958–1965

By- Timothy R. Vande Brake

ABSTRACT
Wole Soyinka publicly broke from his parents’ faith in early adolescence, yet his anti-Christian stance was not fully realized until his early thirties. Thus, a rich religious dialogue animates the first eight years of his artistic career, 1958–1965. In works from these years (during which Nigeria gained its independence), Soyinka keenly observes and insightfully images Christianity yet holds it at a distance. Soyinka’s changing religious outlook is examined through three works from this period: Camwood on the Leaves, The Interpreters, and The Road. Actions suggesting that he was gradually letting go of his inherited Christian values are also explored.

KEYWORDS
Wole Soyinka, Christianity, wrestling, Camwood on the Leaves (play), The Interpreters (novel), The Road (play)

Through the situations and characters he creates, especially in drama, novel, and memoir, Soyinka provides insight into our moral and spiritual lives. Raised by parents whose genuine and fervent Christianity shaped every aspect of their lives,1 Soyinka rejected his parents’ faith in early adolescence. But it did not so easily reject him. In fact, the first eight years of his public career (1958–1965) contain some of the most moving and profound meditations on Christianity written in the past century. I am not alone in noticing this. Alan Jacobs, for instance, muses that Soyinka is “a writer of spectacular literary gifts: he is an acclaimed lyric and satirical poet, a brilliant novelist of ideas, a memoirist both nostalgic and harrowing, and almost certainly the greatest religious dramatist of our time.”2

One might wonder how a writer whose work, especially his late work, can be so hostile to Christianity could at the same time see into it so clearly and deeply. I attribute this rare perception to three factors, which will be axiomatic to my argument:

1. Christianity utterly pervaded Soyinka’s early life, shaping his imagination and his conscience;

2. Like most Africans, Soyinka acknowledges that all life has a spiritual dimension. Though his earliest label for his self-determination was “atheist,” he has never accepted the post-Enlightenment idea that the only deities are those humans have created. Rather, he acknowledges [End Page 55] that nonhuman spirits are real and sometimes palpable;

3. Soyinka’s parents continued to pray for him, making his adolescence and early adulthood a time of intense spiritual struggle.

Soyinka knows the Bible well. Especially in his early life, its stories and pronouncements formed the backcloth of his imagination. Two such stories center my thinking in this essay, the first of which is Jacob’s wrestling with God. Jacob’s life is the paradigm of faith as struggle. Born second, grasping his twin brother’s heel, Jacob strove all his life to be first. When his brother, Esau, was hungry, Jacob traded a bowl of stew for Esau’s birthright, later impersonating his twin to steal their dying father’s blessing. Years afterward, facing a reckoning, Jacob prepared to meet Esau by sending his family away so that he could plead through the night with God:

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.

And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.

And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask my name? And he blessed him there.

And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.

And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.

(Gen. 32:24–31)3

Having received years earlier the covenantal blessing of his father, Isaac, Jacob here appeals to escape his brother’s anger. Along with the requested blessing, Jacob receives a new name: Jacob, which means, “He grasps the heel,” becomes Israel, which means, “He struggles with God.”

A second biblical story key to my argument is that of Absalom’s rebellion and death. The Absalom story begins with the prophet Nathan’s announcement of judgment on David for his sin with Bathsheba:

Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun. [End Page 56]

For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.

(2 Sam. 12:11–12)

Over the course of several years, this prophecy is realized when Absalom, having declared himself king in Hebron, follows the advice of the counselor Ahithophel to pitch tents on the roof of the royal palace in Jerusalem and to lie with his father’s concubines. The ultimate gesture of disrespect, Absalom’s act is also meant to seal his usurping of his father’s throne. But the battle has yet to be fought, and in a long, bloody day of fighting David’s army prevails. Forbidden to go out with his troops, David instructs his commanders not to harm Absalom. Yet when the rebel leader’s long hair is caught in the branches of an oak, Joab pierces Absalom with javelins and tells his men to finish the work. When David hears the news, he mourns from the depths of his heart: “And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Sam. 18:33)

To be continued.......

The first of these stories pertains because, whenever Soyinka touches on faith, especially in his early career, he uses the metaphor of wrestling, and Genesis 32 is the archetype of faith as conflict. The second applies because Soyinka, like Absalom, was the prodigy who indulged a willfulness, even a hunger, for domination that would not be satisfied except with total victory. When Absalom is killed, David laments not only because a son is dead but also because this son’s soul has been irreparably lost. As he breaks away from his parents’ faith, Soyinka portrays not David’s but Absalom’s perspective through several early works.

In this piece I will examine what I am calling Soyinka’s “Christian moment,” the eight years between January 1958 and December 1965 in which Soyinka established himself as a writer of international stature and in which his work is extraordinarily religiously rich. It is not that after 1965 he is a different writer altogether; qualities such as his biting satire and wit pervade his whole oeuvre. Rather, certain themes—a yearning for peace and reconciliation, a longing for hearts to be changed, a hope that beauty (created beauty) might be preserved—belong almost exclusively to this period or to work that reflects on his early life. Though any work from 1958 to 1965 could be examined in light of my thesis, I have chosen to focus on three pieces: Camwood on the Leaves, a radio play from November 1960; The Interpreters, a novel published in 1965 though largely complete by the middle of 1962; and The Road, a signature play from September of 1965.4

Declarations

Through the mind of the character Maren in his memoir Ibadan, Soyinka recounts breaking with his parents’ faith in a passage about his early adolescent thinking at boarding school: [End Page 57]

How it all came about, he no longer remembered. He only recalled that the usual notice had gone up for articles for the school magazine, and he had resolved to set down, in continuous form, arguments that he had often held with Komi, Chris, and sometimes even the quiet Dipo over what had become the major concern of his private reflections: did God exist? He had not yet come to a definition of his convictions, fluctuating as he did between a feeling that rejected the existence of such an omnipotent being, or at least the need to worship and bow before his unseen presence, and a fear of the deeply ingrained penalties that would attend such a denial, were he to be wrong. His mind dwelt longer and longer over the question, eating into the peace of his refuge in Unter den Linden, inserting itself between his head and the pillow and usurping even the voices of teachers in every subject, with dire consequences for his end-of-term reports. He was aware that he had become insufferable, intolerant of distractions from the wrestling match that he conducted all within himself, with only the occasional relief from inconclusive arguments. . . .

With every reflection on the phenomena around him, causality began to replace all notion of miracle or divine origin. And yet he found that he clung deeply to evidence of mystery, to the mysterious, to the existence of a plane that remained non-physical.

He no longer made a pretense of exploring the religious tracts still dutifully sent by his father; they did not contribute anything to his sense of wellbeing, his moral sense drew nourishment elsewhere, from other books that he read, from his continuing assessment of the lessons imparted from childhood, the continuing experience of boyhood, and the judgment he constantly passed on people, events, and even nature. Every day, the tracts seemed to grow even more pretentious, unctuous and even ludicrous. He could not see how the setting of a weekly homily could affect one’s conduct for a week. His interest in the bible waned; there was literature that spoke more pertinently to him, that engaged his moral apprehension in more challenging, more enlarging ways. The chapel services became hollow and meaningless. . . .

It was the very process of writing the article that ended his doubts, and it branded him for ever in the eyes of not a few, as the much heralded and dreaded anti-christ. He titled it: Ideals of an Atheist and, to make matters worse, it won the essay prize. For once, it was not an achievement that he could even dream of advertising at home.5

In a foreword, Soyinka labels Ibadan “faction, that much abused genre which attempts to fictionalise facts and events, the proportion of fact to fiction being totally at the discretion of the author.”6 This incident, however, is confirmed by other people and seems as close to fact as memoir can be.7 In Soyinka’s telling, this event has a sense of finality, of a door latching shut. Faith, though, is not so easily discarded, and losing one’s faith is a process [End Page 58] that can span years, even decades. My argument in this essay is that such was the case for Soyinka.

Faith is inherently mysterious. Jacob grappled with God and lived, and for us too faith can sometimes seem like a wrestling match. When Soyinka writes about faith, he consistently uses this metaphor, as in the above passage. Yet losing one’s faith is not as simple as losing or winning one struggle or even a series of such. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood, maintaining faith depends not only on what one thinks or feels but on how one responds to God’s revealed will: “Only those who obey can believe.”8 And since humans are connected with God and each other in many ways, keeping one’s faith also depends on what others do, as Augustine saw: “But you sent down help from above and rescued my soul from the depths of darkness because my mother, your faithful servant, wept to you for me, shedding more tears for my spiritual death than other mothers shed for the bodily death of a son.”9 When one examines Soyinka’s early work with these things in mind, his boarding-school declaration of unbelief seems not an immediately accomplished fact. Rather, a lingering dialogue with his parents’ faith shapes his first eight years as an artist. In these years Soyinka’s work is suffused with honesty, humor, and—occasionally—hope. It powerfully engages problems of human community, especially those felt by Nigerians as they emerged from their colonial past.

This eight-year span was also extraordinarily productive for Soyinka. The first two years he spent in London working at the Royal Court Theatre. By the end of 1958 he had produced his first play, The Swamp Dwellers, which examines one young man’s response to corruption in priesthood, family, city, and village. Written in response to news that the first wells were being drilled in Nigeria in what would become one of the world’s richest oilfields,10 the play holds out hope that tribal and religious differences could be bridged through courage, truthfulness, and hard work. Soyinka wrote, directed, and acted the lead role in this remarkable first play.11 In the next year two more of his plays, The Lion and the Jewel and The Invention, were produced, the former at the Arts Theatre in Ibadan and the second by Soyinka at the Royal Court.12 Meanwhile, he was also occasionally broadcasting across Nigerian airwaves.13

Soyinka returned to Nigeria on January 1, 1960, and it is the varied and prodigious six years that followed that are the focus of this paper. In this span, he wrote, directed, and produced scripts for radio, television, and film. He assembled amateur actors into companies to perform his plays, from A Dance of the Forests, written for the 1960 Independence Celebrations, to the satirical and subversive revues published in 1965 under the title Before the Blackout. In the pages of newspapers, he engaged in vigorous debate about African art, politics, and culture, gaining international celebrity for opposing the Negritude movement. He directed and performed in other dramatists’ plays and began lecturing in Nigerian universities. In short, between 1960 and 1965 he was giving voice to a new kind of Nigerian art, politics, and culture that those at home and abroad were listening to.14 [End Page 59]

That Soyinka did fully sever ties with Christianity in these years is also clear. In interviews from his later career15 and in talks like “The Credo of Being and Nothingness,” Soyinka excoriates Christianity and Islam as engines of intolerance and violence in Africa, as indeed they sometimes have been. In their place, he began in the early 1960s to endorse Africa’s traditional religions, dubbing himself “an experimenting spiritualist of nothingness since childhood.”16 Sometime before his imprisonment in August of 1967 for his unauthorized attempts to defuse the Biafran War, he wrote an essay entitled “The Fourth Stage,”17 which explores, among other things, the experience of spirit possession.

When did the actual break with the faith of his parents happen? Celucien L. Joseph surmises, “Soyinka probably lost his faith as a student at the University College in Ibadan, and most certainly in London, where he was exposed to a sea of ideas and ‘texts of reason’ in the tradition of Western non-theistic humanism that have challenged his childhood religious experience and belief in the Christian God.”18 In contrast, Jackson L. Rowland-Adeniyi suggests that this loss occurred during the trauma of the Nigerian Civil War and Soyinka’s long imprisonment during that conflict.19

But I think there is evidence from the author’s work, words, and life to place the severance in 1965, and perhaps even in the second half of that year. After 1965, Soyinka’s work is increasingly characterized by anger, bitterness, and scorn, as for instance in the plays Madmen and Specialists and Death and the King’s Horseman. It is also more comfortable with violence, as in the novel Season of Anomy. That these tendencies developed before the Biafran War and not simply in response to it is one thing I hope to show.

1965 was a pivotal year for Nigeria and for Soyinka. In that year tensions had taken the nation to the brink of war but not beyond; in 1965 there was still a hope for resolution, which the coups and massacres of 1966 would bury. In Soyinka’s life 1965 was also a banner year for artistic production: besides continuing to lead drama troupes and to lecture in Nigerian universities, he published his first novel, The Interpreters, and directed or oversaw the premiere of two major plays: Kongi’s Harvest and The Road. These two plays are harder-edged than the earlier ones; they portray and even celebrate violence in a way his previous work had not. In an interview published in the magazine Spear in May of 1966, Soyinka characterized the process of writing The Road as “almost a kind of exorcism.”20 As I will explore below, this statement in its context seems more than just metaphor; it appears to signal an end to the religious struggle that enriches Soyinka’s early work.

By examining three works from this half-decade that chronicle an agon—Camwood on the Leaves (1960), The Interpreters (1962), and The Road (1965)—I will demonstrate how Soyinka’s characterization of Christianity and his tone toward it change. Correspondingly, I will show how Soyinka’s actions during these years confirm the story his works tell. [End Page 60]

Soyinka as Son

Camwood on the Leaves is a deeply personal play, though not a strictly autobiographical one.21 In the Spear interview, Soyinka calls it one of his favorites.22 Though he does not elaborate, there is much to like in this radio play first aired in November 1960.23 Camwood seems utterly opposed to Soyinka’s sprawling experiment in total theater, A Dance of the Forests, that had premiered two months earlier, yet the two plays complement one another. Both captivate and unsettle, probe and teach. Both speak to Nigeria’s prospects as a new nation, sobering the pageantry of the Independence Celebrations in the fall of 1960.24 In contrast to A Dance, Camwood depicts life in one ordinary village, and its action revolves around a single event. James Gibbs calls it a “too often neglected masterpiece.”25

Camwood recounts an intergenerational struggle. Isola is a sixteen-year-old boy who has stubbornly disobeyed his father, the Reverend Erinjobi. Isola has joined the egungun, slept among gravestones, and gotten Morounke, a fourteen-year-old girl, pregnant. Flashbacks reveal Erinjobi’s harsh discipline of his son, yet none of these warnings and beatings have moved Isola. The crisis, recounted in one such flashback, occurs when Erinjobi drags Isola to the home of Morounke’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Olumorin, to shame him into repentance. Isola remains indifferent; he is glad to own his child, but only to Morounke. He ignores his father’s and the Olumorins’ anger over what he has done. When Erinjobi lifts his stick to correct his son, Isola grabs and breaks it and walks home.

The play opens with Isola’s mother, Moji, crying outside of her son’s locked door. Later, Erinjobi, having fallen asleep waiting for Isola to come out, walks to his church, where he spends half the night praying. Isola and Morounke have meanwhile retreated to a sheltered haven of rock and bamboo they call “the chapel.”26 On their side of a stream is a female tortoise and her hatchlings that Isola has named Moji. On the other side is a boa he calls Erinjobi, who kills and eats hatchlings who cross the water. When Isola returns home for ammunition, the Olumorins arrive, demanding the return of their daughter. Morounke has followed Isola; yet rather than going home with her parents, she calls her mother a witch and bites her father’s hand. In the ensuing confusion, the couple elude the crowd and hide in some high brush. Erinjobi, gentle after his night of prayer, pleads with his son to repent and be reconciled, but Isola remains defiant. When Erinjobi enters the bush, Isola shoots and kills him.

Derek Wright’s perception of the play’s characters and conflict is not uncommon among its critics:

Camwood . . . tells the story of the sixteen-year old Isola’s traumatized childhood at the hands of his savagely repressive, puritanical father, the insecure Christian pastor of a still largely “pagan” parish. After being mercilessly beaten for taking part in an innocent egungun masquerade, Isola flees to the forest and, in the “chapel” of a clearing, [End Page 61] builds an alternative world that nevertheless mirrors that of his home life: he projects upon a mother tortoise and a fearsome boa constrictor that dashes the tortoise’s eggs against the rocks the identities of Moji, his timid and powerless mother, and Erinjobi, his brutal father.27

While Isola’s trauma cannot be minimized, his own actions are not innocent. Nor is Erinjobi “savagely repressive,” and nor is Moji “timid and powerless.” Erinjobi, rather, is a strict patriarch transformed by crisis. Moji, though restrained by her cultural role, is a loving truthteller who continually inter-cedes for both husband and son. Ultimately, it is Isola’s Absalom-like desire for total freedom, not his parents’ repression or timidity, that brings on the play’s conclusion.

A fair-minded assessment of Erinjobi must take into account his cultural context: his discipline, though severe, would not have seemed unwarranted in an African Christian community of the mid-twentieth century.28 As pastor of the village church, Erinjobi must maintain discipline within his own household. Paul writes in 1 Timothy 3:4–5 that an overseer must be one “that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?).” Isola’s flagrant disobedience is a scandal that imperils not only his family’s cohesion but also his community’s fellowship.

Yet Erinjobi has acted from more than a desire to preserve his family and church. Like others in his village, he has allowed his children’s obedience to become a reflection of his success or failure as a man. He has erred by caring more about honor and shame than about shepherding his bright son’s curiosity, as his censure of the younger Isola reveals: “You’re a child of sorrow, do you hear? A child of sorrow. You are lost, past redemption. I thought this was a Christian house, but you seem determined to turn it into a house of pagans. Don’t bring shame to my house! If I have to kill you I will see that you do not shame my house.”29 Though rightly concerned about his son’s rebellion, Erinjobi has idolized obedience and has neglected honesty and love.

Yet crisis refines Erinjobi. Having failed to restrain his son with warnings and canings, he opts to disown or “excommunicate” him from the family. This may seem harsh and desperate, but under the circumstances it is loving. This is Paul’s strategy to correct and restore the “immoral brother” in 1 Corinthians 5.

Paradoxically, Erinjobi finds freedom in his loss of control. By leaving Isola “in the hands of God”30 he gains objectivity. Previously, he had cared about his son only as a reflection of himself; now Isola is more like a brother to him. At the play’s end, Erinjobi demonstrates a newfound courage and gentleness when he attempts to woo his son from a hiding place in the long grass:

ERINJOBI:

Isola, while I was in church, your mother came and spoke to me. You have sinned, I know . . .

ISOLA:

I have not sinned. [End Page 62]

ERINJOBI:

Be repentant. I have come to you only because I also have sinned. As I opened my heart to God I knew that only He can give up his children, yet he never does. What right had I, his mere servant, to presume so much? What voice had I to damn you before God and men? My sin then became as great as yours. Come home and help me pray for forgiveness.

ISOLA:

Erinjobi, leave me in peace.31

This extraordinary moment reveals the both the genuineness of Erinjobi’s faith and the hardness of Isola’s rebellion. In this community, to address one’s father (or pastor) by his first name was an act of insolence. And while Erinjobi has been rigid, in the heat of conflict he gains a new suppleness, resembling the “wild Christians” on Soyinka’s mother’s side rather than the “proto-bourgeois,” “brainwashed” colonial clergyman that the play’s critics have perceived him to be.32

Camwood is an extraordinarily moving play. One thing that contributes to its power is its interpolation of Yoruba song, which mingles with Moji’s prayers. Gerald Moore singles out Moji’s role as the remarkable feature of the play’s first broadcast.33 As an intercessor, she is like Christ, who persistently advocates for those who belong to him. In subtle ways, she is also like the Holy Spirit. First, she guides and counsels. In his anger and shame Erinjobi is ready to kill Isola, but Moji lets her husband sleep and then steers him away from violence when he wakes. Second, she is privy to others’ interiority. Her compassion and love permit her a knowledge of her son that is even deeper than Isola’s own knowledge of himself. When Isola returns home for ammunition, that understanding is what makes her warnings ominous: “Have you totally sealed your heart against me? . . . This hardness belongs to an older man. You fill me with fears, my son. Are you my son at all? I no longer know you.”34 The implied danger here is that Isola might spurn the one whose love is unconditional and thus become irreparably estranged. Finally, Moji is like the Spirit in that she intercedes. In the opening scene and in many that follow, her pleas fade into Yoruba song. These lyrics of mourning, of interaction with nature, of Yoruba history and family life, ground the play’s fragile relationships. They remind us that Isola, though calloused and wayward, is a member of a tribe and a family, a person worthy of compassion and care, an Absalom.

Since the play was composed for a nation newly experiencing its independence in an age both postcolonial and post-Christian, it is not surprising that critics’ sympathy has rested primarily with Isola. Moore characterizes Isola’s actions as “natural” and Erinjobi’s as “unnatural.”35 Wright labels Erinjobi’s religion “life-crushing.”36 But this is a jaundiced view, for Christianity, when it takes root, transforms self-love into love for others and fear and hatred into generosity and magnanimity. Though Soyinka has increasingly advocated for traditional West African religions against the Christianity of his parents, in the end these religions have proven no more African than indigenous Christianity.37 And tellingly, in this play it is Isola and Morounke, not Erinjobi and Moji, who are the fatal idealists. [End Page 63]

Is Isola completely sane when he shoots his father? Has he been driven to distraction through a battle of wills? This lingering question helps make this play so fitting a response to its occasion. In 1960 Nigeria’s union was fractious, but its citizens were cemented in their aversion to racist and colonial attitudes. In his memoir, Kayode Eso recalls how enraged he and his youthful peers were in 1947 when the Bristol Hotel in Lagos turned away a West Indian delegate of the British Colonial Office based on the color of his skin.38 In contrast to self-betrayers such as the Black clerk at this hotel, Isola speaks and acts his own mind. He is unashamed of his illicitly conceived child, and he openly talks back to his minister-father. This kind of defiance, arguably, seems necessary when one wants to throw off years of imposed rule. The irony is that Isola rejects healing as well as harm.

Soyinka as Master

Camwood punctuates the extraordinary first three years of Soyinka’s career as a dramatist. In the next few years, he would concentrate on other genres. In August of 1962, he told an interviewer that a novel on which he had been working was “nearly finished.”39 This book, The Interpreters, though not published until 1965, absorbed much of his creative energy in 1961 and 1962. Like A Dance, it is an ambitious, challenging piece. Similar to Camwood, it is considered by some a minor masterpiece.40 Yet in contrast to Camwood, which portrays a small village at the end of the colonial era, The Interpreters depicts urban nightclubs, apartments, offices, roads, bridges, and slums in the independent not-yet-republic.41 It focuses on a group of young, foreign-educated professionals who are as much a problem as a solution to their country’s many ills, and, like the earlier works, it continues to grapple with faith. The novel’s six protagonists—Sekoni, an engineer; Egbo, a civil servant in the Foreign Office; Sagoe, a journalist; Dehinwa, a secretary; Bandele, a university lecturer in economics; and Kola, a university artist-in-residence—are trying to make sense of their society and their lives in a time and place where the inherited rules do not apply. Though they have grown up in a predominantly Christian culture, none considers Christianity of any relevance to their search. Instead, they seek meaning through experience and Yoruba myth. Though each of the male protagonists mirrors Soyinka’s youthful striving in some way, a minor character such as Lazarus, a preacher who claims to have been raised from the dead, also reflects his religious preoccupations in the early 1960s.

One such preoccupation, Soyinka’s growth as an artist, is explored through the characters Sekoni and Kola. Kola has both studio space and an official title, but he is really only an artist-aspirant. He is working on a vast canvas that seeks to instruct, shock, and syncretize. On this canvas, his friends and many of his acquaintances are portrayed as deities in the Yoruba pantheon. But the project, even when finished, fails to accomplish what Soyinka wanted his own art to do. While the enormous painting makes intriguing connections, prods the young professionals to decolonize their [End Page 64] imaginations, and gives them an occasion to gather, converse, and celebrate, it lacks the spark of genius. Kola himself admits as much to Monica Faseyi as they view it nearly finished: “You must know by now that I am not really an artist. I never set out to be one. But I understand the nature of art and so I make an excellent teacher of art. That is all.”42

Sekoni, on the other hand, is an engineer whose creations give profound utterance to his generation’s thoughts, inspiring them to be their best. Upon returning from Jerusalem, Sekoni sculpts from a block of wood a robed pilgrim that he calls “The Wrestler”: “Taut sinews, nearly agonizing in excess tension, a bunched python caught at the instant of easing out, the balance of strangulation before release, it was all elasticity and strain.”43 Like Demoke in A Dance of the Forests, Sekoni is an instinctual and prophetic carver in wood. Though he stutters terribly, his hands are articulate enough to provoke the envy of artist-in-residence Kola.

Born a Muslim, Sekoni marries a Christian woman and works continually for the betterment of the newly independent nation. While Kola plays mostly to an audience of elites who can attend his university reception, Sekoni performs for the nation at large. Besides the wood sculpture that makes Kola jealous, the rural power plant Sekoni creates out of scrap is also art. Jacob wrestled with God to secure a blessing; Sekoni wrestles with metal and wood to express his feelings and to help others. He also tussles, unsuccessfully, with bureaucrats hardened into corruption and greed.

If Kola and Sekoni display Soyinka’s doubts and hopes about himself as an artist, Sagoe and Bandele mirror his efforts as journalist and academic, respectively. Cynical and at times abusive, Sagoe is nonetheless realistic about the challenges facing journalists in the new Nigeria. When we are introduced to the board of directors of Sagoe’s newspaper, both the old guard petrified in their hypocrisy and tribal chiefs who consider themselves above the law, we can understand why Sagoe prefers to drown himself in drink. He sees the truth but cannot tell it, and his wrestling has a religious character, as his habitual use of religious metaphor implies.

Bandele stands out as the adult of the group. Though he looks the other way as Egbo seduces one of his students, he does not indulge in such things personally.44 Bandele reflects Soyinka as a university lecturer and as a leader of acting troupes: someone who could be counted on and who could restrain his desires to advance the greater good. Like the youthful Soyinka in these roles, Bandele subdues demons of ego and desire.

The characters in whom Soyinka’s spiritual strivings at this moment are most clearly revealed, however, are Egbo and Lazarus. In both of these figures we see not only the willful Jacob but also the rebellious Absalom. Egbo has been long recognized as the most authorial of the novel’s protagonists.45 In him there is a chiastic reflection of Soyinka’s own religious heritage: as the memoir Aké later reveals, Christian evangelism was a heritage from Soyinka’s mother’s side while the “pagan” grandfather belonged to his father’s side. In the novel, in contrast, Egbo’s mother is heiress to a traditional chiefdom, and his father is a successful Christian evangelist, though [End Page 65] both parents drown near his mother’s village before he forms any clear memories of them.

Perhaps the most hedonistic and violent of his companions, Egbo seeks meaning through sex. Haunted by the threat of eternal punishment, he wrestles to throw off his religious scruples. He prays, for instance, on the night of his sexual initiation: “Tonight good Lord, let me be lost to you. Forget my pitiful existence and bless my friend at his books. Make him a shining example Lord, but leave me for his example to shine upon.”46 As he stifles his conscience, Egbo’s thoughts reveal his changing attitudes: “If this be sin?—and he knew that his weakening had come from this so he ended it. If this be sin—so—let come the wages, Death!”47 Here is the attitude later expressed through the adolescent Maren: a vague fear about warnings of eternal punishment contending with a desire to prove these warnings false through a lack of singeing.

Seemingly irreligious, the novel’s religious value inheres in two things: first, in Soyinka’s honest rendering of a consciousness determined to break away and, second, in the implicit recognition that doubt can be fed by moral choice as much as by intellectual questioning. Egbo falls away not primarily because Christianity’s doctrines make no sense to him but rather because he doesn’t wish to follow its moral law. He prefers a pagan morality; accordingly, his sacrament becomes not the Lord’s Supper or the washing of feet but rather the piercing of a maidenhead on an island in the Ogun River. Egbo’s new religious alignment allows him to justify seduction and lust through homage to a pagan god. Like Absalom’s intercourse with his father’s concubines on the roof of the royal palace, Egbo’s sex in the open air with an unnamed student of Bandele’s is a defiance of the morality in which he was raised. And like Absalom’s act, Egbo’s is a bold rejection of the Judeo-Christian God of his parents.

Even more interesting connections to Jacob and Absalom can be found in the character Lazarus. Lazarus claims to have been changed from Black to albino when he was brought back from death, producing a tattered news clipping about his resurrection for the skeptical “interpreters.” His church is a bird’s nest of palm rods, thatch, and beer cases perched next to a lagoon. An autodidact, he recounts the story of his descent into and his release from death when the protagonists visit.

Like Absalom, Lazarus desires power. Like Jacob, he dares spiritual forces much stronger than himself. But he is more a Simon Magus than a Jacob. Lazarus seeks power to increase his own earthly holdings rather than to pursue a divine promise. And he fails. As in Egbo’s falling away, here Soyinka, the frank reporter, tells the truth. In the sermon chronicling his experience of death, Lazarus feigns humility: “My name is Lazarus, not Christ, son of God.”48 Yet his actions belie his deeply rooted aspirations to godhead. Not only does he insist on keeping twelve “apostles” to attend to his bidding like trained animals; he also challenges his youngest and newest apostle, Noah, to walk through fire as Christ bade Peter to walk on water. Though Noah is “a blank white sheet for accidental scribbles,”49 [End Page 66] Lazarus cannot inscribe his will onto this young man, and he acknowledges his bitter defeat.

As Lazarus sits in Kola’s studio, Kola asks, “Tell me, how did you convert Noah?” Lazarus snaps, “Convert! I converted nothing. What you wrestle with, what you fight and defeat, that is true conversion.”50 Here Lazarus exposes his error: unlike Erinjobi, he cannot accept a Christianity that requires self-emptying. Lazarus’s faith is not entirely spurious, however. It assumes that God will use the unlikely and the imperfect to accomplish his ends. Like the biblical Samson, for whom Soyinka’s “Champion Tout of Motor Parks”51 is named, Lazarus seems a doubtful instrument, yet one with great faith.

Culturally, Lazarus is simply truth-in-reporting. In the West African church, there is a long tradition of self-taught, miracle-working evange-lists who have gained large and loyal followings among the uneducated.52 Though this was not the pattern in Soyinka’s own family, it was a conspicuous feature of his religious landscape, and in his formative years he was clearly intrigued by types like Lazarus who could arrogate divine power to themselves without qualms of conscience.53 Even so, Soyinka knew— perhaps unconsciously—that such a tactic could not succeed with the God of the Bible.

Soyinka as Elder

As I have mentioned earlier, the year The Interpreters saw print was even more productive for Soyinka than 1960. In addition to this novel, Soyinka produced Kongi’s Harvest in Lagos in August of 1965.54 In September, he traveled to London to advise the company premiering The Road.55 The central character of the latter play, the Professor, is one of Soyinka’s most memorable creations. Compared variously to Faust, to Baron Samedi, and to the fantastical characters that populate Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard,56 Professor also resembles King Lear. In the play, he bursts on the scene this way:

Professor is a tall figure in Victorian outfit—tails, top-hat etc., all thread-bare and shiny at the lapels from much ironing. He carries four enormous bundles of newspaper and a fifth of paper odds and ends impaled on a metal rod stuck in a wooden rest. A chair-stick hangs from one elbow, and the other arm clutches a road-sign bearing a squiggle and the one word, ‘BEND’.]

PROF. [he enters in a high state of excitement, muttering to himself.]:

Almost a miracle . . . dawn provides the greatest miracles but this . . . in this dawn has exceeded its promise. In the strangest of places . . . God God God but there is a mystery in everything. A new discovery every hour—I am used to that, but that I should [End Page 67] be led to where this was hidden, sprouted in secret for heaven knows how long . . . for there was no doubt about it, this word was growing, it was growing from earth until I plucked it. . . .57

While a student at Leeds, Soyinka had impressed G. Wilson Knight with his interpretation of King Lear.58 In Professor, an excommunicated lay reader whose ravings can be eloquent, Soyinka has created his own version of Shakespeare’s legendary king. In the play, Professor has set up his “Aksident Store” and palm-wine bar across from his former church, and he still sports the tuxedo he wore for its evening services. His persistence and the palm-wine communion he administers each evening are his daily acts of defiance against God and the church. Like Soyinka in 1965 in many ways, Professor is also an Absalom.

In the Spear interview, Soyinka calls The Road “one of the three personal plays I have written.”59 Later in the same exchange when asked about his style of dress, he says, “I choose to be comfortable. I wear whatever I feel like—‘agbada’, shirts and so forth. I may even appear in tails and a top-hat if I feel like.”60 Comparable to Igwezu in The Swamp Dwellers or to Isola in Camwood on the Leaves, Professor is a role tailored to the author’s own dimensions. Another such role, and an opposite one, is that of Samson.

Soyinka the spiritual quester has also always been Soyinka the social satirist. In The Road, this aspect of the author’s personality emerges through the garrulous tout, whom Simon Gikandi considers the play’s central character.61 Samson, owner of the transport service No Danger No Delay, is frustrated because Kotonu, his expert driver, has given up the road after a traumatic accident. A compulsive impersonator, Samson at one point pretends to be Sergeant Burma, the war-hardened driver and spare-parts dealer who died when the brakes on his oil tanker failed. Suddenly remembering that imitation can conjure the dead, Samson begs forgiveness: “God forgive me! Oh God, forgive me. Just see, I have been fooling around pretending to be a dead man. Oh God I was only playing I hope you realize. I was only playing.”62 Calloused on his feet but tender in his conscience, Samson is a Jacob.

The Road chronicles one day, dawn to dusk, in and around the Professor’s spare-parts store. Most of the dialogue is spoken by layabouts—former and would-be drivers, touts, hemp smokers, local politicians, thugs-for-hire, and bribable policemen—in the all-male cast. Though their banter lightens the mood, Professor’s quest, his “part-psychic, part intellectual . . . grope towards the essence of death”63 remains unsettling. In its pursuit he sleeps in the church’s graveyard, ogles dying accident victims, and kidnaps a man who is neither dead nor alive. This man, Murano, becomes Professor’s palm-wine tapper and personal servant. He had been possessed by Ogun when Kotonu’s lorry knocked him down; thus, according to the logic of the play, he remains in suspension between life and death. In his transitional state Murano’s physical qualities—his hearing, strength, agility, and speed—are perfected, yet he lacks self-consciousness. Through his mute [End Page 68] opacity, Professor seeks access to death’s mysteries. Oyin Ogunba writes that Murano owes something to a popular Nigerian idea that some men who are determined to acquire great wealth or supernatural power do use fellow human beings as robots to achieve this end in much the same way as Professor uses the soul of Murano. Such a man usually kidnaps a boy or a youngman and installs him either in a grove or a dark corner of a house. The victim is put in a trance state between life and death which makes it easy for him to comune with spirits as well as the man who has arrested his soul. The man visits the robot at specific time of day or night (usually mid-day or mid-night) and the communion takes place.64

A reader can see that Soyinka is in fact drawing on this popular belief in creating the characters of this play. One can also discern, as some critics have, that Lazarus and Noah are earlier types of this same character.65

Like Lazarus and Isola, Professor wrestles. The second half of The Road builds to a life-or-death grapple between Say Tokyo Kid, a braggart driver Professor has irked, and Murano, Professor’s surrogate. Soyinka’s ambiguous stage direction chronicling this combat is worth quoting at length:

[The egungun66 has become thoroughly possessed. Say T., seeing this leaps at Professor, neatly wrests the gourd from him and smashes it against the far wall.

The figure is suddenly still. For some moments they both stand motionless, facing each other. Suddenly they lock. With no sound but hissed breaths they heave and gripe at each other in a tense elastic control.

Salubi watching intently, dips his hand in his pocket and brings out a clenched fist. Finding a moment when Say Tokyo is well placed, he slides an object along the bench and Professor, who has not looked at the combatants at all is attracted by this movement and leaps for his stick, too late. Say Tokyo grasps the knife as Professor’s stick hits Salubi hard on the wrist, plunges the knife in Professor’s back. Professor jerks upright, his face masked in pain. There is a dead stillness of several moments. Panicking suddenly, Say Tokyo attempts to pull the knife from Professor’s back. The still mask appears to come to life suddenly, lifts Say Tokyo in a swift movement up above his head, the knife out and in Say Tokyo’s hand, smashes him savagely on the bench. Say Tokyo tries to rise, rolls over onto the ground and clutches the train of the mask to him.

Professor’s final dare undoes him, just as Absalom’s had. In allowing Murano to regain a trance state in the mask he wore when he was hit, Professor [End Page 69] is seeking to discover if death’s revelation “must be total, or not at all.”68 Fittingly, Soyinka leaves the exact motives, and even the agency, of the deaths unclear. Say Tokyo stabs Professor with the knife of Salubi, who offers it, presumably, because Murano had scared him earlier in the play.

But why does Say Tokyo stab Professor and not Murano? Perhaps Say Tokyo targets Professor as a result of his lingering distrust, which he had voiced earlier. But perhaps Ogun’s devotee is reacting to Professor’s voyeuristic sacrilege in allowing Murano to become re-possessed to uncover the gods’ secrets. In any case, Professor’s use of Murano as a “robot” does not shield him, for his life has become bound to the one he controls. As Murano dissolves into “a heap of cloth and raffia,”69 Professor also dies, unrepentant. A similar ambiguity clouds Say Tokyo’s death. Does Professor, still in control of Murano, slam the driver down on the bench? Or does Ogun, now again in possession of Murano, use the wine tapper to kill his own disciple? These questions cannot be fully worked out. What seems clear is that Professor’ death points to a portal finally closing, to a door latching firmly shut.

An Authorial Montage

When Camwood on the Leaves, The Interpreters, and The Road are brought together, one perceives similar characters and repeated themes related to faith. In Camwood, Isola, a son coming of age, wrestles with his colonially entangled father. Though Isola seems hardened and thankless, Erinjobi recognizes his own errors and repents, seeking reconciliation. Meanwhile, Moji prays sacrificially for her son. In The Interpreters, young professionals drift from the faith of their parents while Christianity sprouts anew among the marginalized, urban poor. Among these poor a prophet saves a thief from death and grooms him to be an instrument of power. Noah does not succumb, however, either to Lazarus or to Kola (or to the seducer Joe Golder) but dies defending his soul and body from violation. Through this process, Lazarus’s religion cracks along its fault lines. In The Road the Professor, an apostate, has gathered to himself the “rejects of the road”70—thugs, drivers, touts, braggarts, and addicts. In his quest for final knowledge and ultimate control, he overreaches.

Through these characters and themes, one perceives a kind of authorial montage for Soyinka’s formative years. Isola, the hardened young man, blurs into Professor, the irreverent old man. Egbo, wrestling with his conscience, folds into Samson, horrified at having impersonated a man burned to death. Lazarus’s abducting a thief in order to build an empire merges with Professor’s stealing a dying celebrant to peer into the mysteries of spiritual migration. And Sekoni’s sculpture, depicting “[t]aut sinews . . . all elasticity and strain” fuses into opponents in The Road’s final scene squaring off “in a tense elastic control.”71 Such variations chronicle not only the increasing social awareness of Soyinka’s artistry but also the waning of his long, fertile dialogue with his parents’ faith.72 His remark in 1966 that writing The Road [End Page 70] felt like an exorcism thus seems more than a turn of phrase. Indeed, when we examine events in this period of his life we find confirmation of our surmise: in the protracted wrestle of Soyinka’s early career, The Road signifies a prayer finally being answered, a fight finally ending.

Soyinka’s early work is interesting not only in how it chronicles internal spiritual struggle but also in how it depicts and analyzes political tumult that gripped Nigeria in the 1960s. In 1966, two bloody coups, one in January and one in June, locked the nation in an intense power struggle. Perhaps more alarming, in pogroms in the Northern Region more than 30,000 Ibos were ruthlessly slaughtered and another 1.8 million were sent fleeing back to their eastern homeland with only the clothes on their backs.73 There was no apology for such killing, no protection for the traumatized refugees, and no acknowledgment that such atrocities had to stop. The second coup left incompetent leaders at the center and all but doomed the nation to civil war, which in fact broke out in July of 1967. These disturbances, however, including those in late 1965 in the Western Region in which Soyinka took part, had been decades in the making.

In the scramble for African colonies, the various tribes of what became Nigeria were subdued and united in the early twentieth century by Frederick Lugard. Lugard established the practice of indirect rule, which favored the customs of the northern Islamic tribes and gave them preferential treatment. Indeed, in the colonial constitutions of the 1940s and 1950s that prepared the way for self-rule, the Hausa and Fulani were repeatedly favored over the Yoruba, the Ibo, and the scores of smaller tribes within Nigeria’s borders. Meanwhile, northerners’ violence, as in the 1953 massacre of Ibos living in Kano, was routinely ignored.74

Thus, from the beginning the politics of independent Nigeria displayed a hard and violent edge. Soyinka’s 1958 play The Swamp Dwellers, in which a blind man from a northern beggars’ colony follows the Niger River south all the way to the swamps of the Ijaw searching for land to farm, imagines that peace can be achieved despite religious and tribal conflict. But as events unfolded, that dream seemed more and more remote. Gradually, Soyinka drifted into the tide of violence, too.

Intimations

In 1962 as part of the Mbari Club in Ibadan, Soyinka directed John Pepper Clark’s Song of a Goat. This play, in which he also played the lead role, featured on stage his sacrifice of a goat. Since A Dance of the Forests Soyinka had been developing his own ritual-intensive style, and in this production he insisted on putting the violence squarely before his audience. Lalage Bown recalls:

I remember very, very vividly the performance of J. P. Clark’s Song of a Goat. I think it was the first performance under the starlight. There was just this open courtyard, and then the smell of cooking floating [End Page 71] from next door. And there was no stage or anything but one end of the courtyard was used for the performance, and people had to nip in and out of the restaurant area when there were changes. The scene changes were lights going out and coming on—in those days the electricity supply more or less worked most of the time. Soyinka played the lead—panned in reviews—and directed. He sacrificed a real goat on stage, which doubtless had an interesting effect on Europeans’ dinners.75

In light of these directorial choices, the contemporaneously written scene near the end of The Interpreters takes on new meaning:

Sekoni’s exhibition had been opened in the afternoon to palm wine and roast meat from the black ram, and its congealing blood still stuck to Kola’s studio floor. Bandele had said, “What do you need the ram for? Haven’t you had your sacrifice?”76 And for a long moment, it seemed that Egbo would plunge the knife into his throat and they all stood, horrified, round the reek of blood and the convulsive vessel of the severed throat. But Egbo gave the knife a playful flick in his direction and a thin streak of blood marked Bandele across the shirt. Immediately the tension was loosened and laughter replaced the un-meaning moment of antagonism; even Bandele smiled, remembering that this, after all, was also for Sekoni.77

By the end of the novel, Egbo, reflecting some of Soyinka’s own attitudes, has become both pleased at bloodshed and indifferent to suffering.

Beginning in 1962, Samuel Akintola upset Yoruba politics by splitting from Obafemi Awolowo’s minority party to form a separate faction that allied itself with the leaders of the more powerful Northern Region. When Awolowo was jailed for planning a coup, Akintola became all the more autocratic. For the elections of November 1965 he used the northerners’ tactics of harassing and even killing opponents and stuffing ballot boxes, inciting many to take to the streets. In his account of the tumult in 1966 following the January 15 coup, Robert Wren writes:

[Soyinka] spent [the night of 15 January 1966] in his University of Lagos office with a canoe near the door, fearing apprehension as a “dissident intellectual.” He was a dissident intellectual, and (though he would deny it) a politician who held up a radio station at gunpoint to broadcast a speech attacking the government after a fraudulent election. Soyinka had fomented the thuggery that brought Nigeria stumbling over the edge of chaos, according to his claim to a role in the “strangulation of Ibadan.” It was part, he said, of the “revolt of the West” that he helped to mobilize, calling it a “people’s revolt.” That revolt, others have said, involved asking drivers of private autos if they favored “Awo” or “Akin”? If “Akin,” a Molotov cocktail finished the car, [End Page 72] driver, and passengers in a gorgeous inferno—the price of guessing wrong. Soyinka’s side favored Awo, other car burners favored Akin.78

Kayode Eso, a Yoruba who rose to Nigeria’s high court in 1965 and who presided at Soyinka’s trial in December 1965 for the radio station hold-up, testifies to the chaos in the Western Region’s capital, citing “Operation Wet E” as an extreme instance of this violence.79 In You Must Set Forth at Dawn Soyinka describes this campaign too, though he denies any involvement in killings, even of Akintola’s thugs:

A new expression entered the vocabulary of politics: Weti e!—literally, “Douse it” (with petrol, then set it on fire). The police had their tear-gas canisters, Mark IV rifles, pistols, and even the occasional submachine gun; the resisters had in the main just the locally fabricated Dane guns, some shotguns, machetes, and—improvisation. The recipe for a concoction invented by the farmers and used to deadly effect remains elusive still. When the police arrived for their raids in rural areas, the seats and backrests of their unguarded trucks were smeared or sprayed with this substance. Minutes after the raiders returned and regained their seats, the effect began—presumably by then the mystery unguent had percolated through their clothing, the process being accelerated, we learned, by the amount of sweat on their shirts. They would leap up and tear off their clothing, convulsed in pain. It was nothing I ever witnessed personally, and nobody seemed to have died from its effect, but it was narrated by the victims themselves, who described the effect as one of intense, sticky burning.80

Sorting out Soyinka’s precise role in Operation Weti e! may take years. What has been long confirmed, however, is that he held up the staff of Ibadan’s Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation on the night of the Western Region’s election to substitute his own tape for the pre-recorded speech of Samuel Akintola. Though he pled not guilty in his December 1965 trial and was acquitted due to conflicting evidence presented under oath,81 he has since owned holding up the NBC in You Must Set Forth at Dawn.

Soyinka’s ability to commit such violence—even in the service of social justice—speaks to borders having been crossed. These acts followed closely upon the penning and first performance of The Road, and I suggest that together his art and life herald a silencing and severing of his dialogue with his parents’ faith, which had lasted nearly a decade of his adult creative life.

Faith is indeed a mystery, if only because we are not the only agents in it. As individuals, we make choices that affect our ability to believe, but we neither always control nor perceive the range of our choices. The loss of faith, even when this is what is strongly desired, need not—and often does not—happen in an instant. Soyinka’s work from the years 1958 to 1965, when the faith he had denounced as an adolescent had not yet let him go, is arguably his richest. In this already-not-yet of his religious life, he pieced [End Page 73] together elements of his Christian upbringing in striking ways, ways that still teach and delight.

Timothy R. Vande Brake

Timothy R. Vande Brake is a Professor of English at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, New York, and among his publications are articles on Flannery O’Connor and Wole Soyinka. He holds degrees from Calvin University (BA), the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (MA), and the University of Alabama (PhD).

Notes

1. The best introduction to the depth and richness of Soyinka’s parents’ faith is his own memoir Aké (Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood, 1981 [reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989]).

Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/855441

I have posted this to let you all know that Wole Soyinka also used to be a Christian, in fact, a Christian fanatics when he was younger, according to this paper.

His early works were full of bible verses. He quoted from Genesis to Revelation!!

It took him time to wake up like most of us. Free yourselves from religion, including from indigenous religion. But if you insist that you must have a religion, then it must be African religion if you must remain in your right state of spiritual consciousness.

However, the part that Soyinka is yet to wake up is the realization that English is the language of Jesus. And until he wakes from that, he's not yet fully awake himself.

after leaving christianity his life have become better

This one na epistle to the church of where?

that old lunatic that disrespect Islam. he is coursed

Abeg can someone summarize.

This is very boring....

blaquebelle:
This one na epistle to the church of where?

to the church of agbado...


I'm glad I was just scrolling at a point I scrolled really fast .....how do u expect me to read this

If e like make e b herbalist wetin concern me

Too long to read abt founder of cultist

musicwriter:
I have posted this to let you all know that Wole Soyinka also used to be a Christian, in fact, a Christian fanatics when he was younger, according to this paper.

His early works were full of bible verses. He quoted from Genesis to Revelation!!

It took him time to wake up like most of us. Free yourselves from religion, including from indigenous religion. But if you insist that you must have a religion, then it must be African religion if you must remain in your right state of spiritual consciousness.

However, the part that Soyinka is yet to wake up is the realization that English is the language of Jesus. And until he wakes from that, he's not yet fully awake himself.

English the language of Jesus? Really.
It's obvious you are unfortunately still in deep slumber and yet deceived that you are awake.

Who go help summarise

Someone should help here. Since Op doesn't know how to summarize a long writeup like this

dhardline:


English the language of Jesus? Really.
It's obvious you are unfortunately still in deep slumber and yet deceived that you are awake.

The three things given to all colonized people to enslave them are:-
1. Language
2. Education
3. Religion

All colonized people got the same package, so it doesn't matter which you or Soyinka prefer or love, you're still a slave choosing what they gave you to participate in.

Fool. You just go copy a full novel post here. Well the dementia patient (Soyinka) is an animal simple

musicwriter:


The three things given to all colonized people to enslave them are:-
1. Language
2. Education
3. Religion

All colonized people got the same package, so it doesn't matter which you or Soyinka prefer or love, you're still a slave choosing what they gave you to participate in.

You have invented nothing, makes you a slave to all the inventors. Your ideas are not original, it makes you a slave to the author of those ideas. You are a composition/slave off all that has impacted you right from birth. The thought and grandiose feeling that you are enlightened and yet muddle in borrowed information that has in no way liberated your thought to see that we are first of all, all slaves to our passions and sinful nature tells me all I need to know about you.

dhardline:

You have invented nothing, makes you a slave to all the inventors. Your ideas are not original, it makes you a slave to the author of those ideas. You are a composition/slave off all that has impacted you right from birth. The thought and grandiose feeling that you are enlightened and yet muddle in borrowed information that has in no way liberated your thought to see that we are first of all, all slaves to our passions and sinful nature tells me all I need to know about you.

I can see you're a Christian, which explains why you can't argue rationally but jumping from one talk to the other all at the same time....... even contradicting yourself. If you didn't create nor invent anything, doesn't that tell you something is wrong? I've long stopped engaging in such unfruitful discussion and people.

And no, you don't have sin. The concept of sin was sold to you so you may get your redemption from their God Jesus, not from someone else. Enjoy your slavery but let others go.

musicwriter:


I can see you're a Christian, which explains why you can't argue rationally but jumping from one talk to the other all at the same time....... even contradicting yourself. If you didn't create nor invent anything, doesn't that tell you something is wrong? I've long stopped engaging in such unfruitful discussion and people.

And no, you don't have sin. The concept of sin was sold to you so you may get your redemption from their God Jesus, not from someone else. Enjoy your slavery but let others go.

I rather be a slave to Christ than to vain imaginations and please note, I was not arguing with you but only showing you that your thought process is off the line. Will you equally endorse 'Abaobaku' which is our traditions or continue in the 'killing of twins' because it was normal to the so called tradition before the colonialist came. The thing is that you do not understand the dept of the evil of man's heart or since there is no concept of sin will be be glad if your female relative is raped and murdered by a person who does not see it as a sin but just doing Them a favor? Think man. Think.

dhardline:


I rather be a slave to Christ than to vain imaginations and please note, I was not arguing with you but only showing you that your thought process is off the line. Will you equally endorse 'Abaobaku' which is our traditions or continue in the 'killing of twins' because it was normal to the so called tradition before the colonialist came. The thing is that you do not understand the dept of the evil of man's heart or since there is no concept of sin will be be glad if your female relative is raped and murdered by a person who does not see it as a sin but just doing Them a favor? Think man. Think.

Your bible supported slavery, even made up laws guiding masters and slaves to live in harmony. But of course you don't think much of it due to indoctrination. A loving god that cast you to everlasting hell if you don't follow or worship him is not loving, it's manipulation. You are still a Christian because you are afraid of going to hell, not because you really care about god. That's the carrot and stick technique, used for mass control. It takes intelligence to break free, unfortunately there are more ignorance in the world compared to the few intelligent ones.

The people who gave us education enslaved us, how about the most educated of our people? They did the same thing too. Only a fool expect perfection from man and anything from man.

None of this spirit of "condemn this condemn that" really did any good than condemn, they can't build anything of their own with the resources at their disposal, because their mind is roving around to condemn.

In the core Yoruba tradition, our fathers says "ori ile ti mo maa wo sun re" meaning this is the surface of the land I will enter in and sleep". What is the meaning of this to defenders of Yoruba tradition?

Our fathers says "ori yeye ni mogun, taise lopo" (many have been beheaded at the altar of Ogun, mostly innocents), who will revisit this issues and correct them? Is sin deserve to be atoned for? If not what exactly is sacrifice meant to do?

And if our fathers called the dead, "Oloogbe" (one who sleeps) is it the universal religion that formulated these concepts of existence and hereafter for them? Those who choose to be Christian were not fools, they are still in the ambient of Yoruba tradition.

What do we get from the victim mentality? Not much. None of them could do anything with what they were given, except to destroy what they can't explain, just to exercise authority here and there. Stop the condemnation of others, it never built your own.

AndroidAI:


Your bible supported slavery, even made up laws guiding masters and slaves to live in harmony. But of course you don't think much of it due to indoctrination. A loving god that cast you to everlasting hell if you don't follow or worship him is not loving, it's manipulation. You are still a Christian because you are afraid of going to hell, not because you really care about god. That's the carrot and stick technique, used for mass control. It takes intelligence to break free, unfortunately there are more ignorance in the world compared to the few intelligent ones.

Unfortunately you are wrong again. I am not a Christian because I am afraid of going to hell, with the enlightenment I have received so far from the love of Jesus Christ, Give me God anytime any day even in hell and I will be satisfied. You speak of slavery but you forget that Africans equally had slaves. For goodness sakes we have what is know as 'osu' ín the east. Go read about them. The level of exploitation going on in China(which happens to have a large amount of non Christians) is worse than any other place in the world. What form of slavery is worse than making a man serve you all His years then retire him with little or nothing to show(employment) atleast the bibles slavery made is so that after some years the slave is set free with some settlement. The problem now is that what you think of Christianity is wrong because you have not seen the light. Forget what you have been taught from Childhood or what you see from televangelist etc. Seek God for yourself and you will understand. God willing.

dhardline:


Unfortunately you are wrong again. I am not a Christian because I am afraid of going to hell, with the enlightenment I have received so far from the love of Jesus Christ, Give me God anytime any day even in hell and I will be satisfied. You speak of slavery but you forget that Africans equally had slaves. For goodness sakes we have what is know as 'osu' ín the east. Go read about them. The level of exploitation going on in China(which happens to have a large amount of non Christians) is worse than any other place in the world. What form of slavery is worse than making a man serve you all His years then retire him with little or nothing to show(employment) atleast the bibles slavery made is so that after some years the slave is set free with some settlement. The problem now is that what you think of Christianity is wrong because you have not seen the light. Forget what you have been taught from Childhood or what you see from televangelist etc. Seek God for yourself and you will understand. God willing.

You are gone. There's no longer hope for you. A goner you are. Beyond redemption. That is what indoctrination does. My sympathy is with you.

AndroidAI:


You are gone. There's no longer hope for you. A goner you are. Beyond redemption. That is what indoctrination does. My sympathy is with you.

Like I said earlier. I rather be gone this way than be gone in the way you are headed. I really wish you have an idea of what indoctrination means. You'd be shocked at how deep you are in it.

dhardline:


Like I said earlier. I rather be gone this way than be gone in the way you are headed. I really wish you have an idea of what indoctrination means. You'd be shocked at how deep you are in it.

Perfect, equilibrium.

You don't conclude the viewpoint of anyone as hopeless when you have your own viewpoint too in equal and opposite direction.

dhardline:


Like I said earlier. I rather be gone this way than be gone in the way you are headed. I really wish you have an idea of what indoctrination means. You'd be shocked at how deep you are in it.

Where am I heading? To hell? To everlasting suffering if I don't believe in God? I thought you said hell isn't the reason you believe, but you just proved that it is. You are a Christian because you were programmed from birth by your christian parents or society. If you were born in Pakistan, you probably would have become a jihadist with bombs strapped on your chest and ready to die for Allah Dey play

dhardline:


Unfortunately you are wrong again. I am not a Christian because I am afraid of going to hell, with the enlightenment I have received so far from the love of Jesus Christ, Give me God anytime any day even in hell and I will be satisfied. You speak of slavery but you forget that Africans equally had slaves. For goodness sakes we have what is know as 'osu' ín the east. Go read about them. The level of exploitation going on in China(which happens to have a large amount of non Christians) is worse than any other place in the world. What form of slavery is worse than making a man serve you all His years then retire him with little or nothing to show(employment) atleast the bibles slavery made is so that after some years the slave is set free with some settlement. The problem now is that what you think of Christianity is wrong because you have not seen the light. Forget what you have been taught from Childhood or what you see from televangelist etc. Seek God for yourself and you will understand. God willing.

Stop lying agianst China.

AndroidAI:


Where am I heading? To hell? To everlasting suffering if I don't believe in God? I thought you said hell isn't the reason you believe, but you just proved that it is. You are a Christian because you were programmed from birth by your christian parents or society. If you were born in Pakistan, you probably would have become a jihadist with bombs strapped on your chest and ready to die for Allah Dey play

If you do not repent and believe in Jesus Christ then you have chosen hell. Even the Bible tells us that we are all heading there but a way of escape has been made for those who decide to escape. So the point is that hell is what we all deserve. Go to Pakistan/do a little research and see the level of conversions going on there and other Muslim countries and they willing to die for the gospel they have received. You think majority of Nigerians are Christians because we have a lot of churches right! Well wrong. I was born in a Christian home went to church for over 20 years but if I had died then I'd be cast away. So going to Church does not in any way make you a Christian. Renew your mind.