Watching Soyinka: Notes of an Old Peace Corps Volunteer
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Watching Soyinka: Notes of an Old Peace Corps Volunteer —TOM HEBERT— CONTENTS Preface Prologue I. A Comedy of Errors in an Ibadan street 2. Of Soyinka the charismatic and cinematic 3. Wole’s short take on négritude 4. A wife in the forest 5. The politics of Emergency at the Paradise Hotel 6. To topple the Government in 13 days Obatala, a poem 7. SRO on Spanish Air 8. Finding a home for Obatala, Mother of the Gods Epilogue Watching Soyinka: Notes of a Peace Corps Volunteer PREFACE “I cannot claim that I am a good Dramatist, but I believe that practice makes perfect. I may have my faults as any other dramatist may have, as there is no perfection in humanity. Sensible readers may agree with me that it is a tough job to get a story explained. This book is written in simple English to enable many readers who are semi-illiterate to read it and understand. Very high words are avoided. May you enjoy the interest in the book, that is all.” —Okenwa Olisa, About the Husband & Wife Who Hate Them-Selves, Onitsha, 1962. PROLOGUE 1. However badly the English finally cobbled Nigeria together in 1914, for an enchanted spell in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Nigeria was the capital of Africa and the best place in the world to be. Over-filled with the most politically sensitive, fervent, and sophisticated citizens known anywhere, it included the largest percentage of whole sane people on the planet. Then a census went bad, a Southern politician mistakenly campaigned through the Moslem North in a helicopter—thus over-flying harems—and years later all this—and more—resulted in the promise of an independent Biafra dying in 1969 under the guns of a military that once roused to ethnic excuses and excesses, has never returned to its barracks. And how odd that would have seemed to us in 1962. When then it was politics, politics, and politics like no American since the early 19th Century has known. Oh, to be there and then again. To have another try at mere raw and rare politics. 2. The ramifications of this sloughing-off of democratic freedoms and institutions were not only preamble to the Biafran War, but helped directly to create the blasted landscapes of Darfur, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Congo, and Liberia. And their child soldiers. And even violent Islam. 3. Yet, Nigeria in the 1960s—in its wondrous play of intrigue, power, and corruption, atavistic moments revealing secrets ancient and wise, and in its violence, size and distinctness of character, portents and augury, fools and tragic heroes, kingship struggles, a fabulous renaissance of African art, dance, and scholarship, public clownery, and scope of divisive political, cultural, and religious issues—all this was closer to Elizabethan England than anything since, anywhere. And add love of language and flowing national dress. 4. Founded in the 1830s, Ibadan, now the capital of the Yoruba peoples, developed into the most powerful Yoruba city-state before coming under British protection in 1893. As an American Peace Corps 3 Volunteer from 1962 to 1964, I was at home in—and was at content in— this Yorubaland, this Ibadan, my russet tin city. 5. It was there that I met Wole Soyinka, titan. 4 I. A Comedy of Errors in an Ibadan street Note: Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors , BBC-described as a “madcap romp of mistakings and misadventures,” while “Shakespeare is much more than a literary great. As a crowd puller, his name virtually guarantees money in the bank.” And that was surely true in the first years of Nigeria’s independence—before Nigeria’s Great Unraveling—particularly whenever A Comedy of Errors was the West African School Certificate’s annual Shakespearean “set play.” It’s May, 1963. The scene: A silent late-evening downtown Ibadan street outside a down-at-the-heels colonial-era cinema which now and then still doubles as an honest theatre. Players: A 25-year-old Peace Corps somebody—a former college drama major—trying desperately to hold on to his first experience directing a full-length play. And this fool is losing this encounter because he is up against Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s poet laureate, Africa’s foremost playwright, and the toast of London’s West End. (This, as opposed to the great Kola Ogunmola, Nigeria’s premier Yoruba opera and theatre party impresario. Do I mention that because I am still harboring rebellion forty-three years later?) Anyway, the Wole Soyinka holding all the cards and standing before me is headed—I already know with an absolute dead certainty—to a Nobel Prize in literature. And not due to accidents of literary geography, but because Soyinka writes like a fierce angel happily mired to his kneecaps in all things Yoruba: “Love of independence, a feeling of superiority over all others, a keen commercial spirit, and of indefatigable enterprise, that quality of being never able to admit or consent to a defeat as finally settling a question upon which their mind is bent, are some of those qualities peculiar to them, and no matter under what circumstances they are placed, Yorubas will display them.” —The Rev. Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas, Lagos: 1897. Worse still, there is a growing suspicion that I am not much of a play director. How did I get into this unlovely pot-holed street on the short end of a stick? A Comedy of Errors was the new University of Ife’s first step into live theatre. And Wole, then a Lecturer in the English department at Ife—which was then getting organized in borrowed space at the University of Ibadan—was producing and directing the play. I became involved because even though I was a middling Fourth Form English teacher at the very poor but very competitive and Moslem Ahmadiyya Grammar School at Eleyele, Ibadan, I had been making myself known around town, loitering at arts gatherings and chumming it up at the 5 famous Mbari, a cultural club on Onireke Street for eaters, drinkers, and vagabond artists including J. P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe and the stranger-by-the-moment German couple Suzanne and Uli Bier. On behalf of a reluctant American Embassy, I even booked the suspect American folk balladeer Pete Singer into Mbari. (Ironically, during Richard Nixon’s 1972 Watergate scandal, we learned that Mbari had been indirectly funded by the CIA—good work that.) Anyway, I came to know Soyinka somewhat and because he needed all the volunteer help he could find, he asked me if I would work on set design and construction. Sure! Since we didn’t have enough budget to build a real set, I whumped together with scraps of wood an Italian street scene in profile/outline and in-filled it with chicken wire. It’s true! I thought/hoped that the chicken wire would get picked up in stage lighting creating a sparkling effect beyond our means. Well, no. By the time the play opened it was clear that with only small-small lighting and smaller money and wood scraps and chicken wire, more genius than I was required. But after Wole cast the play with U. of Ife student actors—some really good—he was called to London on some film business. So I started the play in rehearsals—someone had to and I was surely available. I was not only set designer and builder but until Wole returned I was director, helping define characters, blocking movements, setting pace, timing laugh lines, and the rest. Well, several weeks went by and no Wole. So I really began to take hold and take ownership. But alas, Soyinka returned and one evening sat through a run-through to see what had transpired—of good or evil—in his absence. I see him now, stirring in his seat, standing up, walking around. Finally he stops the action and asks some questions which the actors try to answer or in my case, defend. Well, of course the actors knew who was back and in-charge. And one by one, my proud interpretations went flying out the wings. Unfortunately, not being a shy or retiring person, I began to take exception. And this is when Soyinka invited me to conference in that silent, dusky Ibadan street. Here I met the cold wind of reality as Wole said the obvious: that the play could only have one director and he was it, and how he really liked my set design, and how he hoped that I would stay on as stage manager through the run of the play. Or somesuch. As I had carried water for him in his absence and am not a bad sort, he let me down easy. Comedy of Errors soon opened to good audiences, its many mistakings and misadventures playing to much laughter. And soon, in late July, 1963 I did direct a play at Mbari Club for Ahmadiyya Grammar School, completely ace-ing the theatrical 6 reputation of Ahmadiyya’s long-time cross-town rival, the elite Government College Ibadan. Yes! The play, The Gossips of Ewa, was a very funny one-act play “with Woro Dancing and Bata Drums” set in a Yoruba village. It had been adapted at the University of Ibadan from the Irish play, Spreading the News by Augusta Gregory. (I played a clownish white anthropologist investigating the people of Ewa.) I was beginning to learn the ritual magic of Yoruba theatre because we ended the play with a marriage feast and then invited the Mbari audience to eat and dance with us to the student drummers and singers.