Wole Soyinka

[Toyin Falola]

Wole Soyinka 70th Birthday Lecture

"'Oguntoyinbo': Wole Soyinka and "'Igilango Geesi'"

     Lagos, Nigeria, July 5, 2004




                            Biodun Jeyifo
                           Professor of English

                                Cornell University

[Full Text of the Lecture Delivered on Monday, July 5, 2004]

"'Oguntoyinbo: Wole Soyinka and 'Igilango Geesi'"


   Mr. Chairman, as we all know, this lecture is being given to mark the 70th birthday of Professor Wole Soyinka, but I am sure that the celebrant will have no objection at all to my dedicating the lecture to the memory of the following compatriots who are no longer with us: Bola Ige; Ken Saro-Wiwa; Bala Mohammed; Fela Anikulapo-Kuti; Comrade Ola Oni; Kudirat Abiola; Mokwugo Okoye; Ola Rotimi; Bade Onimode; and Mahmud Tukur. In the course of the lecture, especially in the concluding section, it will become clearer why, as I honour one of the living today, I deem it important to remember those who, while they walked among us were, like the celebrant, dedicated fighters for the cause of justice in our country.
I was invited to give this lecture to honour the celebrant and I intend to meet the burden of this invitation to the best of my abilities. Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka, Nobel laureate for literature, CFR, Professor of Comparative Literature and Drama Emeritus of the Obafemi Awolowo University, holder of honorary doctorates from many of the world's finest universities, one time President of the International Theatre Institute and the International Parliament of Writers, an indefatigable fighter for social justice, aka Kongi, aka Captain Blood, is a man to whom all honour is due.
With regard to the title of my lecture this morning, "'Oguntoyinbo: Wole Soyinka and 'Igilango Geesi", let me at the very outset of the lecture confess that it was partly in the spirit of vengeance that I chose the subject of this lecture. This is especially true of the part of the lecture relating to "Igilango Geesi". I have myself often been accused of using "big English" in my own critical and scholarly writings, especially by no less a person than my friend, Femi Osofisan. But when we are talking of Igilango Geesi, bi ti Soyinka ko; the man is in a class all by himself. In other words, this is not a matter of "sago n'bugo", of the kettle calling the pot black. The celebrant's "Igilango Geesi" is almost without parallel among living writers. And I am not talking of only African literature in English; I am talking of the entire body of the Anglophone writings of the world in the last half a century. And I can tell you that I have first hand experience with his exquisite, ojulowo "Igilango Geesi".
About nine months ago, my study of all Soyinka's writings was published. Perhaps some day, I shall find the time to write about the years it took me trying to unravel the layers upon layers of meaning in his writings before I could finally dare to even think that I had done some justice - some justice, not full justice - to the challenge of the "Igilango Geesi" in his writings. And it was only then that I could allow Cambridge University Press to bring out the book, not a day before. As long as there remained some lingering doubts that there were still some important insights to be gleaned from the dozens of intricate, difficult or even obscure passages in any of his plays, poems, fiction and nonfiction, I held out and refused to have the book published. God is my witness. Indeed, we don't have to go that far to confirm this allegation. Let anyone who doubts this claim go to Harvard University and ask Abiola Irele, the general editor of the series for which the book was written. For many years, Professor Irele kept telling me: BJ, "o  ma je ki Soyinka pa e" (Don't let Soyinka kill you). Just do the best you can; indeed, you have done the best you can. If you go on like this, the work will never be finished."
For better or for worse, I chose to ignore that sound advice and the result, people of our land, is that as the years piled up as I struggled with Soyinka's "Igilango Geesi" in not just one volume of poems, not just one dramatic work or one novel but the entire corpus of his writings, my baldness increased, and so did my grayness. So in a way, this is my payback for all those years of struggling with and through the celebrant's writings.

Speaking seriously now, of course, I am exaggerating playfully. Professor Irele did not exactly say, "don't let Soyinka kill you"; he said something much milder. And my bookish, "acada" baldness did not come from studying only the works of Soyinka; in the long years in which I worked ceaselessly on Soyinka, I produced other books and a good number of essays. And finally, those years of study that I devoted to Soyinka's writings were worth it and I would not have had it any other way. The charges of difficulty, of impenetrable complexity, of even willful obscurity are rife in the scholarly and critical writings on Soyinka's works. For the most part, these charges are valid, but only with regard to Soyinka's most ambitious works. For let us never forget that Soyinka has also written very popular, very accessible works, works like the two "Jero" plays, like The Lion and the Jewel and Child International. Thus, my point is precisely that the difficulty and complexity of the celebrant's greatest works should not be the end of the story - as it usually is in critical and scholarly books and essays on Soyinka's works. My basic argument, my basic presupposition is that once one has made the effort to diligently engage the complexity and difficulty that are the surface expressions of many of Soyinka's most ambitious works, the yield in aesthetic pleasure, in insight into many aspects of our present social malaise is truly staggering, especially the aspects that concern our experience of colonialism and the legacies of that experience, not only in our country and on our continent, but in the modern world in general.  Thus, by focusing on precisely those aspects of his writings covered by the term "Igilango Geesi", I am hereby giving notice that it is a very special kind of celebration of Soyinka's life and works that I will attempt in this lecture. Indeed, the model for the kind of celebration that I have in mind is provided by one of the celebrant's most accomplished dramatic works, A Dance of the Forests. Let me explain what I mean by this observation.
        A Dance of the Forests was Wole Soyinka's first major play. It is also one of his most complex dramas. It has deeply fascinated and at the same time considerably perplexed two generations of scholars of his writings. The fact that a very early play in the celebrant's corpus of dramatic writings could be that extraordinary in the scale of its achievement can, in my opinion, be traced to the fact that in this play, we confront for the first time in his writings something that would become a fundamental feature of Wole Soyinka's artistic sensibility and practice. Let me try to state this as precisely as I can. I am suggesting that in that early play, A Dance of the Forests, we encounter for the very first time in the celebrant's writings, a man gifted with extraordinarily insightful visionary powers who had to find the language, the idioms and techniques of representation to give form and shape to these visionary powers. This contention can perhaps be better explained by placing it in a Yoruba cultural or metaphysical context through the following question: How does an "enia ti Edumare fun ni ebun iran riri, enia to nri orisisi iran, not to say irikuri iran", how does such a person cope with this gift of visionary powers if he or she is not to be psychically destroyed, or in plain language, go crazy? The answer of course is that it depends on the situation of such a person. If he is an artist, art will or may provide a means for such a person to find a safe, or even beneficial outlet, but this will be the product of a great struggle to find appropriate means and idioms of artistic expression. If the person is not an artist, then a priest or diviner will have to be found and the appropriate rituals of healing will be performed. But this will have to be a priest or diviner who is not a charlatan. If the priest or diviner consulted is a charlatan, that person with great visionary powers with no outlet for his visions, he is finished, "ti e ti baje". Please understand that I am not talking of just any kind of "iran riri". The predisposition to see visions comes from a wide variety of experiences and life situations: from great poverty and hunger; from fear and paranoia; from greed, opportunism and racketeering; or from something as ordinary and banal as smoking ganja or snorting cocaine. Wole Soyinka has of course written about these kinds of charlatans masquerading as visionaries in such works as The Trials of Brother Jero, The Metamorphosis of Jero and, with ferocious satire in Requiem for a Futurologist. And indeed, isn't our country, and our continent at the present time a vast breeding ground, a land of milk and honey for such charlatans masquerading as visionaries?

What I am talking of is the kind immense visionary gifts that enable great artists, thinkers, scientists, inventors and moral and social reformers to found new kinds of knowledge, new and original codes and expressions of morality or spirituality, and new and more just forms of social, political and economic organization of society. It is precisely this gift of great visionary, prophetic powers that, for the first time in Soyinka's writings, we encounter in Dance of the Forests. And even if the visionary projections that we encounter in that play are very, very frightening, our celebrant was able to find the artistic means to give shape and form to those visionary projections largely on the basis of his superior gifts of language, specifically the English tongue. That is the heart of the matter: a visionary projection that is extraordinary in its power of hinting at terrifying possibilities, for the individual and for the whole community; but right beside it is this gift of mastery of language, specifically of the English tongue, through which the dramatic poet was able to, as it were, contain the cautionary and prophetic "irikuri", the terrifying vision.  What does this have to do with the title of this lecture, with indeed the act of paying tribute to our celebrant that is my very welcome burden to discharge in this lecture today?
In response to that question let me remind the present gathering that the plot of A Dance of the Forests is constructed around what the playwright called the "gathering of the tribes" for a great celebration, a great occasion of communal renewal. Let me also draw your attention to the fact that virtually every commentator on the play has seen that "gathering of the tribes" as a metaphor of Nigeria's independence from colonial rule since, in fact, the play was written and staged as part of the country's independence celebrations. Finally, let me draw your attention to the fact that the kind of celebration which then happens in the play was not what the characters in the play expected. Since the plot of the play is well known, or at any rate ought to be, I shall not bother to give a summary here. Suffice it to simply say that where the characters in the play expected a celebration which would cast communal renewal in the present in the reflected glory of the great achievements and legacies of the past, Soyinka chose to present them with a celebration all right, but one which involved confronting some terrible corruptions and injustices in the past which, if not exorcised, would return to haunt and compromise the euphoria of the present and the hopes for the future. In other words, what Soyinka was saying through this deliberate inversion of expectations was, "independence from colonial rule is a great moment in our history, so by all means let us celebrate, but let us celebrate not as a mindless people, a people without collective memory of what has happened to us in the past and may yet happen to us again". The dry, abstract manner in which I am presenting these aspects of the play does not of course do full justice to the terrifying visions of the distant and recent past that Soyinka invokes in the play's central scenes, including the very scene which involves the celebration at the heart of the play's dramatic plot. But my purpose here is, I hope, clear: from that brilliant inversion of expectations in A Dance of the Forests, I am drawing a lesson and an example from our celebrant: yes, let us celebrate, but let us celebrate in a manner that leaves a worthy legacy for the future. It is this very original and audacious mode of celebration, this uniquely Soyinkan vision of celebration as an occasion for renewal of communal life through a courageous encounter with the great challenges of the past, the present and the future, it is this notion of celebration that I wish to invoke today as I give testament to the quality and scope of the celebrant's achievement. To give greater clarity to what I am saying here, I would describe this symbolic, Soyinka conception of celebration as "ariya-amuludun-tunluse-taiyese", which I render into English as "festival or carnival of renewal and emancipation". It is similar, at least in intent, to what has been called by some contemporary dramatic theorists "carnival of the oppressed". By the way, this conception of communal, festive celebration as a momentous occasion for cathartic self-encounter and self-renewal is in nearly every scene of celebration in Soyinka's writings, from a relatively minor work - that is to say minor within Soyinka's own body of writings - like The Strong Breed to great dramatic parables like Kongi's Harvest, Death and the King's Horseman, The Road and Madmen and Specialists. So as we start off the week of events and activities marking a life rich in inspiration and achievement, it is this conception of celebration from the celebrant's own works that I have in mind in my lecture this morning. More specifically, it is between two key words in the title of my lecture, that I wish invoke this kind of celebration in order to construct a symbolic or allegorical framework for a proper and deep appreciation of the celebrant's achievement and legacy. The words are "Oguntoyinbo" and, of course, "Igilango Geesi". Permit me to give a short elaboration of the meanings that I will be attaching to these two words in this lecture, starting with "Igilango Geesi".

In the days of my childhood and youth, especially in primary school, the term "Igilango Geesi" was applied to a person whose mastery of the English language was superlative, so superlative indeed that such mastery of the language went beyond the competence of the "owners" of the language, the English themselves. Since it is probably the case that quite a substantial number of those present at this gathering belong to generations born long afterwards, let me remind you that the period I am referring to was the colonial age itself. This was a period when as schoolchildren we annually celebrated "Empire Day", singing lustily in praise of the Queen and her empire on which it was then often said that the sun would never set. In that epoch, to write or speak English better than the English themselves was to earn that epithet, "Igilango Geesi". Now, the interesting thing about "Igilango Geesi" is that it was an ambiguous phrase; it had both negative and positive connotations. It was applied to both persons genuinely and brilliantly gifted in English and persons who were pretenders, persons who were not actually gifted in English but loved big words and liked to show off. It was indeed people like these who gave the term its bad, negative connotation. As an example of such people, there is a character named Bambulu in James Ene Henshaw's play, This Is Our Chance. In Bambulu's speeches throughout this play, every other word is an example of inflated, verbose language, of "oyinbo repete" or "gba kan su'bu Geesi". Either as actors in that play, or as audiences in school productions of This Is Our Chance, we felt great pleasure in Bambulu's flamboyant pyrotechnics with the English language. But there are different forms of pleasure or delight: the delight that we felt in Bambulu's "Igilango Geesi" was comic delight. We most certainly did not see him as a model to copy, or if to copy at all, to do so only in jest, in a parody of the real stuff. This real stuff of "Igilango Geesi" we found in those of our classmates in whose essays - or "composition" as we called them - the use of English was so brilliant that the teacher would have one of us read the "composition" to the whole class. While the "composition" was being read, the whole class would be rapt with attention, listening with a mixture of awe, envy and respect. For usually, there was never more than a single pupil in a class who wrote and spoke English so well as to be the object of awe, envy and respect of the other pupils. Again, let me repeat that I am referring to the colonial period itself when the English were here as the colonial overlords of not only our then not-yet-born country, but of British West and East Africa as well, of indeed the far-flung British empire itself, an empire spread out over the five continents and at it's peak covering about three quarters of the earth's surface. In that historic cultural context, in our imagination, a pupil who showed early signs of "Igilango Geesi" of the real stuff, not the Bambulu kind, was operating on the same plane, in the same firmament, at least on the linguistic level, with the very lords of the universe, the English colonial imperialists. Such pupils, we all thought, would go very far in life if they made good use of their exceptional gift of effortless mastery of the English tongue. Anyone who has read Ake: the Years of Childhood would know that Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka, in his primary school days at Ake, Abeokuta in then Southern Protectorate of the colonial territory of Nigeria, was such a pupil.
I have identified a distinction between a fake "Igilango Geesi" and a genuine one, between one that was an exhibitionist imitation, a parody of the one that was the real stuff. I must admit that sometimes, the one blended with the other. The reason for this comes from an enigmatic feature of language, not just English, but also all languages. This is the fact that you cannot have a mastery of language without having the powerful, overwhelming impulse to display that mastery, to play with all the potentialities of language, and more than this, to stretch these potentialities well beyond their limits. It was this aspect of masterful use of language which, in the case of "Igilango Geesi", brought the fake, exhibitionist variety close to the genuine, original stuff, to the point where to some people, the two could not be differentiated. In the case of Wole Soyinka of course, there is not the slightest doubt than you are in the presence of the original stuff, of "Baba ke". Indeed, what is fascinating about Soyinka's "Igilango Geesi" is that in some of his writings, he himself subjects the confusion between the original stuff and the fake variety to satire and parody. I cannot go fully into this within the context of this lecture, but those who are interested in the topic will find much to tickle their imagination in works like Requiem for a Futurologist and The Road.

There is a dimension of the impulse to play with language, to stretch its potentialities that I have just identified with the genuine variety of "Igilango Geesi" that perhaps needs some clarification in the context of this lecture. This is the fact this impulse comes from an aspect of language that the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, probably had in mind when he called language the house of being. From this observation, I make the following extrapolation: in the House of Being, there are many mansions; language is the key which lets one into any of those mansions; masterful use of language allows one into all, or many of the mansions. From this extrapolation, it is easy, I hope, to accept a philosophical claim about language that forms the conceptual base of this lecture, and this is the claim that mastery of language makes available to a writer access to areas of Being that others only very, very dimly glimpse.
"Igilango Geesi" was of course a linguistic phenomenon that happened throughout the British Empire; it was not limited to the experience of one ethno-national group. Indeed, let me place it in a "Wazobean" framework: in Yoruba, this phenomenon is called "Igilango Geesi"; in Hausa, it is "Dogon Turenchi"; in Igbo, it is "Ogonogo Oyibo". I am deliberately emphasizing this historic context of imperial rule and domination because it is only within this context that we can properly see and appreciate the link that I wish to make between "Igilango Geesi" - or "Dogon Turenchi", or "Ogonogo Oyibo" - and the other key word in the title of my lecture, Oguntoyinbo". I am also laying this emphasis on the historic colonial context of "Igilango Geesi" because in now moving to the second key term in this lecture, "Oguntoyinbo", I wish to indicate that I am merely giving a Yoruba example of a phenomenon that is of such extraordinary historic and cultural significance that I am sure that examples of the phenomenon can be found in the cultural lexicon of other ethno-national groups throughout the British, and indeed the French and Portuguese colonial empires. What is this extraordinary phenomenon that is encoded in the word "Oguntoyinbo"?
In responding to this question, I ask that we pay attention to several facts pertaining to the etymology and social usages of the word, as well as its metaphoric and symbolic connotations. Thus, I ask first, that we pay attention to the fact that the word conjoins the name of one of the most powerful of the deities of the Yoruba pantheon, Ogun, with the word "oyinbo", literally translated as "the white man". In the light of this simple gloss on the etymology of the word, "Oguntoyinbo" can be literally translated as "Ogun is an equal of, or is a match for the white man". Please note that I say that this is a simple, literal translation, a translation that I shall presently considerably complicate. Following this, I ask that we remember that as a family name, a patronym which came into being with the historic arrival of the white man as a colonizer, an imperial overlord in our part of the world, "Oguntoyinbo" shares an etymological similarity with other family names like "Fatoyinbo" and "Odetoyinbo" in that in each of these patronyms, the name of a god or avatar who is deemed to be one of the most powerful deities in the Yoruba pantheon is invoked in conjunction with the presence of the white man as a colonial overlord. To put this matter somewhat differently, let us recall that the principle of forming family names from the deities of the pantheon does not discriminate between powerful gods and smaller deities. Hence, just as you have Ogunbiyi, Fagbemi, and Sangodare, patronyms derived from the powerful male deities, so do you have names like Oyawoye, and Osundare, names that are derived from female deities. But in relation to the arrival of the white man as a colonial overlord in this part of West Africa, it appears that only the names of the most powerful male deities were appropriated as an encoded response. To put the matter in a slightly comic form, who has ever heard of a name like "Iwintoyinbo"? Or "Orotoyinbo"? Or "Eboratoyinbo"? "Iwin", "Oro", "Ebora": these are all small spirits, they belong to the class of "ghommids" that inhabit the world of D. O. Fagunwa's hunters' sagas or Amos Tutuola's enchanted narratives. Because they are minor spirits and avatars, they don't have cults of devotees attached to the powerful male and female deities of the pantheon, and neither do they invoke the great symbolic and spiritual energies associated with the cults of Ogun and Ifa or the guild of hunter-warriors implied in the name "Odetoyinbo".

From these clarifications, we can now attempt a far more complex and more meaningful translation of the word "Oguntoyinbo" than that simple and literal transliteration that I earlier alluded to, "Ogun is a match for, or is an equal to the white man". And from such a much richer translation, we can then begin to perceive the links between those two key words or terms in the title of my lecture, "Oguntoyinbo" and "Igilango Geesi".
For this richer and more complex translation, we have to ask the following question: what was it about the arrival of the white man in our part of the world as a colonial overlord that generated family names like Oguntoyinbo, Fatoyinbo, and Odetoyinbo, names based on the most powerful male deities in the pantheon? The answer to this question is, I suggest, completely unambiguous: the arrival of the white man as a colonial overlord in our land and in other parts of Africa, in Asia and North and South America and other parts of the world, this historic event signified a new order of existence that was so profoundly threatening, so all-embracing in its effects that only the symbolic values and the spiritual energies associated with the most powerful deities in the pantheon were deemed appropriate to the threat, the challenge posed by this event. This world-historical event dialectically involved a great opportunity as well, and I shall touch on this later in the lecture, but for now, it is on the threat, the challenge that I wish to focus.
Anyone who has carefully read either Chinua Achebe's two novelistic masterpieces, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, and Wole Soyinka's great tragic play Death and the King's Horseman and his long, narrative mythopoem, Ogun Abibiman, can glean from these works the nature and scope of the threat, the challenge posed by the colonial enslavement of people in every region of the world by Europeans, including some peoples of Europe itself like the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots. Indeed, we can get a sense of the scope of this threat and challenge by the fact that, in one form or another, it is the subject of other great works of contemporary literature from around the world like Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World, Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Leslie Marmion Silko's Almanac of the Dead, and Brian Friel's Translations. To put the real nature of this threat and challenge at its clearest formulation, it is simply that the order of colonial overlordship was likened to the order of nature itself; it was justified with the claim that a people are colonized, or conversely, that one people are able to colonize another because this was all in accordance with the order of nature itself.
We are not in the colonial age of Europe's imperial world domination any more, but I have my reason for going back to it. If I may remind you of a point I made earlier in this lecture, I am following the example of the celebrant himself in that first major play of his wherein he first showed his genius in an extraordinarily original manner, Dance of the Forests. Let me recall what the model of celebration in that play provides for this lecture: yes, let us celebrate a worthy event or personage - and on this particular occasion, an eminently worthy literary artist and intellectual - but let us celebrate as a people willing and able to confront the challenges and possibilities in our past and present. This is why I am tracing the words "Igilango Geesi" and "Oguntoyinbo" to their colonial roots, especially the logic of colonial domination at its most effective.
Colonial overlordship worked best when it succeeded in convincing both the colonizer and the colonized that there were no alternatives to colonization in the forward match of modern history, when it made people on both sides of the colonial divide accept that the colonial order was completely in consonance with the order of nature itself. The famous or infamous slogan of the sun never going to set on the British Empire derived from this view of colonial domination as the order of nature. This is a point made powerfully by the late Edward Said in his magisterial study of imperialism and the responses it generated in the colonized world, Culture and Imperialism. In that book, Said argues that the only reason why famous Western philosophers and writers could quite openly express the extremely racist and ethnocentric views about non-Western peoples that we find so shocking today was due to the simple but profound fact that they implicitly believed that Western imperial domination of the world would last forever. The logic of Said's point here is that if you feel that your dominion over a people was part of the natural order and would therefore last forever, then you could say anything about them because they would never be in a position to effectively call you to account, effectively challenge your claims to sovereign dominion over them. To those who may perhaps think that this is all past history, I draw your attention to contemporary global history, to the ways in which the G8 countries relate to the rest of the world, especially to the poorest countries in the world, the majority of which are in our continent. In all their dealings with us, or rather with our leaders and our political and cultural elites, the message from the G8 countries is clear that they cannot seriously think of us in any relationship with them in which we are not dependent, debt-ridden, beggar nations, they cannot seriously think of an alternative to the world in which we now live, a world that is divided between rich nations and poor nations, a world in which universal social injustice dictates the course affairs everywhere, between nations and within nations.

"Oguntoyinbo" is a response to the self-deification of the white man in the colonial period that was rooted in the myth that his dominion or sovereignty over his colonized subjects was a part of the natural order of things. That is why the literal translation, "Ogun is an equal to the white man" doesn't go deep at all. For it gives the skewed impression that by comparing Ogun, a deity, to the white man, a mere mortal, this is tantamount to deification of the white man, any white man or all white men. But Oguntoyinbo is, properly speaking, a response to the self-deification of the white man, to the myth that colonial sovereignty is a sort of divine sovereignty. In order words, Oguntoyinbo is a counter-myth. Ogun, like most of the deities of the Yoruba pantheon and indeed most of the divinities of traditional African religion, is a nature divinity, an embodiment of certain energies, forces and predispositions deeply rooted in earth and nature. I said earlier that colonial overlordship worked best when both the colonizer and the colonized implicitly or tacitly accepted the myth or the claim that colonialism was rooted in the order of nature itself. This claim in turn rested on something that seems, at least on the surface, undeniable and unchallengeable: the ever-expanding scope of the conquest of the forces of nature by Western industrial and postindustrial capitalism, in its colonial and postcolonial phases. Since Ogun, a nature divinity has dominion over energies and forces of nature, Oguntoyinbo is a symbolic indication that those who were colonized can also tap into, and control the forces of nature.
Mr. Chairman, I must admit that I have digressed quite a bit from my announced intention to show how the link between "Oguntoyinbo" and "Igilango Geesi" provides a symbolic basis for celebrating the work and legacy of Wole Soyinka according to the model of celebration that I earlier in this lecture designated "ariya-amuludun-tunluse-taiyese", a festival or carnival of renewal and emancipation. But this digression was necessary in order to show the historical roots of both terms in the colonial age, more precisely in a certain mythology of colonial sovereignty. It is now time to focus on this link, without any further digressions. And here, I want to be as clear and unambiguous as possible, using the plainest language that I can muster, even though I am dealing with very complex processes of history, past history and contemporary history. Thus, I propose that Oguntoyinbo is an idea, a counter-myth for which "Igilango Geesi" is the practical realization, the material manifestation. Another way of putting this is to say that "Oguntoyinbo" states a thesis that "Igilango Geesi" practically validates as an objective phenomenon in the world. Still another way of expressing this is to say that without Igilango Geesi, Oguntoyinbo remains a myth, a mere fantasy. The work of Wole Soyinka provides literal proof of this contention and though that literal proof is important, it is what we are able to extrapolate from it as an example, a legacy, that I want to emphasize.
The crucial element in Igilango Geesi lies in the very notion of using the English language in a manner that surpasses the owners of the language themselves, surpasses the objectives they had when they imposed their language on us as colonized subjects. When I spoke earlier about the dialectical opportunity that accompanied the threat and the challenge posed by colonialism to the colonized, this was what I had in mind. When you use language in the Igilango Geesi manner, you are transforming the English language, you are doing things with it and in it that the owners of the language themselves had not thought imaginable. This particular sentiment is expressed in the following passage from a review of the staging of The Road in London in 1965 during the Commonwealth Arts Festival of that year. The review was written by a theatre critic, Penelope Gilliat, who was at that time a very influential critic of the British professional stage:

Every decade or so, it seems to fall to a non-English dramatist to belt new energy into the English tongue. The last time was when Brendan Beehan's The Quare Fellow opened at Theatre Workshop. Nine years later, in the reign of Stage Sixty at the same beloved Victorian building at Stratford East, a Nigerian called Wole Soyinka has done for our napping language what brigand dramatists from Ireland have done for centuries: booted it awake, rifled its pockets and scattered the loot into the middle of next week.

As far as praise for Soyinka's Igilango Geesi from a representative of the "owners" of the language goes, this is genuine, gratified praise, couched in an excited, rambunctious language that was probably inspired by Soyinka's use of language in The Road. But this praise ignores, or is totally oblivious of the "Oguntoyinbo" dimension of Soyinka's "Igilango Geesi". In the light of this dimension, it is not Soyinka's intention to merely wake up the "napping" English language for the edification of Englishmen and women. His intention is to take the English language to areas of being that the owners of the language had not thought imaginable; or, which is the same thing, had once thought imaginable but had irrevocably lost and can recover now only if they have the humility, the grace, and let it be said, the self-interest to make themselves receptive to a fundamental aspect of world literary and intellectual history in the twentieth century. This is the fact that the things that writers like Soyinka, Achebe, J.P. Clark, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Kamau Braithwaite, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Femi Osofisan, Ben Okri, Ama Ata Aidoo, Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun and a host of other Anglophone writers around the world are doing to and with the English language transcend things the English had thought their language capable of expressing, including the end of English as a language of colonial sovereignty and dominion over large areas of the world. I submit that only a perception of the link between Oguntoyinbo and Igilango Geesi enables one to see this dimension of the Anglophone writings of the contemporary world from around the world. In this respect, let me repeat again that Igilango Geesi is only a Yoruba expression of an extremely widespread linguistic and artistic phenomenon, a phenomenon in which the English language, as a medium of literary expression, comes into contact with other languages, other traditions of expressive idioms and is fundamentally transformed in such encounters. To make an illustration of this point from another great figure of contemporary Nigerian literature, this being Chinua Achebe, who has not felt himself or herself in the presence of an English literary medium that is vastly transformed by contact with Igbo expressive idioms in the crystalline prose of Achebe's greatest novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God?
       Mr. Chairman, compatriots, it is time to move to the concluding section of this lecture. I started the lecture with a brief account of how, in Soyinka's first major play, Dance of the Forests, we encountered for the very first time in his writings a gift for prophetic, visionary powers so extraordinary that only by the force of his equally great gifts in language did he manage to find meaningful, coherent and beneficial outlet for them. In concluding this lecture, I now return to that theme and in doing so will touch on an aspect of that term "Oguntoyinbo", which so far, I may have implied here and there in the lecture, but have not fully and directly engaged. Of all the dimensions of Soyinka's achievement and legacy - and Edumare knows that they are many and diverse - it is the one that appeals the most to me, speaking for myself and perhaps those of my generation who were drawn so powerfully to Soyinka and the example of his work that in order to achieve our own artistic, intellectual and political adulthood and maturity, we had perforce to go through him, sometimes in extremely fractious and bitter controversies. Paradoxically, it is this very aspect of Soyinka's appropriation of the Oguntoyinbo counter-myth that, speaking now only for myself and not for an entire generation, establishes the limits of his achievement and legacy, the point where, metaphorically speaking, the rubber meets the road, the place where larger collectivities and institutions must take off from the achievements of one individual genius. Simply stated, in this dimension of Soyinka's appropriation of the Oguntoyinbo counter-myth, Ogun is a match for the colonial overlordship of the white man and his claim of natural sovereignty and dominion over the earth not only because he is one of the most powerful divinities in the pantheon, but primarily because for Soyinka Ogun is a god of restorative justice. My elaboration of this point will lead to the concluding summation of what I have been trying to say in this lecture.

        So much has been written on Soyinka's fascination with Ogun, on his adoption very early in his work of this deity as the muse of his creative sensibility that I am saying nothing new in this lecture in linking Oguntoyinbo to Igilango Geesi when I could equally have appropriated "Fatoyinbo" or "Odetoyinbo" for the same purpose. Literally millions of words have been written in books, essays and articles on the centrality of the Ogun archetype in Soyinka's writings. Indeed, I know I am not revealing any privileged information here when I say that the celebrant's email address - eniogun.com - translates literally as a being of Ogun, a being of the god's protection and grace. Also, it is a commonplace of the scholarship on Soyinka's writings that all the major characters of his works, in all the genres, are seen in one way or another as Ogunnian protagonists. Given this background, what I have to say here on Soyinka's appropriation of the Oguntoyinbo counter-myth is really a distillation of things I myself and others have said in other contexts, a deliberate highlighting of what has so far been understated. And it is this: in his appropriation of the symbolic connotations of the Ogun archetype, Soyinka makes the character of the god many-sided and contradictory, but within this framework, he makes Ogun's propensity for redistributive justice constant and unwavering. One of the products of this pattern in Soyinka's writings is the fact that characters who are constructed around the archetype provided by Ogun are deeply flawed but are nonetheless relentless in their pursuit of justice; and though they find justice elusive in a world that seems not yet ready for it, they never waver from the pursuit of justice. There are innumerable passages from Soyinka's writings in which the counter-myth of Oguntoyinbo combines with Igilango Geesi to give extraordinary aesthetic resonance to this pattern, but time will permit me to read only two passages in illustration of this point. The first passage is from Madmen and Specialists while the second one is from The Road. I shall read these passages without offering any detailed analyses of either passage because I do not have the time to do so in the context of this lecture. I quote the passages with a simple plea to you: simply listen, listen attentively to Igilango Geesi at work in Soyinka's writings and perhaps you may get a glimpse of how effortlessly he brilliantly combines the phonetic, lexical, semantic, and ontological dimensions of language. For only after we have glimpsed this ability to move into and around diverse forms and aspects of Being and existence through masterful use of language, only then can we establish the grounds of both Soyinka's achievements and their inevitable limitations. First then, the passage from Madmen and Specialists:
      
Old Man: Because Š we are together in As (He rises slowly). As Is, and the System is its mainstay though it wear a hundred masks and a thousand outward forms. And because you are within the System, the cyst in the System that irritates, the foul gurgle of the cistern, the expiring function of a faulty cistern and are part of the material for reformulating the mind of a man into the necessity of the moment's political As, the moment's scientific As, metaphysic As, sociologic As, economic, recreative ethical As, you-cannot-escape! There is but one constant in the life of the System and that constant is As. And what can you pit against the priesthood of that constant deity, its gospellers, its enforcement agency? And even if you say unto them, do I not know you, did I not know you in rompers with leaky nose and smutty face? Did I not know you thereafter, know you in the haunt of cat-houses, did I not know you riffling the poor boxes in the local church, did I not know you dissolving the night in fumes of human self-indulgence, simply, simply, simply did I not know you, do you not defecate, fornicate, prevaricate when heaven and earth implore you to abdicate and are you not prey to headaches, indigestion, colds, disc displacement, ingrowing toenail, dysentery, malaria, flatfoot, corns and chilblains. Simply, simply, do I not know you Man like me? Then shall they say unto you, I am chosen, restored, redesignated and redestined and further further shall they say unto you, you heresiarchs of the System arguing, questioning, querying weighing puzzling insisting rejecting upon you all shall we practice, without passionŠ

Mendicants: Practice
Old Man: With no ill-will
Mendicants: Practice
Old man: With good conscienceŠ
Mendicants: PracticeŠ
Old man: That the end shallŠ
Mendicants: Practice
Old Man: Justify the meannessŠ
Mendicants: PracticeŠ
Old Man:  Without emotionŠ.
Mendicants: Practice
Old Man: Without human tiesŠ
Mendicants: Practice

The second passage from The Road is the very last speech in the play, spoken by the play's protagonist, Professor, as he is apparently dying after having been fatally stabbed by one of the play's most colourful characters, Say-Tokyo Kid. Martin Esslin, one of the most influential scholars and critics of modern Western drama has called Soyinka one of the finest poetic playwrights who have ever written in the English language; he must have had passages like this one in mind when he made that incontrovertible judgment about the achievement of Soyinka's drama:

Prof: Be even like the road itself. Flatten your bellies with the hunger of an unpropitious day, power your hands with the knowledge of death. In the heat of the afternoon when the sheen raises false forests and a watered haven, let the event first unravel before your eyes. Or in the dust when ghost lorries pass you by and your shouts your tears fall on deaf panels and the dust swallows them. Dip in the same basin as the man that makes his last journey and stir with one finger wobbling reflections of two hands, two hands but one face only. Breathe like the road. Be the road. Coil yourself in dreams, lay flat in treachery and deceit and at the moment of a trusting step, rear your head and strike the traveler in his confidence, swallow him whole or break him on the earth. Spread a broad sheet for death with the length and the time of the sun between you until the one face multiplies and the one shadow is cast by all the doomed. Breathe like the road, be even like the road itselfŠ.

Mr. Chairman, for centuries after William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, nothing of the order of the quality of poetic drama from which these two passages are excerpted had been written in the English language before Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka arrived on the scene of world drama with his Igilango Geesi. At the level of the aesthetic, linguistic and cultural resources of artistic creation, that is the magnitude of the achievement and legacy we are celebrating this week. And as if that were not enough, this order of expressive power is, in Soyinka's works, consistently devoted to the cause of social justice. And herein lies the paradoxical limits of the achievement. I shall end my lecture with a succinct summation of the range of issues contained in this observation.
   Let us think of Igilango Geesi as a metaphor for being the very best you can be as a writer whose historic conditions - conditions not of your own choosing - have compelled to take over the English tongue as your own. Let us further reflect that in being the very best you can be in your craft or trade or profession, you are also relentlessly and indefatigably devoted to the cause of social justice, in your own part of the world, but also for the entirety of the human community. Let us think of what might be the equivalents of Igilango Geesi in other disciplines, other professions and calling. In the tradition of how Igilango Geesi was coined, what, for instance, would we call being the very best in the world of science? Would we, for instance, call it "Ogbologbo Sayensi", or maybe "Ojulowo Sayensi? I hope the point I am making here is clear: Soyinka's example and legacy through Igilango Geesi should be repeatable in other disciplines and other professions. On the basis of that repeatability lies our survival as a people, a country, a continent, most of whose peoples are ravaged and pillaged, by internal and external forces of false dominion and sovereignty, and by forces of nature seemingly beyond our control. We all know that the chances of the example of Soyinka's Igilango Geesi being repeated at the present time in any calling are very slim indeed. Let us be as clear and unambiguous as we can be in expressing what this entails: only strong, viable institutions and infrastructures, not individual geniuses, can assure the repeatability of Igilango Geesi in other professions and disciplines, in even literature and the arts, Soyinka's own domain of formidable influence and authority and of his legacy to the present and the future; but where those institutions and infrastructures should be, there are only monumental wreckages piling up to the high heavens. This point marks the place where we encounter the ontological and material limits of Igilango Geesi - or any other expression of individual genius for that matter. It is the point at which individual genius is not enough, the point where larger institutional forces must take over or else individual genius becomes either so severely isolated a phenomenon or so very rare an occurrence that reactionary, opportunistic or redundant coteries or bands of "devotees" are erected around it. [May such bands or coteries never, never be erected around Soyinka!] As I said earlier in the lecture when I invoked an image drawn from the world of automobiles and the diverse aspects of life based on traveling on the highways, this is where the rubber meets the road. When you travel on the highways, you want to stay inside the car or the bus, availing yourself of whatever security and comfort it affords, you do not want to be where the rubber of the tyres meets the road. But in order to get where you are going, the rubber must meet the road and do so unimpeded. Look around you at the appalling condition of our schools, our universities, our hospitals, our parastatals, and, yes, our roads, and see how we are faring where the rubber meets the road. There are many dimensions to this metaphor but in the present context, I will mention only two: Africa's extreme and intensifying marginalization from the centers of intellectual, technological and informational innovation in the contemporary world; the terrible and absolutely unacceptable impoverishment of the vast majority of our peoples. If I had more time, this is a subject that I would have liked to develop further, but it is time to conclude this lecture.

I would like to conclude on a note from Soyinka's writings that may seem pessimistic to some, but is for me paradoxically optimistic. This point may be gleaned from the excerpt from Madmen and Specialists that I read just a while ago in this talk. The passage articulates a very, very bleak view of the underlying bases of past and present modes of organization of human community, but just remember that it is orchestrated by a character who is deeply revolted by the state of things, and moreover is articulated with élan, with sly humour and corrosive wit. One of the most resonant sentences in all of Soyinka's writings is this sentence from The Man Died: Justice is the first condition of humanity. The course of justice in our world is, like the abiku phenomenon, a "daku daji" affair, a born again, dead again dilemma. This is both a matter for deep pessimism and a portent of hope that the cause of justice will never be extinguished. In celebration of this point as a summation of Soyinka's achievement and legacy, I conclude with a reading of the following lines from a poem from the second of Soyinka's six volumes of poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt. The poem is appropriately titled "Seed"; it was composed at a moment of great bleakness in the life of the poet when he was in solitary confinement, but was able to tap into great reserves of grace, imagination and spirit to pen these lines:

      I speak in the voice of gentle rain
     In whispers of growth
   In sleight of light
     I speak in aged hairs of wind
   Midwife to cloud
        And sheaves on threshing floor


Biodun Jeyifo
Lagos, July 5, 2004


 

       

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Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa