Wole Soyinka
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Wole Soyinka 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 1 15-06-2021 19:55:35 BLACK LITERARY AND CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS Bloomsbury’s Black Literary and Cultural Expressions series provides a much-needed space for exploring dimensions of Black creativity as its local expressions in literature, music, film, art, etc., interface with the global circulation of culture. From contemporary and historical perspectives, and through a multidisciplinary lens, works in this series critically analyze the provenance, genres, aesthetics, intersections, and modes of circulation of works of Black cultural expression and production. SERIES EDITORS Toyin Falola and Abimbola A. Adelakun, University of Texas at Austin, USA ADVISORY BOARD Nadia Anwar, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan Adriaan van Klinken, University of Leeds, UK Alain Lawo-Sukam, Texas A&M University, USA Nathaniel S. Murrell, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, USA Mukoma wa Ngugi, Cornell University, USA Bode Omojola, Mount Holyoke and the Five College Consortium, USA Nduka Otiono, Carleton University, Canada Bola Sotunsa, Babcock University, Nigeria Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Emory University, USA VOLUMES IN THE SERIES: Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation by Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 2 15-06-2021 19:55:35 Wole Soyinka Literature, Activism, and African Transformation Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 3 15-06-2021 19:55:35 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design: TK Cover image © TK All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dauda, Bola, author. | Falola, Toyin, author. Title: Wole Soyinka : literature, activism, and African transformation / Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Black literary and cultural expressions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021011690 (print) | LCCN 2021011691 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501375767 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501375750 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501375774 (epub) | ISBN 9781501375781 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501375798 Subjects: LCSH: Soyinka, Wole. | Soyinka, Wole–Criticism and interpretation. | Authors, Nigerian–20th century–Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies. | Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PR9387.9.S6 Z613 2021 (print) | LCC PR9387.9.S6 (ebook) | DDC 822/.914–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011690 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011691 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-7576-7 PB: 978-1-5013-7575-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-7578-1 ePUB: 978-1-5013-7577-4 Series: Black Literary and Cultural Expressions Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in the United States of America To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 4 15-06-2021 19:55:35 Our heroic Grandpa: Pasitor Eleepo who was gunned down and died in my presence for refusing to be silent in the face of tyranny during the Agbekoya revolt in Western State in 1969 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 5 15-06-2021 19:55:35 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 6 15-06-2021 19:55:35 CONTENTS List of Figures ix Acknowledgments x Preface xi Part 1 Introduction and Context 1 Studies on Wole Soyinka 3 2 Wole Soyinka in Historical Perspective 33 Part 2 Historical and Cultural Background 3 Abeokuta: The City of Innovations and Creativity 51 4 Collective Traditions, Childhood, and Rites of Passage 79 5 Nobel Laureate: Literary Scholarship and Nation- building 95 6 Relationships, Beliefs, and Values 113 Part 3 Literary Works 7 Soyinka’s Novels 135 8 Dramatic Oeuvre 159 9 Soyinka’s Poetry 177 10 The Politics of Soyinka’s Literature 195 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 7 15-06-2021 19:55:35 viii CONTENTS Part 4 Legacies and Conclusion 11 Soyinka’s Contribution to Literature 217 12 Soyinka’s Literary Achievements and the Use of Language 239 13 Conclusion: Will Soyinka’s Works Outlive Him? 259 Bibliography 276 Index 290 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 8 15-06-2021 19:55:35 FIGURES Title Page Wole Soyinka in the late 1990s i 7.1 Soyinka in the 1980s 134 8.1 Soyinka working on The Lion and the Jewel 158 10.1 Fighting for justice 194 12.1 Writing in the 1990s 238 14.1 Wole Soyinka 298 Illustrations by Dr. Kazeem Ekeolu, Michael Efionayi, and Olasunmade Akano 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 9 15-06-2021 19:55:35 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are indebted to many people in our humble effort to encapsulate over sixty of Wole Soyinka’s published works, and his more than sixty years of political activism into a 120,000-word format for this book. We would like to thank Sarah Skinner, Amy Martin, Ben Doyle, and their team at Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc. We are grateful to Professor Adeshina Afolayan for his preliminary research work in fishing out scores of academic articles, books, and resource materials on Wole Soyinka. While we would like to acknowledge the many authors that have instructed and influenced our understanding and analysis of Soyinka’s corpus, we regret that we cannot list all. We want to thank Michael Afolayan, Mike Vickers, Augustine Agwuele, Akin Alamu, Kenneth Harrow, Ben Lindfors, James Gibbs, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Aderonke Adesanya, Omobola Dauda, and Ademola Dasylva for reading some draft chapters and for their useful comments. We are grateful to Michael Efionayi, Olasunmade Akano, and Oyetunde Ekeolu for the illustrations. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their time and their unanimous compliments and praise for the book. We appreciate our families for bearing with the solitary demands of being writers’ spouses! To many others, who we could not list here, we are most grateful. Toyin Falola, Texas, USA, November, 2020 Bola Dauda, Crystal Palace, UK, November, 2020 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 10 15-06-2021 19:55:36 PREFACE On July 13, 1934, Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, to a Yoruba mother who actively served in Nigeria’s women’s liberation movement and to a Yoruba father who was a principal of a school and an Anglican priest. Before his university years, Soyinka attended college preparatory school at Government College in Ibadan. He then attended the University of Leeds in England, from where he completed his degree and later received an honorary degree. During his studies at the University of Leeds, he was very active in drama and theater. Between 1958 and 1959, Soyinka was a dramaturgist at London’s Royal Court Theatre and, in 1960, Soyinka received a Rockefeller bursary. At this point, he chose to go back to Nigeria in order to study African drama. During this pursuit, he also taught literature and drama at universities in Lagos, Ibadan, and Ife. He, in the meantime, founded two theater groups: “The 1960 Masks” in 1960 and the “Orisun Theatre Company” in 1964. Soyinka not only acted in these groups but also engaged in his own productions.1 We would like to use this opportunity to say that this work is an unauthorized biography of Wole Soyinka, and we are indebted to Kitty Kelley for her advocacy of the authenticity of unauthorized biography. In a foreword to her biography of Oprah Winfrey, Kitty Kelley, a biographer of international repute, mused that the challenge of each biography has been to answer the question, “What is the person like?” [T]he unauthorized biography avoids the pureed truths of revisionist history—the pitfall of authorized biography. Without having to follow the dictates of the subject, the unauthorized biographer has a much better chance to penetrate the manufactured public image, which is crucial. For, to quote President Kennedy again, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth— persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”2 1 The Nobel Prize, “Wole Soyinka,” The Nobel Prize, 1986, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/. 2 Kitty Kelley, Oprah: A Biography (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), xi. 9781501375750_txt_rev.indd 11 15-06-2021 19:55:36 xii PREFACE Wole Soyinka is not an exception in biographical revisionism and political equivocation. In other words, what he says depends on the debate in which he is engaged. In his five-volume autobiography, one senses that Soyinka has taken liberties to tell his own story in his own way: sometimes like a fiction, emphasizing his heroics along the way and at others revealing that he is hardly a saint. For example, Soyinka wrote Aké in part to prove that he is “earthed.” After all, even in fiction, and much more so in real life, “there are no heroes with flawless character!” He too has some “flaws” that have been pointed out by numerous others. Ironically, however, Soyinka also has a global followership and hagiographic admirers. Thus, as the low and high pressures and the cold and warm winds from the high seas result in British weather that feels like four seasons in a day, it is so with Soyinka’s life and works.