Following Wole Soyinka: A Modern Road Tale (6,000 words)

By Peter Chilson

Dept. of English, Washington State University

Pullman, WA 99164-5020

Tel: (509) 335-2163; Email: pchilson@mail.wsu.edu

When other drivers go out of the way to kill

a dog, Kotonu nearly somersaults the lorry to

avoid a flea-racked mongrel. Why, I ask him,

why? Don’t you know a dog is Ogun’s meat?...

Before it’s too late take warning and kill us

a dog.

--From The Road, by Wole Soyinka

“Out of nowhere,” he says, “a white cockerel flew against my windscreen and splattered itself there, showering me with its white feathers. I had a feeling so unusual...I just knew I was going to encounter something along the way. A few kilometers ahead I came across a very still scene. The violence of the accident had already dissipated and the vehicle involved [he could not see it] had tumbled into the ditch. All you saw were these corpses covered in white cloth by the side of the road and this mute group of people standing around as if they had been there an eternity.”

Wole Soyinka, distinguished by a dense crown of white hair and stiff goatee, unravels detail in a soft baritone as he leans back in his chair, elbows on the armrests and fingertips touching to make a tent of his hands. His office at Emory University in Atlanta has a traveler’s simplicity. Empty walls and shelves, desk clear except for a laptop computer pushed aside next to proofs of a new essay. First, he offers bare details. A dawn sun rising over a paved road in southern Nigeria, his homeland, illuminating a gray Land Rover traveling south. Then the cockerel. Most important, though, was Soyinka at the wheel on a day in 1963 when he was 29 and making the short drive from the city of Ibadan to the sprawling port of Lagos.

That event in Nigeria’s third year of independence became Death in the Dawn. The poem, published in 1967, introduces the body of Soyinka’s writing that explores the road as a cultural metaphor, the “wrathful wings of man’s Progression,” as the poem puts it, or as a domain of the gods. The road fits as well the digressions that are the life of Soyinka, whose work won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for its “wide cultural perspective” and poetic style that “fashions the drama of existence.”

I say this not to highlight a writer’s career, but to stress the notion that anyone who spends real time in Africa experiences the road in a way that touches the gut. That’s what road travel does to you there, and that’s why Soyinka is important: He connects us to an Africa little noticed. Soyinka, in essays, poems, novels, three memoirs, and many plays, explores a spiritual side to road travel in Africa, arguing that surviving the road requires spiritual respect.

You begin with his “personal deity,” the Yoruba god Ogun: god of war and the hunt, of iron, protector of artistic spirit, god of transition, the explorer god, the god of the road. Ogun is contradictory, a being of compassion and anger whose reason for being is the impossible--to close the gap of understanding between gods and people, between cultures, and ideologies. All of these things Soyinka celebrates. Ogun, the activist deity and member of the pantheon of a dozen “greater” Yoruba gods, represents those who take the plunge.

Then you move to the road itself. Soyinka recalls an event in 1964, one of his earliest memories of driving, and as he talks his language moves closer, with every detail, to a view of the living road.

“I was driving on the old Lagos-Abeokuta road and suddenly I skidded going around a corner, probably braked on a patch of oil. I suddenly felt the most unbelievable feeling, as if some kind of force had taken the car away from me. There I was skidding all over the place and a tree was heading for me, not the other way around, and it all happened both swiftly and yet in slow motion, like a huge giant seized the car and had taken control completely.” He pauses, pressing his hands together as if in prayer. “I ended up facing the direction I was coming from [still on the road, unhurt]. I remember leaping out of the car and running some distance away from it to look at it, you know, as if to say, ‘what are you about to do next?’ It had a spirit of its own.”

Digression as confession. I discovered Soyinka in an African motor park.

In 1987, while a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger (Nigeria’s neighbor to the north) I went to Kano, a city in northern Nigeria. Kano’s motor park is a loud, crowded, filthy place that reeks of burnt goat meat, sweat, and urine. I loved it.

One morning, I stood in a crowd at a bookseller’s table, thumbing old paperbacks–-Bronte, Dickens, Joyce, Achebe. I saw a book of poetry by Soyinka, who had just won the Nobel Prize. I opened the book, called Idanre, and read “Death in the Dawn.” The poem began:

Traveller, you must set out

At Dawn. And wipe your feet upon

The dog-nose wetness of the earth.

My stomach tightened. The words paid the road visceral homage, evoking a brutal reality of getting from one place to another.

I knew something of that reality. I’d been in Niger two years, teaching English in a village called Bouza. Every week trucks rumbled into our motor park, a sandy field where a man sold hot tea. They came 60 miles up the dirt road from the highway that ran along the border. There were pickups and big trucks. Many had no brakes. Mostly they carried market goods, but the drivers were from all over West Africa. Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon. Most knew English or French—-the colonial languages--and talked of a raw, spiritual Africa of the road. They spoke of breakdowns and accidents, bandits, and black spirits who “eat” souls.

Afternoons I drank sweet tea with the drivers. One from southern Nigeria said, “Where I come from drivers sacrifice dogs to the road...at the festival of Ogun.”

“Why dogs?”

“Because that’s what Ogun eats.”

At the book table, a man elbowed me for browsing space. Another reached between us for a book. A young couple argued. I read on.

The right foot for joy, the left dread

And the mother prayed, Child

May you never walk

When the road waits, famished.

Soyinka is now 65 and the fact he’s here at all, on a day in late October 1998, trying to make sense for me of his writing on road culture, is remarkable. This, just after his brief return to Nigeria-—after four years exile and at the invitation of a new military ruler--to that “ravaged” and “crumbling” “nation space called Nigeria,” as he described it in a speech the week before at Lagos University. Hundreds greeted him at Lagos International Airport October 14, surging so close to Soyinka that reporters described him as visibly nervous.

It’s impossible to talk of Soyinka and the road without discussing his struggle against the abuses of military regimes that have ruled Nigeria for most of its 40 years of independence. To trace his life think of the road fragmented, an odyssey of experimentation, confrontation, prison, and exile. Soyinka graduated from high school in Ibadan in 1954 and attended Britain’s University of Leeds. He stayed on as a bouncer, bartender, bricklayer, and teacher, traveling Europe before reading plays for London’s Royal Court Theater. In 1959, independence eve, he returned to Nigeria and in 1961 roamed the country in a Land Rover studying traditional theater. He spent six years staging plays, writing, teaching, and protesting looming civil war. In 1965 he won acquittal on charges of stopping a pro-war radio broadcast at gunpoint. In 1967 civil war broke out and he was jailed without charge for 26 months, 15 in isolation. After release he exiled himself to Ghana, London, the United States, writing, editing and lecturing, before returning in 1975. From Nigeria, he spoke out on human rights and continued his world travels as a teacher and writer. In 1986, after the Nobel Prize, his criticism sharpened. By 1994 he was under surveillance. Helicopters buzzed his home, and finally death threats came. Soyinka fled Nigeria at night on foot through the bush, evading military patrols in what he calls his “Rambo escape.”

He won’t discuss details. “There are,” he says, “people to protect.” Neither will he shut up. He speaks of military rule with an angry list, staring across his office desk at me like a man who wants to be sure he’s being heard. “People tortured, detained without trial, you know, pauperized by all sorts of fake trials, families taken hostage....”

As a result, Soyinka lives furtively, keeping travel plans secret and using assumed names. He relies on friends and sympathizers in Nigeria and abroad to protect his security. “On one occasion a high level military officer flew to London to warn me there is another group that has been sent out, that people have been paid to kill me.” Soyinka stops and stares at nothing, rigid in his chair, as if the shock were still fresh. “There were three of us on the hit list.” He talks of being followed in London, in Washington, D.C., of strangers inquiring about the location of his hotel room, his office at Emory.

So, it’s easy to see why Soyinka is difficult to interview though simple to locate. News reports find him in Paris at an African arts festival, in London meeting with a human rights group, in Washington, D.C. on a radio show, or teaching in New York, Boston, Atlanta. On the Internet I found him at Emory’s African American Studies Department. I wrote and called, leaving my number and email address. “Yes, he teaches this semester, but he’s out of town,” a secretary said. “We never know where he is until he calls.” Weeks later Soyinka wrote back agreeing to the interview. He included an email address, fax and phone in California, and office phone in Atlanta. Via email we negotiated. He talked of dates on which “I am comparatively free.” We settled on Oct. 26 in Atlanta. Then this message turned up on my phone: “Ahh hello this is Wole Soyinka, please give me a call urrrgently. Um, I’ll tell you what it is, I have made a miscalculation, and the date, the date will now be October 28, but, ahhhmm, you know, give me a call....” We reset the date, but the “miscalculation” I learned from a BBC broadcast was his surprise return to Nigeria.

Even now, with the death of Gen. Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s most brutal dictator, and with an elected civilian government in place, Soyinka plays the peanut in a giant shell game. “Abacha’s bloodhounds,” he says, “are still around.” His family is in hiding in California and his mailing address is wherever he is teaching.

Teaching, in fact, is how I met Soyinka--in a lecture hall before our interview. At Emory, Soyinka is a sort of roving professor at large, giving a lecture here, a writing seminar there. The 25 students enrolled in Introduction to African American Studies--black, white, Asian, baggy pants and shorts, ball caps and T-shirts--sat in a room of gray carpeting, wood panel walls and hanging lights. A young woman, feet on the chair in front, munched pretzels, crinkling the bag as she sucked from a bottle of Coke. On stage Soyinka was lecturing on negritude, the ideal of Pan-African pride he has written so much about.

He resembled an aging hippie (in a collarless beige tunic, oval-shaped black rimmed glasses, brown cotton trousers, black street shoes) but sounded like a Nobel laureate. His voice was even and his hands steady on his notes for 70 minutes. “I apologize for my absence last week,” he said at the start, “but developments at home took me away from these shores.”

Silence. The woman beside me put a pretzel in her mouth. Pens scratched, paper rustled, students dozed as Soyinka’s mission to “bridge the abyss of ideas” marched doggedly on. He is casual hip and studious academic framed by a wiry, strong physique that fits his love of wandering in forests. He is, in fact, a son of the bush and the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria’s rural southwest. He was born in Abeokuta and attended the Christian primary school where his father was headmaster and a teacher. Teaching, as a vehicle for affecting transition, the Ogun ideal, suits him: risk old ideas to explore new ones.

He moved only to stress a point or use the blackboard. “It was this cultural value, separation from the mechanistic world,” he said, “that the negritudonists proposed as an alternative to the mechanistic nature of white culture.” At the podium his ideas stand alone, no emphasis. “Negritude is a French expression for the being of blacks.” Smiling, he broke from his notes. “The French have a way of intellectualizing everything. Don’t be intimidated.”

The air conditioner whirred softly. Somewhere a book fell on the floor.

Afterward, Soyinka stepped from the podium, rolling his notes. Students filed out. I introduced myself and he granted me two hours in the morning. We talked of Nigeria. I asked if he still drives.

He laughed. “I drive as a matter of fact.” He owns a Jeep Cherokee. “I love jeeps, I drive them into the bush to hunt.” But Soyinka turned cold when asked if he plans a road trip I might join him on. He said, “No.”

Soyinka’s childhood memoir, Ake, opens with the image of “undulating terrain” above the parsonage where he grew up, and the road that winds over this landscape, teasing a boy’s imagination. “This dizzying road only sheered upwards from one noisy market to the other,” he wrote, “looking down...into the most secret recesses of the parsonage itself.” Exploration became a childhood vice, and Ogun, the boy’s patron saint. A guardian of risk.

His 1976 essay, The Fourth Stage, helps explain. “To dare transition is the ultimate test of the human spirit,” he wrote, “and Ogun is the first protagonist of the abyss.” Which is to say, that to put one’s faith in Ogun is to give license to risk-taking, to accept, in fact, an invitation to the open road, to anything new, a path fraught with frustration.

“I always loved the bush,” he tells me, relaxing with the subject. “My grandfather told me ‘you are protected by Ogun,’ and at university I began to study my own culture. My fascination was for that repressed part of society that was held askance by my Christian environment.” Soyinka tilts his head back and smiles, keeping his hands pressed together and occasionally separating them for emphasis. “The contradictions in Ogun fascinated me: god of the lyric and yet god of war, protector of the road, the path finder, an agent of change.”

Everything Soyinka says is precise and slow, formed in neat grammatical run-on thoughts. Not lecture, but a careful self-manifesto.

“I found other deities too peaceful, too saintly for my temperament. Ogun is an out and out sinner, but one who is able to recognize his weaknesses and try to overcome them, and also his solitude is something else. The kind of solitude I found in the bush, in the forest, I found to be a characteristic of Ogun--the fact that he retires to the mountains after all his blunders around mortals and tries to exorcise the violent side of him. I found a kind of identity, and so he adopted me, or I’ve adopted him....”

There is confession in these words as well, a sense of relief in the discovery of a most human, none “too saintly” god. It was Ogun who gave the Yoruba the secret of iron, and who moodily retreated to the forest alone when his people said his hunting ways made him dirty, unfit to lead. Legend also claims that in a moment of unexplainable pique, Ogun slew his own army, causing death with the swift genocidal messiness of an interstate pileup, only to declare remorse by sinking into the earth. Self-imposed exile. Myths both, but in the context of road travel in Nigeria this is a mythology to take seriously.

And Soyinka is serious. His anger seethes as he recalls the early 1960s, his intense road years, when he drove from his home in Ibadan to Lagos and the nearby towns of Abeokuta, Oyo, and Ife to teach and to direct his new plays. “I was frankly appalled...That slaughter slide between Ibadan and Ife, I was on that road often and there was not one single trip when I did not have to ferry the injured to the hospital or disentangle bodies on the road.” Soyinka’s hands fall to the armrests of his chair and his body again goes rigid. “Some of those bodies were my students, some of them were my colleagues. I’d get to class and there would be an empty place yet again where another person had died. I’d leave class and there would be an obituary notice on the wall, and there we were pumping knowledge into these young people’s heads only to pick up their brains on the road.”

That sentiment rings bitterly in The Interpreters, his 1965 novel that bears witness to the struggle of young Nigeria’s new intellectuals. Part two of the novel begins with a character’s bloody end on the road. “Too late he saw the insanity of a lorry parked right in his path,” the story reads, “a swerve turned into a skid and cruel arabesques of tyres. A futile heap of metal and Sekoni’s body lay surprised across the open door.”

Embedded in Soyinka’s dismay is the idea of a country that has accepted chaos as a part of the national culture. In no part of Nigerian life is this clearer than on the road, which is Soyinka’s point. That there is in Nigeria a pervasive risk of being killed or maimed on a road (the government claims one in three Nigerians are annually hurt in accidents, while one in nine die) is difficult to prove to the uninitiated. It means applying images of war to common Nigeria, where cars and petrol tankers casually burn on roadsides. Consider a force that consumes a country’s emotional and intellectual resources, the lives of its talent, injecting fear and loss into every residential block in every village, town, and city, subjecting the population to heated daily debate, and forcing a nation to cope with the maimed and the dead.

Some background: On a visit to Nigeria in 1993 I picked up The Guardian, a national newspaper, and read that a state governor and three aides were terribly injured in a high-speed road accident. Later, in The Vanguard, another national paper, I read this: “A Supreme Court judge...last Tuesday night died in a ghastly accident along Ogbomosho-Ilorin road, when a [tractor] trailer rammed into a convoy of cars carrying eight other justices.” Nigeria’s entire supreme judiciary body! Days later a bus crashed on a Lagos bridge, killing 25. By week’s end 100 died in bus accidents Lagos alone. A Daily Times cartoon showed a man kneeling in prayer before boarding a bus. And The Guardian, over an editorial on the roads, ran the headline: “Sitting Ducks, All of Us.”

Soyinka, in exasperation, descends into hyperbole. “Nigeria is a special case,” he says. He swivels his chair to face the window and folds his arms. “There is a complete lack of common sense. I would characterize my countrymen and women as mindlessly egotistical.” He repeats the last phrase, drawing out syllables, punching each consonant with his tongue. “Yes, minnd-less-llly ego-tis-tical.”

In 1977 he decided to form a counter-force to the road culture, a local Road Safety Corps in Ibadan. Volunteers patrolled roads in and around the city. “I wanted to create something incorruptible,” he says, “unlike the police, a force that could talk sense to people.” In 1988 the group became official, the national Federal Road Safety Corps, which still exists. Soyinka served as its first chairman.

What that meant at the time, to borrow his phrase “to talk sense to people,” was to struggle directly with the legacy of Ogun and with government, to, in fact, change a popular view of Ogun and challenge the status quo on the roads, where “the very worst drivers wear uniforms.”

Soyinka, in other words, recast Ogun as a divine highway patrolman whose wrath must first be provoked. But like some policemen, especially in Nigeria, many believe Ogun can be bribed. Drivers sacrifice dogs to ease his hunger and believe as well that Ogun’s hunger is arbitrary, that if he wants to take someone on the road, he will. But Soyinka dismisses Ogun’s venality. “We have to make drivers understand that Ogun himself would be very furious with those who abuse the road,” he says, “that the road is indeed the province of Ogun and if you mess around with his roads you will have a very messy death.”

He recruited the first “road marshals” from his strongest constituency, idealistic college-age young people. The Corps sent them to “road safety academy” and onto the roads in teams, driving cars equipped with flashing strobes. The marshals, he says, must “get through that fatalism which directs the gross abuse of the road, this attitude that drivers have a special correspondence with that living spirit.”

Soyinka designed the Corps to carry the weight of official authority, using the state highway patrol in the United States as a model. Marshals wear purple berets, white shirts with red epaulettes, black pants and shoes. But they are hardly hardened state troopers. Neither is Soyinka, who was with a patrol of four marshals when they pulled over an army truck in 1988, a memory that works now to define the Road Safety Corps--badly underfunded then and now--as an agency battling the absurd.

“The driver was an ordinary corporal,” he says, “carrying his major’s load and swiping cars on the road, driving on whichever side he wanted. We overhauled him and he went to the back of his truck and brought out this horrible looking screwdriver and came at me. I was nearly stabbed.” Soyinka, leaning forward with his hands on his office desk, says the soldier lunged once and then seemed to restrain himself. “His partner grabbed the major’s ceremonial sword [still in scabbard] and waved it.” A staring match followed with Soyinka and his marshals facing the soldiers until finally the soldiers thought it easier to give up. “We seized the sword and screwdriver as trophies.”

Righteousness and the Nobel laureate meet road rage.

A digression back to the road.

Nigeria’s roads, even the best, are narrow and the potholes deep enough to consume a car or grab a wheel and fling any vehicle spinning into the bush. I was thinking this one morning in March 1993, while on patrol just north of Ibadan with marshals of the Road Safety Corps.

For eight months I’d been in Niger, researching a book on road culture and living with drivers. I’d come to Nigeria to find Soyinka, and I’d failed. At his office in Abeokuta I learned he’d left the country. “You’ve just missed him,” said Soyinka’s secretary, a young woman at a large desk. “He left yesterday for London.”

No, the woman said, the office hadn’t received my letters and Mr. Soyinka would not be back for...well, she didn’t know. The room was big and empty, just her chair and desk on a tiled floor. Two framed posters of African art exhibits hung on the walls. “He’s hard to keep track of,” she said, “even for me.”

The woman was empathetic, as if she saw in my exasperation something that she felt herself. “Look, I only know where he is when he calls or sends a telegram, and I am always reminding him to call.” She smiled. “I’m so sorry. He travels a lot. There’s a chance you can catch him in Europe or the States.”

I asked about a schedule. She laughed. “There is no schedule.”

So, instead of driving with Soyinka, I was dodging potholes and errant motor vehicles in a Peugeot station wagon with three young men in purple berets. Kids, really, with a Peace Corps kind of idealism for human rights. On the road they invoke Soyinka’s call for people to respect “the basic right to live.”

Everyone I met in the Corps claimed Soyinka as friend or mentor even if they hadn’t met him. “He’s like our father,” they said At one Ibadan field office two marshals slept off an all-night patrol on torn sofas. On the wall hung Soyinka’s photo, the chin-up profile flashed around the world when he won the Nobel Prize. Below that, stapled to the wall, was this photocopied caveat:

ALL MARSHALS: BRIBE-TAKING IS AN

ABOMINATION. ANYONE CAUGHT TAKING BLOOD

MONEY WILL BE DISMISSED. REMEMBER, THE

ROAD IS PATIENT, BUT IT DOES NOT FORGIVE.

--Wole Soyinka

But with the marshals I was as safe as a traveler could be in Nigeria, even when facing the perfect nightmare--an oil tanker gone wild. We were two hundred yards behind the thing, moving at 70 miles per hour on a narrow road. The tanker half of the rig, painted red with no company logo, began to shake and wobble as two rear right wheels blew, each with a brief blast.

Beside me in the back seat was Lowali, a young Moslem from the north attending the University of Ibadan where Soyinka had once taught. Lowali, the budding economist, screamed and shoved an arm out over the front seat, pointing. We could see the tanker shudder and skid as the driver fought to stay on the road.

The marshal at the wheel, a 19-year-old named Albert, slowed the car so we hung about 500 yards back.

“He’s got no brakes,” said Lowali.

“Or he’s a crazy man,” said a third marshal, Christopher, in the front passenger seat.

The tanker behind the cab began to twist and turn, lifting the cab on its right wheels before detaching entirely and tumbling like a spinning sausage into a farming hamlet, smashing off the corner of a mud house before splitting open in a field of young corn. We pulled over and got out of the car as the cab, still upright, stopped just down the road.

The driver, a bearded man in T-shirt, greasy khakis and sandals, stumbled up the roadside and stood with us, watching with hollow, exhausted eyes and open mouth. Crude oil oozed over leafy corn, approaching the doorstep of a mud house with an iron roof. Outside the doorway an old man stood and stared. He wore a dirty beige tunic, white britches and sandals. Oil crested the doorstep, forcing him to step aside and watch the stuff creep into his house.

We decided to leave Christopher on the scene to investigate while we continued the patrol. He waved goodbye as I walked to the car with the others. “Mr. Peter,” he shouted. “Welcome to Nigeria!”

Soyinka never hides his anger over Nigeria’s roads, nor his respect for the idea that the road is chief purveyor of change at once cultural, political, ecological, technological, and violent. Spend enough time with Soyinka and his work, and you find the road becomes its own character, loudly rumbling on the periphery of peace of mind, threatening to both broaden peace and destroy it.

“I do not hate progress,” the village chief Baroka says in Soyinka’s play, The Lion and the Jewel, explaining his concern for nearby road construction, “only its nature/Which makes all roofs and faces look the same.” The chief adds a wishful argument for rural life about to be lost to a road that will bring change in an indigestible jam of things and ideas. “Among the bridges and murderous roads...we must leave virgin plots of lives, rich decay/And the tang of vapour rising from forgotten heaps of compost.”

In 1990, two years after returning from my first visit to Africa, I discovered Soyinka’s play, The Road. He published it in 1965, the same year as The Interpreters, and staged it in London. In his New Statesman review of the production, Ronald Bryden wrote,

[The Road] is about the real modern Nigeria:

an enormous, inchoate territory whose ancient

units of tribe and religion are being supplanted

by the new patterns of technology—-above all,

by the system of rough, weather-pitted roads

along which thousands of ramshackle picturesquely

named lorries speed goods and passengers.

Bryden’s words reflect the play’s setting at a roadside parts shop in the back of a broken down lorry, “lopsided and minus its wheels” under the sign, “AKSIDENT STORE—-ALL PART AVAILEBUL.” The parts are used, salvaged from wrecks, and they reflect the road world in the image of the human body dismembered and mutilated. Soyinka’s characters, the drivers and touts who gather at the store, speak with sensual awareness of this reality.

I read the play raw. I grabbed a pencil, marking the book obsessively, scratching, for instance, an exclamation point next to the death obsessed monologue of The Professor, the madman who manages the parts shop.

My bed is among the dead and when the road

raises a victory cry to break my sleep I hurry

to a disgruntled swarm of souls full of spite

for their rejected bodies. It is a market of

stale meat, noisy with flies and quarrelsome

with old women. The place I speak of is not

far from here, if you wish to come.

I was startled, too, by this passage where a driver recites names of colleagues lost to the road.

Where is Sigidi Ope...And Saidu-Say?...Where

Is Humphrey Bogart? Cimarron Kid? Have you known

any other driver take an oil tanker from Port

Harcourt to Kaduna non-stop since Muftau died?

Where is Sergeant Burma who treated his tanker

Like a child’s toy?

All of this gets back to that first ghastly little scene Soyinka described on the Lagos-Ibadan highway and what it means to get on the road for any reason without a certain respect. Without awareness of consequences, of the deadly combination of the road and one’s own energy, or what the Canadian critic Derek Wright identifies in Soyinka’s poem Death in the Dawn as “man’s uncontrollable instinct for headlong, forward motion...” The poem calls this “Racing joys and apprehensions for/A naked day.”

This is the vast web of contradictions and chaos. Ogun’s dilemma, and Soyinka’s

A digression, for the sake of the drivers.

On the patio of my house in Niger, I looked through journal entries, checking drivers’ names. I recall several, like the driver called le Bandit, who liked to drive fast, and another called Busy Man because he always seemed to be on the road. But most names were simple, like Moussa or Adamou, names that were important to me because I knew their faces. Two had died in accidents-–Adakunli, a Nigerian who drove his truck into an oil tanker near Kano, and Issa, a local driver who crashed his Peugeot pickup one night in a dust storm. Conducting my own roll call of the motor park, I scratched out names of the dead, circled names of those I had seen, and drew a question mark by more names, keeping tabs on who survived, who didn’t, and on those whose status couldn’t be confirmed.

The MIA’s.

So now, with Nigeria’s military in retreat, the man whose life is a shell game refuses to lower his guard, even with students. “I want to know more about this character. He is a saint and I distrust saints.” Wole Soyinka has let me join him and nine students around a table in an evening play writing seminar, where is directing his words--an opinion, not a lecture--at a young man with long brown hair whose play the class is critiquing. What bothers Soyinka is the “goodness” of one of the characters.

“Saints are bad for law and order,” he says, “They forgive too much.”

The student leans forward. “The play,” he says in earnest, “is about four young people who are very much past Neil Young.” He stares down, folding his hands, then opening them as if holding a bowl. He looks up. “It’s...it’s about dealing with strained relationships, loss of naïve young magic....”

Confused silence. The rock star’s name hangs uneasily. No one knows what to say. Soyinka, smiling slightly, stares at his copy of the student’s play, his left index finger across his lips, an elbow hooked over the chairback. He lets the silence do its work.

Actually he looks amused, like someone who has only just joined the conversation, which in a way is true. Soyinka is one of three visiting playwrights who drops in occasionally to work with the class. The students, whose plays he has read but whom he has never met before tonight, are keeping him in discussion of himself and their work through three fast hours. He is patient, disarmingly direct, and when he talks students lean in as if he were talking to each alone.

At some level his dialogue is about determining, in one’s physical or intellectual travels, an awareness of risk in concert with a desire to be heard, to be free to test any idea reckless or wise, as long as one recognizes consequences.

The crash and burn.

The toll on Ogun’s road.

Finally, Soyinka says, “But human beings are very cynical. We don’t like to see goodness. So this character who is the opposite of badness needs more explanation. How did he get that way? How is it possible he is so good?”

Yeah,” says a young woman across the table. “He’s too straight. I don’t buy it.”

The young man nods his head.

At 9 p.m., class breaks up slowly in knots of discussion and lingering questions for Soyinka. He follows the students out, a black leather bag over his shoulder, walking with smooth agility. They drift off, leaving Soyinka to make his way across campus to his apartment nearby. Emory is an urban university, well lit at night, and Soyinka lets me walk him to the edge of campus.

I press him on saints. “The danger is there are people who devalue saintliness and they feel a need to compensate, to retaliate in the opposite direction. I can’t forgive that.” Soyinka, frustrated lawman, speaks with Ogun’s bitterness, the unsaintly urge to force remorse on the unremorseful. “I like to punish criminals, punish them hard.”

His pace quickens as we pass streams of students. I ask how he reconciles his activism with his writing.

“Let me tell you what I planned to do with my life.” He keeps his head up, eyes on passersby. He’s talking about commitments, which like many writers he resents. The Road Safety Corps is one. So, too, is fighting military rule. He fears being drawn deeper into politics and doesn’t plan to live in Nigeria soon. “I planned to retire at the age of 49 and devote myself to writing and disappear.” He stops himself. “I was so sure that’s what I was going to do.” He laughs softly.

Suddenly, a voice calls out.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Soyinka keeps walking. The voice becomes louder.

“Excuse me, I know you, you look familiar to me, are you Wole Soyinka?” We turn to see a young black man in Navy blue sweats. Soyinka slows, but keeps on walking.

“Are you Wole Soyinka?” The voice is American.

Soyinka stops now, turns and looks at the young man, who introduces himself.

“Do you know my father?” he asks. “He’s in D.C. now.”

“Yes, I know him,” Soyinka says, smiling a little, perhaps in relief. “We’ve not seen each other in years.”

“Then you are Wole Soyinka?”

“Well, yes,” Soyinka says. “Sometimes.”

NOTES ON WORKS CITED

[Page 1] The epigraph: The Road, published in Wole Soyinka: Collected Plays, Volume 1. (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 165

[Page 2] The Nobel Prize quote is from the award committee’s official citation.

[Pages 4-6] Quotes from Wole Soyinka’s poem, “Death in the Dawn” are from Idanre and Other Poems. (London: Methuen & Co Ltd), 10-11

[Page 11] Ake. (London: Rex Collings, 1981), 1

[Page 12] “The Fourth Stage,” published in Soyinka’s essay collection, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 37

[Page 14] The Interpreters. (London: Heinemann, 1965), 155

[Page 15] Quote on death of judge from the article, “8 Supreme Court Judges in Car Crash,” by Laide Oyalude in The Vanguard. (Lagos: Feb 12, 1993), 1

[Page 15] Statistic of 100 bus accident deaths from the story “Bloody Molue! Claims 100 Lives In One Month,” by Niyi Newman in Poise magazine. (Lagos: March 7, 1993), 7

[Page 15] Cartoon from The Daily Times. (Lagos: March 3, 1993)

[Page 15] Headline “Sitting Ducks, All of Us,” from an essay by Tai Solarin in The Guardian (Lagos: February 23, 1993), 23

[Page 22] Quote from The Lion and the Jewel. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 52

[Page 22-23] Quote from Ronald Bryden’s review, “The Asphalt God,” in New Statesman. (London: September 24, 1965), 460

[Page 23] First quote from The Road, in Collected Plays, Volume 1, 151

[Page 23] Second quote from The Road, in Collected Plays, Volume 1, 159

[Page 24] Third quote from The Road, in Collected Plays, Volume 1, 167

[Page 24] Wright, Derek, Wole Soyinka Revisited. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 152

[Page 24] Quote from “Death in the Dawn” in Idanre and Other Poems, 10