The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
While most human beings are content to live their lives by each day, others do more, they literally perform their lives.
The Nigerian playwright, novelist and public intellectual Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka is one such person for whom every occasion is an artistic production and dramatic event. Soyinka is not only a famous dramatist but he is also spectacularly dramatic.
As a visiting distinguished professor at the University of Johannesburg, on 22 September he was required to deliver his inaugural public lecture which he meaningfully titled The Long Walk to Mandeland.
And he dramatically refused to wear the usual academic gown, opting to remain in his colourful apparels that he had on as if the first wind will fly with them.
Mandeland is a fantastic and poetic play with the historical and political promises of Nelson Mandela that are presently going unfulfilled and continue to be negated as South Africa and Africa at large sink further into despair and pessimism.
If there is any truth to the allegation by Ali Mazrui that his intellectual life was “a long debate” of a lifetime, there should be some truth also that Soyinka’s life is a long disagreement, he is at his best and punchiest when he disputes the arguments of others, no matter how grand the arguments are.
Who else but Wole Soyinka would challenge such a powerful idea as Negritude at its very best in the sixties and the seventies? Successive Nigerian dictators and military rulers were called names and described as “drooling imbeciles” by a thorny mouthed Soyinka who was in turn severally detained and harassed by security agents, until he went to exile.
Upon the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency he publicly renounced his American green card and promised to leave the so called land of the free. At eighty two years strong, Soyinka approached the stage at UJ with military gait, walking with a spring and casting a ceremonial air.
This is the man who has asked to be called “disciple of Ogun,” a follower of the Yoruba god of creativity. His now snow white Afro that he typically wears is a spectacle of its own, probably a sign of some unique wisdom that the African griot has gathered over many years.
Professor Chris Landsberg, the master of ceremony broke the ice of the fully packed wall with a strange disclosure, over lunch earlier in the day, Soyinka had pulled him aside and impatiently asked if he could discreetly be supplied with some skokijaan.
What is to us in Zimbabwe tototo or kachasu is what South Africans called Skokijaan during the homeland days of apartheid when natives were banned from drinking alcoholic beverages. skokijaan is a kill me quick and potent brew. Landsberg’s careless whistle blowing victory did not last long.
When he took to the podium, Soyinka expressed light-hearted sadness at the ignorance of the professor, he was looking for skokijaan the word that he wanted to use in a poem, not the beer. As a worker in words he is a word collector, he said, the beer is for addicts like Chris Landsberg, and thus the case was closed and the lecture began.
The Importance of Good News in Africa
He began by elaborating on his “career in controversy” and ended by warning South Africans of their fault of xenophobia, futile hatred of the other, that does not solve the problem of drug trafficking that affects both the Nigerian and South African economy.
In all the darkness Africans should seek the good news and shun the increasing tribe of Afro-pessimists that are making profit out of insulting Africa for the pleasure of foreign audiences. African intellectuals should belong to the world, as Edward Said pronounced, they should be prepared to ask embarrassing questions and to publicly embarrass themselves seeking important truths. The African road to Mandeland is truly narrowing but walk still we must!
The African worldview should be the starting point of anyone that wants to think and write about Africa. Africa might, after all, be a true sleeping giant, who but the intellectuals of Africa, the poets and the griots should kick the giant to activity and productivity?
Soyinka called himself a closet Afro-pessimist of a kind, one who will not dramatise his unhappiness with Africa for the joy of Europeans and Americans, the enslavers and the colonisers. The audience went into true stitches when he described how he warned his friend, a man that he has called a human institution, Bishop Desmond that his true belief was love for humanity and not the fuss with Jesus.
Urgently, Soyinka demanded a return to the true African personality. He called prophets like TB Joshua magicians and snake charmers that must not waste Africa’s time. Ritual killings, kidnappings and rape must not be allowed to define Africa. The witchcraft theme, he said, has painfully returned to haunt Africa as there is presently a thin line between the magical and the real in the continent. Importantly Soyinka noted that Africa still needs liberation a goal that many wise heads want to pretend is old fashioned. African peoples and countries should stop laughing at each other as they are all victims of Empire that will not escape suffering: The stick that is used to beat the junior wife is always there to beat the senior wife, he said proverbially.
One African laughing at another is wasting time as misery is coming to him too. After worrying about the African collective psyche, to the relief of many, Soyinka said true churches and mosques must rise and take the space of the present magicians and pretenders. Joseph Kony, Boko Haram and Alshabaab should not be allowed to give religion and faith a bad name with their Satanism.
In this point Soyinka came close to the decolonial argument that there is a difference between Christianity, the religion of liberation, and Christendom the religion of domination that is a kingdom of this, as Enrique Dussel has stated.
The Road to Mandeland
It is not going to be easy. The devil hides in presidential palaces, in the schools, churches, mosques and market places of Africa. Too many African thinkers and even imperialist intellectuals have thought and written of the African problem of leadership.
The problem, Soyinka dramatically claimed, is in the followership, what goes and comes out of the heads of African leaders comes from the kind of people that follow and support them. Evil followership produces evil leadership and African villagers should not be spared scrutiny and critical examination for the kind of leadership that they have shaped in Africa.
There is a sad development in Africa where war has begun to be glamorised, where leaders and their dangerous followers, seem not to see any alternative to war.
One is a warrior or one does not exist at all. Colonial borders in Africa are not a simple issue, they are complex as they have become naturalised. In the real liberated Africa colonial borders should not exist, if they are needed at all, they should be made more humane. Mandeland exists as a vision and a zone somewhere, it is a utopia worth the while.
Finally Soyinka wondered loudly why the struggle against apartheid is taking so long when South Africa has so much fine wine and fine people. As it would happen, during question time an understandably excited and star-struck student asked what exactly he can do to be like Wole Soyinka, which can be such a high school question, sternly Soyinka warned his fan never to try it at home, “to be Wole Soyinka, I don’t advise it!” in a dramatic baritone voice of one that is confident even of the nonsense he might say.
Soyinka is a tyrant of presence as he colonises space and captures the air with a voice that he evidently trained himself in overtime throughout his spectacular life. Human beings, even if they are talented Nigerians, simply do not speak like that. Soyinka speaks like a man who wished to be a god.
The type that would say let there be water and water gushes out. Some ladies in the throng, supposed experts in looks, shapes and sizes, what is called “hotness” in South African lingo were heard whispering about Soyinka’s killer looks, I and other self-respecting men looked aside in pity, Soyinka looks like a poem.
He could have come and stood there without saying a word, his message would have been received all the same. Like Valentin Mudimbe the beautifully aged Congolese philosopher, Soyinka will end up being invited to conferences not to speak philosophy but to be philosophy itself and lift up the aesthetics of the events. Mudimbe no longer speaks, if he does, he speaks to himself in his own personal language, but is still the most sought after keynote speaker in conferences of the world.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria in South Africa:[email protected]
