₦airaland Forum

LegendHero:
Below is his speech when he received the Nobel Prize in December 8, 1986. His speech addressed brutality meted against Africans and how he refused to come on stage as an actor for a performance in a London theater because the role he was given to play was a depiction of the atrocities committed by white men at Hola Camp, Kenya where 11 detainees were beaten to death by camp officers and warders. He refused to participate because he was assigned the role of a camp guard (one of the killer), and he will be part of the people to beat the Africans to death. So he refused!

The speech is long but you can read more of it on the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/lecture/

Title: This Past Must Address Its Present
A rather curious scene, unscripted, once took place in the wings of a London theater at the same time as the scheduled performance was being presented on the actual stage, before an audience. What happened was this: an actor refused to come on stage for his allocated role. Action was suspended. A fellow actor tried to persuade him to emerge, but he stubbornly shook his head. Then a struggle ensued. The second actor had hoped that, by suddenly exposing the reluctant actor to the audience in full glare of the spotlight, he would have no choice but to rejoin the cast. And so he tried to take the delinquent actor by surprise, pulling him suddenly towards the stage. He did not fully succeed, so a brief but untidy struggle began. The unwilling actor was completely taken aback and deeply embarrassed – some of that tussle was quite visible to a part of the audience.

The performance itself, it should be explained, was an improvisation around an incident. This meant that the actors were free, within the convention of the performance – to stop, re-work any part they wished, invite members of the audience on stage, assign roles and change costumes in full view of the audience. They therefore could also dramatize their wish to have that uncooperative actor join them – which they did with gusto. That actor had indeed left the stage before the contentious scene began. He had served notice during rehearsals that he would not participate in it. In the end, he had his way, but the incident proved very troubling to him for weeks afterwards. He found himself compelled to puzzle out this clash in attitudes between himself and his fellow writers and performers. He experienced, on the one hand, an intense rage that he had been made to appear incapable of confronting a stark reality, made to appear to suffer from interpretative coyness, to seem inhibited by a cruel reality or perhaps to carry his emotional involvement with an event so far as to interfere with his professional will. Of course, he knew that it was none of these things. The truth was far simpler. Unlike his colleagues together with whom he shared, unquestionably, the same political attitude towards the event which was being represented, he found the mode of presentation at war with the ugliness it tried to convey, creating an intense disquiet about his very presence on that stage, in that place, before an audience whom he considered collectively responsible for that dehumanizing actuality.

And now let us remove some of the mystery and make that incident a little more concrete. The scene was the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1958. It was one of those Sunday nights which were given to experimentation, an innovation of that remarkable theatre manager-director, George Devine, whose creative nurturing radicalised British theatre of that period and produced later icons like John Osborne, N. F. Simpson, Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, John Arden, etc., and even forced the then conservative British palate to sample stylistic and ideological pariahs like Samuel Beckett and Bertold Brecht. On this particular occasion, the evening was devoted to a form of “living” theatre, and the main fare was titled ELEVEN MEN DEAD AT HOLA. The actors were not all professional actors; indeed they were mostly writers who jointly created and performed these dramatic pieces. Those with a long political memory may recall what took place at Hola Camp, Kenya, during the Mau-Mau Liberation struggle. The British Colonial power believed that the Mau-Mau could be smashed by herding Kenyans into special camps, trying to separate the hard cases, the mere suspects and the potential recruits – oh, they had it all neatly worked out. One such camp was Hola Camp and the incident involved the death of eleven of the detainees who were simply beaten to death by camp officers and warders. The usual enquiry set up, and it was indeed the Report which provided the main text on which the performance was based.

We need now only to identify the reluctant actor, if you have not guessed that by now – it was none other than this speaker. I recall the occasion as vividly as actors are wont to recollect for ever and ever the frightening moment of a blackout, when the lines are not only forgotten but even the moment in the play. The role which I had been assigned was that of a camp guard, one of the killers. We were equipped with huge night-sticks and, while a narrator read the testimony of one of the guards, our task was to raise the cudgels slowly and, almost ritualistically, bring them down on the necks and shoulders of the prisoners, under orders of the white camp officers. A surreal scene. Even in rehearsals, it was clear that the end product would be a surrealist tableau. The Narrator at a lectern under a spot; a dispassionate reading, deliberately clinical, letting the stark facts reveal the states of mind of torturers and victims. A small ring of white officers, armed. One seizes a cudgel from one of the warders to demonstrate how to beat a human being without leaving visible marks. Then the innermost clump of detainees, their only weapon – non-violence. They had taken their decision to go on strike, refused to go to work unless they obtained better camp conditions. So they squatted on the ground and refused to move, locked their hands behind their knees in silent defiance. Orders were given. The inner ring of guards, the blacks, moved in, lifted the bodies by hooking their hands underneath the armpits of the detainees, carried them like toads in a state of petrification to one side, divided them in groups.

The faces of the victims are impassive; they are resolved to offer no resistance. The beatings begin: one to the left side, then the back, the arms – right, left, front, back. Rhythmically. The cudgels swing in unison. The faces of the white guards glow with professional satisfaction, their arms gesture languidly from time to time, suggesting it is time to shift to the next batch, or beat a little more severely on the neglected side. In terms of images, a fluid, near balletic scene.

Then the contrast, the earlier official version, enacting how the prisoners were supposed to have died. This claimed that the prisoners had collapsed, that they died after drinking from a poisoned water supply. So we staged that also. The prisoners filed to the water waggon, gasping with thirst. After the first two or three had drunk and commenced writhing with pain, these humane guards rushed to stop the others but no, they were already wild with thirst, fought their way past salvation and drank greedily the same source. The groans spread from one to the other, the writhing, the collapse – then agonized deaths. That was the version of the camp governors.
The motif was simple enough, the theatrical format a tried and tested one, faithful to a particular convention. What then was the problem? It was one, I believe, that affects most writers. When is playacting rebuked by reality? When is fictionalizing presumptuous? What happens after playacting? One of the remarkable properties of the particular theatrical convention I have just described is that it gives off a strong odour of perenniality, that feeling of “I have been here before”. “I have been a witness to this.” “The past enacts its presence.” In such an instance, that sense of perenniality can serve both as exorcism, a certificate of release or indeed – especially for the audience, a soporific. We must bear in mind that at the time of presentation, and to the major part of that audience, every death of a freedom fighter was a notch on a gun, the death of a fiend, an animal, a bestial mutant, not the martyrdom of a patriot.

Read the full speech on the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/lecture/

LegendHero:
Below is his speech when he received the Nobel Prize in December 8, 1986. His speech addressed brutality meted against Africans and how he refused to come on stage as an actor for a performance in a London theater because the role he was given to play was a depiction of the atrocities committed by white men at Hola Camp, Kenya where 11 detainees were beaten to death by camp officers and warders. He refused to participate because he was assigned the role of a camp guard (one of the killer), and he will be part of the people to beat the Africans to death. So he refused!

The speech is long but you can read more of it on the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/lecture/

Title: This Past Must Address Its Present
A rather curious scene, unscripted, once took place in the wings of a London theater at the same time as the scheduled performance was being presented on the actual stage, before an audience. What happened was this: an actor refused to come on stage for his allocated role. Action was suspended. A fellow actor tried to persuade him to emerge, but he stubbornly shook his head. Then a struggle ensued. The second actor had hoped that, by suddenly exposing the reluctant actor to the audience in full glare of the spotlight, he would have no choice but to rejoin the cast. And so he tried to take the delinquent actor by surprise, pulling him suddenly towards the stage. He did not fully succeed, so a brief but untidy struggle began. The unwilling actor was completely taken aback and deeply embarrassed – some of that tussle was quite visible to a part of the audience.

The performance itself, it should be explained, was an improvisation around an incident. This meant that the actors were free, within the convention of the performance – to stop, re-work any part they wished, invite members of the audience on stage, assign roles and change costumes in full view of the audience. They therefore could also dramatize their wish to have that uncooperative actor join them – which they did with gusto. That actor had indeed left the stage before the contentious scene began. He had served notice during rehearsals that he would not participate in it. In the end, he had his way, but the incident proved very troubling to him for weeks afterwards. He found himself compelled to puzzle out this clash in attitudes between himself and his fellow writers and performers. He experienced, on the one hand, an intense rage that he had been made to appear incapable of confronting a stark reality, made to appear to suffer from interpretative coyness, to seem inhibited by a cruel reality or perhaps to carry his emotional involvement with an event so far as to interfere with his professional will. Of course, he knew that it was none of these things. The truth was far simpler. Unlike his colleagues together with whom he shared, unquestionably, the same political attitude towards the event which was being represented, he found the mode of presentation at war with the ugliness it tried to convey, creating an intense disquiet about his very presence on that stage, in that place, before an audience whom he considered collectively responsible for that dehumanizing actuality.

And now let us remove some of the mystery and make that incident a little more concrete. The scene was the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1958. It was one of those Sunday nights which were given to experimentation, an innovation of that remarkable theatre manager-director, George Devine, whose creative nurturing radicalised British theatre of that period and produced later icons like John Osborne, N. F. Simpson, Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, John Arden, etc., and even forced the then conservative British palate to sample stylistic and ideological pariahs like Samuel Beckett and Bertold Brecht. On this particular occasion, the evening was devoted to a form of “living” theatre, and the main fare was titled ELEVEN MEN DEAD AT HOLA. The actors were not all professional actors; indeed they were mostly writers who jointly created and performed these dramatic pieces. Those with a long political memory may recall what took place at Hola Camp, Kenya, during the Mau-Mau Liberation struggle. The British Colonial power believed that the Mau-Mau could be smashed by herding Kenyans into special camps, trying to separate the hard cases, the mere suspects and the potential recruits – oh, they had it all neatly worked out. One such camp was Hola Camp and the incident involved the death of eleven of the detainees who were simply beaten to death by camp officers and warders. The usual enquiry set up, and it was indeed the Report which provided the main text on which the performance was based.

We need now only to identify the reluctant actor, if you have not guessed that by now – it was none other than this speaker. I recall the occasion as vividly as actors are wont to recollect for ever and ever the frightening moment of a blackout, when the lines are not only forgotten but even the moment in the play. The role which I had been assigned was that of a camp guard, one of the killers. We were equipped with huge night-sticks and, while a narrator read the testimony of one of the guards, our task was to raise the cudgels slowly and, almost ritualistically, bring them down on the necks and shoulders of the prisoners, under orders of the white camp officers. A surreal scene. Even in rehearsals, it was clear that the end product would be a surrealist tableau. The Narrator at a lectern under a spot; a dispassionate reading, deliberately clinical, letting the stark facts reveal the states of mind of torturers and victims. A small ring of white officers, armed. One seizes a cudgel from one of the warders to demonstrate how to beat a human being without leaving visible marks. Then the innermost clump of detainees, their only weapon – non-violence. They had taken their decision to go on strike, refused to go to work unless they obtained better camp conditions. So they squatted on the ground and refused to move, locked their hands behind their knees in silent defiance. Orders were given. The inner ring of guards, the blacks, moved in, lifted the bodies by hooking their hands underneath the armpits of the detainees, carried them like toads in a state of petrification to one side, divided them in groups.

The faces of the victims are impassive; they are resolved to offer no resistance. The beatings begin: one to the left side, then the back, the arms – right, left, front, back. Rhythmically. The cudgels swing in unison. The faces of the white guards glow with professional satisfaction, their arms gesture languidly from time to time, suggesting it is time to shift to the next batch, or beat a little more severely on the neglected side. In terms of images, a fluid, near balletic scene.

Then the contrast, the earlier official version, enacting how the prisoners were supposed to have died. This claimed that the prisoners had collapsed, that they died after drinking from a poisoned water supply. So we staged that also. The prisoners filed to the water waggon, gasping with thirst. After the first two or three had drunk and commenced writhing with pain, these humane guards rushed to stop the others but no, they were already wild with thirst, fought their way past salvation and drank greedily the same source. The groans spread from one to the other, the writhing, the collapse – then agonized deaths. That was the version of the camp governors.
The motif was simple enough, the theatrical format a tried and tested one, faithful to a particular convention. What then was the problem? It was one, I believe, that affects most writers. When is playacting rebuked by reality? When is fictionalizing presumptuous? What happens after playacting? One of the remarkable properties of the particular theatrical convention I have just described is that it gives off a strong odour of perenniality, that feeling of “I have been here before”. “I have been a witness to this.” “The past enacts its presence.” In such an instance, that sense of perenniality can serve both as exorcism, a certificate of release or indeed – especially for the audience, a soporific. We must bear in mind that at the time of presentation, and to the major part of that audience, every death of a freedom fighter was a notch on a gun, the death of a fiend, an animal, a bestial mutant, not the martyrdom of a patriot.

Read the full speech on the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/lecture/

TANTUMERGO007:
Useless old full

BlackfireX:
The good ,the bad the ugly.




The man that introduced cultism to Nigeria's higher institution.



The man that supported Biafra.


The man that helped brought buhari to power.

ProfOlu:
Happy birthday Prof

ProfOlu:
Happy birthday to professor Sole Soyinka. the celebrated noble laureate, an icon, and a respected personality all over the world. He is really a great man, who has turned around the world. Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, a proud son of Nigeria, African statesman and global citizen, is 86 years old (13 July 2020).

ProfOlu:
Happy birthday to professor Sole Soyinka. the celebrated noble laureate, an icon, and a respected personality all over the world. He is really a great man, who has turned around the world. Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, a proud son of Nigeria, African statesman and global citizen, is 86 years old (13 July 2020).

ProfOlu:
Happy birthday to professor Sole Soyinka. the celebrated noble laureate, an icon, and a respected personality all over the world. He is really a great man, who has turned around the world. Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, a proud son of Nigeria, African statesman and global citizen, is 86 years old (13 July 2020).

Officialgarri:
Born Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka on the 13th July, 1934 into a Yoruba family—Remo—in the city of Abeokuta, Ogun State. He is a playwright, poet, essayist and an activist.
Uncommon Facts about him:

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.

18.
Seun, I learnt you are also an alumni of Obafemi Awolowo University. Please take note that the Ori-Olokun that is found in the Museum is only a travesty. It is also quite unfortunate that the same fake image is used as the University Crest while the real artifact remains somewhere close to London

Source: His books, majorly his personal memoirs
Lalasticlala, I spent my weekend preparing this . Kindly let me take your position in posting this one Birthday for today
I'm currently sipping from a bottle of Heineken in honour!

Officialgarri:
Born Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka on the 13th July, 1934 into a Yoruba family—Remo—in the city of Abeokuta, Ogun State. He is a playwright, poet, essayist and an activist.
Uncommon Facts about him:

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.

18.
Seun, I learnt you are also an alumni of Obafemi Awolowo University. Please take note that the Ori-Olokun that is found in the Museum is only a travesty. It is also quite unfortunate that the same fake image is used as the University Crest while the real artifact remains somewhere close to London

Source: His books, majorly his personal memoirs
Lalasticlala, I spent my weekend preparing this . Kindly let me take your position in posting this one Birthday for today
I'm currently sipping from a bottle of Heineken in honour!

Officialgarri:
Born Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka on the 13th July, 1934 into a Yoruba family—Remo—in the city of Abeokuta, Ogun State. He is a playwright, poet, essayist and an activist.
Uncommon Facts about him:

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.

18.
Seun, I learnt you are also an alumni of Obafemi Awolowo University. Please take note that the Ori-Olokun that is found in the Museum is only a travesty. It is also quite unfortunate that the same fake image is used as the University Crest while the real artifact remains somewhere close to London

Source: His books, majorly his personal memoirs
Lalasticlala, I spent my weekend preparing this . Kindly let me take your position in posting this one Birthday for today
I'm currently sipping from a bottle of Heineken in honour!

Billygee2u:
OP ,this your post supposed to grace front-page,but it's unfortunate it won't because , Nairalander's mods, are biased demons

searchMaster:
Lolz. Are you judging from your grade and your present occupation? OR you know one drop out who is terrorizing the nation and think he's controlling the economy?

While the first class graduates become the Professionals, they can also venture into any of the other items you assigned to others?

What stops a first class graduate from owning a business or contesting in an election? As a matter of fact, I know some first class graduates who are successful entrepreneurs. Also, someone cannot loose election simply because he finished with a first class degree. NEVER!

What people end up becoming isn't much a function of their final grade, but passion and determination.

mystery22:
The late buhari had a lot of wrinkles..jubril has no wrinkles..no matter how rich you are a man in his latest 80s must have wrinkles..