Soyinka Taught Me Traditional Society is Not Evil

"If Soyinka did anything for me, the most important thing he did was to [wean] me off the Christian notion that the traditional society is evil – evil in the sense that if you were not a Christian, whatever else you believe in is considered not so moral or straightforward. Everything about tradition which many people saw rather in distracted ways, Soyinka saw as a part of a very well worked out way of seeing the world and the mystic truth in Soyinka’s analysis of society enabled you to see that traditional society had a philosophical underpinning that was helpful in knowing the ways the world worked. I have my own decision on Soyinka’s position; his not allowing himself to be submerged by the grammar of Christian denunciations and the general Islamic assault on so-called paganism help me relate to my two families. My maternal grandfather was a Christian, who once they abandoned the ‘fetish ways’ of the traditional society, adopted Christianity without looking back. My father’s family, first because my father was a motor mechanic, had to be an Ogun worshipper and if you are an Ogun worshipper, you are required to observe tenets that derive powers from mythology and also indicate ways of treating your fellow human beings in a manner that helps a sense of collectivity in society. Myth making is therefore at the centre of the way Soyinka views traditional society. I have managed because I did not quite accept all the hoopla about Christianity; I learnt to see the interconnection between what was Christianity and what was supposedly traditional religion. All religions are the same – they are based on some form of worship which is to say that you have faith in what those who came before you had seen and done. … Soyinka was a strong critic of the religious ways of doing things. … [He] actually did something out of the usual because he took traditional religion on its face value. He took a philosophy out of it which may discount certain material elements but stuck to its core and its core is that the life we live can be understood by the knowledge that has been condensed from the prehistory to the present and that if we understand them well, we could live a good life in lot of ways."

Odia Ofeimun

Punchng.com, March 22, 2020

Wole Soyinka: From Ake to the World Stage

Soyinka, Language, and Ede Yoruba

TundeKelani.tv

How Achebe Saved Me From James Hardley Chase

(By OkeyNdibe)--Two Saturdays ago, I had the privilege of giving a keynote at an international conference organized at the Senate House of the University of London to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. 

Okey Ndibe The two-day celebration was an impressive gathering of scholars who have devoted time to the study and explication of Achebe’s work as a novelist, cultural activist and intellectual. Among the luminaries who offered stimulating papers were John Gikandi of Princeton University, Harry Garuba (who traveled from his South African location), and T. Vijay Kumar. The first day of the conference, Femi Osofisan, a polyglot who is at once an incisive scholar, extraordinary dramatist, and novelist directed a dramatization of Arrow that brought home in a powerful way the millenarian tension in Achebe’s most important—even if not most well known—fictive work. Akachi Ezeigbo, a novelist and professor at the University of Lagos, capped off the second and final day of the event by performing an Igbo dirge for Achebe. 

The two-day conference was altogether moving. The brilliance of many of the presentations was matched by the conference’s festive air. It all showed the potential power of rich, deep cultural production. In their wide-ranging, multidisciplinary engagement with Achebe’s grandest novel, several presenters sought to underscore how literary creativity can illuminate a people’s social experience and embody a broad range of their dreams.

To Everything, Its Place

Soyinka

(Wole Soyinka)--The issue, I understand, is the flaunting of religious markers in public educational institutions. Let me begin by confessing that I envy the French to whom those choices have only been recently thrust to the fore – they have always been with us in Nigeria. I also envy those to whom the issues are straightforward, and permit of dogmatic positions. In normal circumstances, perhaps I would agree that it should be a non-issue. It is tempting to simplify the debate by evoking the nature of club membership - a public school has certain rules, and if you wish to be a member, or make use of its facilities, then you must conform to those rules or seek alternatives elsewhere. 

However, the world we inhabit has changed vastly and dramatically over the past few decades, and club rules – like race or sex differentiated membership rules - are no longer sacrosanct. In addition, the genie is out of the bottle and the beasts of intolerance, suspicion and polarization stalk the streets. Dialogue is mostly relegated to the status of a poor relation of terror and intimidation, barely tolerated, often mocked. Conscious of the fact that the present dialogue is being conducted within such an atmosphere, it may be helpful if I began with a reference to my personal response when a directly contrary policy was announced in my own country, Nigeria,  and not just recently. It happened about twenty years ago, long before the introduction of the Sharia – the Islamic law – in a number of states within the country. 

Miracles and Wonders, Faith and Diaspora: On Tope Folarin's Miracle

Source: humboldt-foundation.de

(Aaron Bady)--Read Tope Folarin’s “Miracle,” in its entirety here.

That “miracles” are not real is, I think, a secular assumption that many of Tope Folarin’s readers will share. Some of us might say that we believe in miracles, and we might enjoy indulging in the fantasy of divine intervention, or biblical stories that describe Jesus’ ability to turn water into wine, or a few loaves and fishes into many loaves and fishes. But to turn one thing into another thing is the provenance of medieval alchemy, and we are moderns. We might say we believe in angels, but we tend to put the lives of our loved ones in the hands of doctors, instead of prayer. We believe in science.

Prayers and God's Ways

"Not for the first time, I noticed that God had a habit of either not answering one's prayers at all, or answering them in a way that was not straightforward."

Wole Soyinka, Ake: The Years of Childhood

The Challenge of Change--A Burden of Choice, by Wole Soyinka

First, let us not simplify the challenge. There are no blacks and whites. It is not a contest between saints and demons, not one between salvation and damnation. If anything, it is closer to a fork in the road where uncertainty lurks - whichever choice is made. Someone in the media has called it a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, another between Apocalypse and Salvation. The reasons are not far-fetched. They are firmly lodged in the trauma of memory and the rawness of current realities. Well, at least one can dialogue with the devil, even dine with that creature with the proverbial long spoon. With the deep blue sea however, deceptively placid, even the best swimmers drown. The problem for some is deciding which is the devil, which the deep blue sea. For most, instructively, the difference is clear. There are no ambiguities, no qualifications, no pause for reflection - they are simply raring to go!  I envy them.

Let all partisans of progress however constantly exercise self-restraint in assessment and expectations. Facts remain facts and should never be tampered with.  Verification is nearly always available from records and – the testimonies of witnesses. Yet memory may prove faulty, so even those who were alive during any political regimen should exercise even greater caution and not get carried away by partisanship in any cause, however laudable or apparently popular.

Rootedness and the Mystery of Tradition

“I was born to keep it so. A hive

Is never known to wonder. An anthill

Does not desert its roots. We cannot see

The still great womb of the world—

No man beholds his mother’s womb—

Yet who denies it’s there? Coiled

To the navel of the world is that

Endless cord that links us all

To the great origin. If I lose my way

The trailing cord will bring me to the roots."

Elesin, in Wole Soyinka, Dead and the King’s Horseman

Wole Soyinka: Writer, Critic, and Poet

Killing in the Name of THEIR God

"...[W]ho kills for love of

god kills love, kills god,

Who kills in the name of

god leaves god

without a name..."

Wole Soyinka, Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known

Born-Again Hooliganism

They’ll murder heritage in its timeless crib,

Decree our heroes, heroines out of memory

Obliterate the narratives of clans, names

That bind to roots, reach to heavens, our

Links to ancestral presences. The Born-Agains

Are on rampage, born against all that spells

Life and mystery, legend and innovation.

Imprecations rend the air, song is taboo,

The stride of sun-toned limbs racing wind a sin,

Flesh is vile, wine, the gift of earth, execrated.

These tyrants have usurped the will of God.

How did we fail to learn, that guns and boots

Are not essential to a coup d ‘état?

Shall Ala die? Ahiajoku be anathematised? Does

Oya defile her streams, Ifa obstruct the paths

Of learning and councils of the wise? Praise the Lord

And launch the bulldozer – they’ve razed

The statues of mbari to the ground, these

Christian Talibans. Their brothers in Offa

Murder Moremi in her shrine, shrieking Allah akbar.

Rivals else, behold their bonded zeal that sanctifies
Alien rape of our quiescent Muses, extolling theirs.

                          Wole Soyinka, "Elegy for the Nation" (For Chinua Achebe at 70)

The Problem With Nigeria...

"...Fela sang it, Achebe wrote it, Okogie preached it, Soyinka spoke it. But Nigerians don't care about these old men with their quaint ideas. We like bling, sparkle and whizz. Hence, private jets and funky pastors. The problem with Nigeria is Nigerians. Archbishop [Anthony Cardinal okogie], you have spoken - we have refused to hear. The beat goes on."   ---Man of God

Top 10 Books About Nigeria

Nigeria has a terrible image – as a land of email scammers, obscene corruption and religious bigotry and violence – but the stereotypes only tell part of a more complex, and often more attractive, truth. Nigeria is a land of rich cultures, stunning artistic achievement and industrious and resourceful people. Here are 10 books that show Nigeria in all its cruelty and folly, but also its beauty, generosity and humor.

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

As a young man Achebe read the canon of western literature, but could not find his own people's story there. So he set about writing a tragic tale: of how a vulnerable society, and a flawed man, could not cope with the military superiority and crushing arrogance of the white invaders. Millions of readers around the world have since identified with Things Fall Apart as the definitive account of what happened to their own societies when the Europeans arrived. Invariably the colonial legacy was destructive and destabilising, and one that "Nigeria", a British invention, has never quite recovered from.

What's in a name? Soyinka Rejects "Nollywood"

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet..." Shakespeare asserts in Romeo and Juliet. Really? Well, Nigeria's Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka agrees, especially with regards to the enduring moniker, Nollywood, given to the Nigerian video-film industry in 2002 by The New York Times journalist, Norimitsu Onishi.

In his "Everything is Oversize in the Birthplace of Nollywood" Keynote Address at the FESPACO's CODESRIA-Guild of African Filmmakers workshop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in February 2013, Soyinka lamented the '''N' word [that] constitutes a mutative explosion that I consider most unfair to others in the same creative field--the cinematic--more especially as there have been predecessors who impacted on our cinema world without burdening themselves with such a verbal albatross."

The Nobel Laureate further clarified his disappointment: "My complaint therefore is not against borrowings and adaptations as a principle, but against the lack of originality that translates as plain, unmediated imitation, or a tawdry, unenhanced borrowing that is conceived and delivered on the very edge of the pit of banality, and out of which it has no wish to clamber, once it has fallen in.  It indicates a pre-set mind, a basically unadventurous mind dressed up in castoff clothing, of which nothing can be expected except as a breeding ground, a reproductive automatism of its own kind--especially in taste."