Soyinka on Obedients
Toyin Falola
Michael Afolayan
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Okey Iheduru
An Open Letter To Mr Wole Soyinka By Oluniyi Olóyè
An open letter to the honourable Nobel Laureate. Dear Mr Wole, You’re being disingenuous sir. Your attempt at the revisionist version of the recent happenings in our country is sad. Our people say, “Where we expect to meet wisdom, if we meet folly there, it pains deeply.”
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Each and every point could be taken up with the aim of further emphasizing their importance, and it would be worth the effort, even though it is time-consuming. So we may have to return to those main points piecemeal, later. For now, lest we forget, and for some, it’s easy to do so as we gloss over that opening paragraph and over this sentence that we may pass by so easily: “A climate of fear is being generated”...
Wole Soyinka delivered the Reith Lectures on the BBC in 2004 and they were titled
Some may have lost their compass and consequently lost their moral bearings, but most certainly, Wole Soyinka, even if sometimes a little obtuse, is, on the whole, still right on target here, and most vigorously so. It is therefore to be sincerely hoped that some of the literati, the literates, semi-literates, the illiterates, and the over-educated, sour grapes bad losers among us who are still crying over spilled milk have not deliberately or unerringly misread Professor Wole Soyinka baring his heart to all and sundry here. The tenor of this sentence - like a court sentence from a qualified Lord Chief Justice, is unmistakably clear.
Stiff upper lip Soyinka wrote
“Such, for instance, were the virulent attacks and threats to the musician, Seun Kuti, his family and iconic music Shrine. His crime consisted of nothing more than declaring the name “Obidient” derogatory to his sense of civic dignity and activist history… I do agree with Seun Kuti; ‘Obidients’ is one of the most repulsive, off-putting concoctions I ever encountered in any political arena.”
For crying out loud, you (whoever you are, or think you are) cannot read and agree with his disapproval and then wonder on whose side he is - is he on God’s side or is the one & only God, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala also on his side? Our side.
As far as we can see from his track record Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s centre of gravity is and has always been TRUTH - including speaking his heart’s truth to power. It is no mean comparison, and it’s neither hyperbole nor understatement when he writes,
“Nowhere has this been more evident than in the effrontery of attempts to place the present contention on the same podium as the twenty-year old anti-Abacha struggle!”
Mr. Soyinka the activist knows what he is talking about, and no armchair activist is he. He actually went on a world tour campaigning against the Abacha regime. I actually asked him a question or rather threw a comment at him at one of his public campaigns at a fully packed house, over here in Stockholm during his never-ending world tour. On the day that Sanni Abacha passed away, Wole Soyinka was in Jerusalem - from there he flew to Paris, etc etc etc….
“Just as a reminder: I was not being rhetorical when I declared, on exiting prison detention: Justice is the first condition of humanity.” ( Wole Soyinka)
The most significant sentence in this vintage Soyinka treatise is the word that is so emphasized in the Torah: Justice and we ought to pay special attention to Justice
with the main aim being that we all move from theory to practice.
This policy announcement is heart-warming
President-Elect Bola Tinubu: I seek a government of national competence.
Stage one accomplished: Right vision.
Where there is no vision, the people perish
ovde...@gmail.com
Before, during and after the civil war.
His activism againt injustice and his partisan polltics in support of particular political goals combine to constitute his complex politics.
His The Man Died shows him agonizing over Victor Banjo's failure to move faster from his annexation of the Midwest towards encirling the West in the name of Biafra, leading to the defeat of the Biafran forces at Ore by a regrouped Nigerian army, beginning the long journey to the defeat of Biafra, which had been locked within its geographical zone by that defeat.
He helped legitimize IBB's coup plotter govt by accepting a position in that govt, describing those who criticised his action as ''disco critics''.
In the midst of his friendly relationship wth the IBB govt, whom I dont recall him criticising, he was careful to only refer obliquely, without giving names, to the circumstantial involvement of director of military intelligence and IBB's ADC, Halilu Akilu and Tunde Togun, to the assasination of Nigeria's then perhaps most prominent journalist Dele Giwa, through a letter bomb, which Kayode Soyinka, Newswatch's London bureaue chief, who was with Giwa at the moment the letter was received, reported Giwa as stating came from the Commander in Chief. Only one person holds that title in Nigeria.
One of those two men in the IBB govt and direct service with him had been reported as calling to ascertain Giwa was at home before the letter bomb arrived by motorcycle dispatch. The other one had declared in a public interview that Giwa's case was akin to a person who stood in front of a speeding train. Both incidents are enough to bring both men to trial, possibly along with their principal, which never happended, in spite of the years long struggles of activist lawyer Gani Fawehimi.
As Nigeria's then most prominent activist, a position greatly enhanced by his relatively recent Nobel Prize for Literature, and a person part of the IBB govt or close to it, his international credentials a significant protection in an envinronment in which others had become mortified into silence by that first act of assasination at that level in Nigeria, Soyinka left Gani alone to fight that battle, Soyinka's later account of Gani's struggle unflaterring, even as he painted his ready and friendly access to IBB.
During the GEJ govt, Soyinka was involved in a running battle with President Jonathan's wife, and was reported as publicly calling her a ''sheppopotamous.''
He was granted audience with President Jonathan towards the end of that govt and came out of it to publicly ridicule the President, describing him as out of touch with reality, doing this in a manner that suggested the President was a person not in full control of his faculties.
In his intimate relationship with the political actors who later became the APC that ousted GEJ in the 2015 elections, Soyinka allowed then Rivers state governor Rotimi Amaechi to host him to an elaborate and very expensive celebration of his, Soyinka's birthday.
When the discordance between such a hugely funded celebraton of his person, most likely from the purse of Rivers State, and his activist credentails was pointed out to him, his defense was that he was unaware of the amount spent on the birthday celebration.
He jettisoned his decades long opposition to Buhari, represented by his ''The Trouble with Buhari'', the most trenchant anti-Buhari text before 2015, to support Buhari in 2015, declaring at a Harvard post-election lecture, that ''we had to change the govt using a dictator''.
The only reason I have encountered him giving for that support is that he was assured that Buhari has changed, a ridiculus reason, in my view, given Buhari's consistency of character in his entire political life.
Soyinka, however, eventually criticized the terrorist Fulani herdsmen culture enabled by Buhari but it was too late.
Soyinka's politics cant be adequately understood in terms of a non-partisan, apolitical conception of truth.
He is best appreciated as a political actor, at different times in alliance with various political interests, of different hues, even the undemocratic, and opposed to others when it suits him.
A great writer, but an unreliable politician.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Cornelius Hamelberg
Great Expectations. That’s what usually happens.
Thanks for your interesting resumé of the tiger’s activist credentials but no great thanks from us, for your unreliable conclusions. Wole Soyinka declared 1980 as the year of the theatre War against Apartheid South Africa. You failed to mention that and much else in your cherry-picking and selective amnesia. That’s how it is with some great men, you know, everything to everybody, all things to all men - and the lesson is, you can’t please everyone…
“And something ain't never quite right
Ah, but who would want to listen
To you kissing his existence good night?” ( Walking Man )
In the writer’s role, you also have a long list of writers who were politicians including people such as Senghor, Agostinho Neto , Amilcar Cabral , Václav Havel, to name just three.
Wole Soyinka, the sleeping giant's premier literary icon is also one of the world’s significant literary giants, and on top of that, according to fellow political animal Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, “Soyinka is significantly a politician.”
Like Jesus, son of Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit and crucified as “ King of the Jews”.
Wole Soyinka, a human rights activist, a political interventionist, a so-called politician without a political party, just like a king without a crown
Before some AI poet or irate sour grapes Nigerian Igbo - like Obi / Fulani - like Alhaji Atiku, Yoruba - like Pastor Obasanjo or some other not-so-sober Diaspora philosopher prince or politician decries or wants to call me to order for comparing grapes to oranges, I daresay that Adepoju the cosmopolitan cosmologist wouldn’t hesitate to say ditto about the Almighty too, that when he surveys all the documentary allegations/evidence that’s so plentifully available to him, The Almighty - by whatever name you would like to refer to Him, that “The Almighty is significantly a politician.”
I’d go further than that in support of such a claim, I’d say that in fact, the Almighty is the source of all politics, considering that according to the various popular scriptures the Almighty created man, to begin with, and perhaps even more significantly because of many of his Divine Interventions - in the course of human history, He could be regarded as the politician par excellence, for, Who can compare with the Lord? Who else is omniscient and omnipotent?
“The Godfather”?
Even further than that, in higher political parlance, the Almighty as a dictator, albeit a holy dictator who requires of others that they become holy, like Him.
At Mt. Sinai, the Almighty gave Israel a Divine Constitution.
Having said that, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that the Almighty also has a main adversary known as Satan, according to St. Paul, “ the god of this world” and that Satan is the sworn enemy of mankind: and, that, of course, along with their battalions of so-called “fallen angels” they have their own dedicated agents moving among us causing as much havoc as they can, in the on-going war between good and evil: “Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain't neutral ground.”
By the same token Achebe is or was also “significantly a politician” hence his diagnosis, “ The Trouble With Nigeria” (1983). When it comes to the calibre of first-hand experience his and Ben Okri’s pedigree leaves Adichie far behind. Lamentably, we haven’t heard as much as a word from Chinweizu for a few months now,...
Joni Mitchell: Free Man in Paris
Free Man in Paris ( live)
Cornelius Hamelberg
Re - “Like Jesus, son of Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit and crucified as “ King of the Jews”.
Here’s Marcel Sarot ( a Happy Easter Message?) on his alternative concept of God, a short discussion that addresses some of the common-sense issues raised by e.g. Richard Dawkins….