Review: Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola, ‘Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation’
Soyinka, Africa and the Worlds Beyond
Review of Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola’s Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation (Bloomsbury, 2021), 320 pages.
Abstract
The Nigerian Nobel Prize winning writer Wole Soyinka is a giant of African literature. His various works in almost every genre of literature spans some six decades. This new biography examines the life, the works and the political activism of a man that the book claims has transformed African literature. But what might the reader learn not only about Soyinka but about African literature from this biography? This review explores these questions.
Reviewed by Gabriel O. Apata
What then is biography? This is not a question about definition. We know what biography is: it is the history or story of a life. What we wish to know is whether biography is art or science or indeed what to make of it. If biography is art, then it is art of a different kind. It is literature that is caught up in disciplinary no man’s land, not belonging to sociology proper, history, psychology, philosophy, politics or even fiction, but crosses different boundaries, hardly making a home of any. In this sense, biography lacks for itself disciplinary methodology while its favoured approach, chronology, rests on sequential ordering – one event following another – which gives false impression of necessary causal connections between them and of linear teleology that appears to head towards an end that providence appears to have designed. Bourdieu in Biographical Illusion (1986), as the title suggests, describes biography as an illusion, on account that the ‘life history’ which constitutes its subject-matter lacks internal logic or coherence. It is largely descriptive narrative built around selected pieces of scattered events that is then cobbled together to produce what he refers to as ‘social surface’. Thus, biography reduces history to the individual life, and that individual life to a series of events. In this sense biography appears to operate like Spinoza’s substance, while the events that attach to it operate like attributes, turning the subject, the life into a Master of the universe, so to speak, the shaper of events. We find similar idea in Carlyle’s Hero and Hero Worship (1841) in which he reduces history to biography, claiming that ‘The history of the world is but the biography of great men’ and that history is ‘the essence of innumerable biographies.’ The question is what then are the essential elements or logic that ties different and innumerable biographies together, separate from the social contexts that those individuals inhabited, the ‘surface social factors’? The answer is the life itself. But the events in which the life participates, the histories that make up the life, are contingent and not the workings of a teleological linearity. Which is to say that human beings are shaped as much by events, if not more so, than they shape events.
Yet biography cannot be dismissed as entirely meaningless. The problem for Bourdieu or arguments the kind that describes a phenomenon as an illusion, is that such arguments seem to suggest that there is nothing there, the same as describing a thing as a mirage. No doubt an illusion or indeed a mirage represents a false impression of an object – that the object is not what we belief it to be – but there is still something there even if that something is a distortion of reality. It must have its own illusory logic. Biography exists and must be read as something from which some form of knowledge is derived. Thus, biography cannot be said to lack value since it imports literary, historical and epistemological significance. Therefore, even if there can be no theory of biography, from an academic perspective at least, biography must operate like a cuckoo bird by laying its eggs in the nest of other disciplines from which it must then proceed to inhabit the life and methods of those disciplines. This means that as literature it must transcend its subject-matter, the individual life that is its primary focus, as to become sociology, history, philosophy, politics, even science or fiction. For example, two of the most famous biographies in history, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1831), are literary masterpieces that read like fiction and histories, while Martin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life (1991) is essentially a history of British politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1945) is a history of philosophy, or the history of ideas presented in the form of biographies.
So, where does this new biography Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation by Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola fall within the disciplinary canon? In a career spanning six decades during which he has published several important works of novels, drama, poetry, memoirs, essays and many others, not to speak of his political activism, Soyinka’s life is a biographer’s dream. Yet, it is also a daunting undertaking not least because so much has been written on Soyinka, many of them by the writer himself. But the authors have managed to squeeze Soyinka’s life and works into 279 pages, divided into four parts: introduction and context, historical and cultural background, literary works and finally legacies and conclusions that again examine Soyinka’s oeuvre. Each of these parts are chopped up in vignettes of themes and analyses.
Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, a town in Southwest Nigeria during British colonial rule. The name Abeokuta means under a rock - Olumo rock is the area around which Abeokutans settled after being driven out of the Oyo Empire. This experience appears to have instilled a siege mentality into this group, a collective warrior psychology such that when the missionaries arrived, they were met with resistance and activism. But the colonial masters managed to establish Christianity as well as education in Abeokuta, and this combination of spartan resistance and Christian education became the making of Soyinka, and other notable Abeokutans like Funmilayo Ransome Kuti and later her famous musician son, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The Yoruba language into which Soyinka was born is also a significant factor in his development as a writer, as we shall later see.
What follows is the context which deals with analyses of Soyinka’s works by various authors including Biodun Jeyifo, James Gibbs, Clara Brodie and others. Jump to the third part of the book, literary works, and the discussion returns to analyses of Soyinka’s works. Perhaps the strength of the book is the analyses of Soyinka’s works situated within Yoruba culture. However, the puzzle is why the critical analyses by various authors and the book’s authors were not brought under one section rather than split in this way? This presents a problem of structure that disjoints the discussion, resulting in what can only be described as Groundhog Day narrative with too many repetitions scattered across the book. Here is just one example. ‘On July 13, 1934, Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta’ (vi); ‘Born on July 1934 to Yoruba parents’ (51); ‘Born in 1934, Wole Soyinka’s literary…’ (80); ‘Born in the Great Depression in 1934…’ (82). Then ‘Akinwande, Oluwole Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, Nigeria’ (239). Could just one mention of his date of birth not have sufficed?
Yet, the sociology of Soyinka’s cultural background, with which the authors begin the book is significant, framing Soyinka’s life as ‘a product of his society, his times, and his chosen responses and reactions to the conditions of his society’ (86). And: ‘Soyinka imbibes Yoruba culture’, the authors write, ‘which does not draw a distinction between respective public and private lives and responsibilities of members of the Yoruba community’ (122). This sociology of knowledge could have been pursued with more panache and rigour but fades away at precisely the point where it needed to get going. The fact that Soyinka is Yoruba, Nigerian and African is not only significant but crucial to our understanding of African culture through his works.
What we find is that in much of his works Soyinka has sought not merely to resist the denigration of African culture, but to return to those roots, particularly the Yoruba culture, recover and then present them to the world in all its finery. But it is not only to the West that Soyinka has sought to show the profundities of African culture; it is to Africans themselves who appear ignorant of, or have lost parts of their own traditions, believing it to be inferior to Western culture. In Myth, Literature and the African World (1976) Soyinka sees African culture as sacred and laments its profanation, while in Beyond Aesthetics (2019) he laments the sacrilege, denigration and destruction of African art.
One major problem with this book is that it does not sufficiently distinguish between methodological individualism and methodological holism or converge them in seamless narrative. So, while the first part of the book sees African culture through Soyinka the man and his works, the second part appears to pursue the idea of methodological individualism, i.e., a Carlylean hero worship or great man theory of history. Indeed, it could be argued that the book’s main thesis is the greatness of Wole Soyinka as a literary figure, because so early in the book we are told that: ‘Soyinka is the greatest literary mind from Africa’ (xiii). Then ‘Wole Soyinka is one of the greatest writers Africa has ever produced’ (3). Then, ‘Soyinka is one of Africa’s greatest literary minds’ (137). And ‘Soyinka is one of his generation’s great African literary minds…’ (146). Apart from these repetitions, similar adjectives are liberally sprinkled across many passages, such as: ‘global icon’, ‘genius’ and so on, making the narrative at times read like the reverential obsequiousness of a fan. Nothing wrong with being a fan, but critical distance is still required to make the case for admiration. While many might agree that Soyinka is a great writer, the book does not exactly tell us in analytical detail why he is possibly Africa’s greatest writer. With whom for instance is he being compared and by what yardstick? Instead, what we have is Soyinka as Nietzsche’s superman (Übermensch), a transcendental figure that towers above everyone else. This then is the problem of biographical illusion about which Bourdieu speaks, where the life is placed on a supreme pedestal from a collage of events and where the events appear to come into existence by fiat of the man himself.
This point requires a further emphasis. According to Macpherson (1962) the problem of possessive individualism lies in this ‘conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owning nothing to society for them’ (3). While this is not quite the argument that the authors make, their presentation of Soyinka’s greatness takes their narrative in that direction, which contrasts with methodological holism the kind that Bourdieu (1984) offers through his concept of ‘habitus’. For Bourdieu, the individual inhabits ‘social fields’ that shapes his or her life, meaning that individual achievements, however considerable, cannot be explained in isolation or at a remove from the holistic or social world that the subject inhabits, or from historical processes of which he or she forms a part. The individual is not independent of the world in which he or she lives, or the world in which he or she plays a role, even if that role is a dominant one.
Yet, in analysing the concept of biography, individual agency must not be allowed to disappear completely down a plughole of history only to leave nothing but mere social structures in place, structures empty of life. The unique qualities of the subject or the life cannot be ignored since that life also forms part of the social development. No doubt some individuals are blessed with extraordinary or exceptional talents, qualities, genius even, that make them unique. There must remain a unity that holds the plurality of different aspects of these events together, which is the life. The point I am making here is a subtle one, which is to say that although the book does contextualise Soyinka’s life and his works and does situate them within Yoruba and Nigerian culture, the connections needed to be explicated better for the narrative to form a coherent whole. It is for this reason that we see repetitions and actions, or events cut loose from or are loosely attached to the life itself rather than to a narrative in which everything coheres, which is precisely the illusion of a life about which Bourdieu is critical. Negotiating the contours of the individual life and the social factors that shaped that life is indeed a tricky one.
The book describes Soyinka as a philosopher, but Soyinka is not a philosopher, at least not in the sense in which the term is often used in the academic sense. Soyinka has founded no school of thought or assembled no disciples. This is not to suggest that Soyinka has no philosophy, but it is the reader that must tease out the philosophies that are embedded in his works. But crucially, Soyinka is not a philosopher in the way that Shakespeare or Sophocles or Moliere were no philosophers. Rather, Soyinka is first and foremost a creative artist whose medium of expression is literature, but whose literary output splinters into diverse dimensions, spanning plays, poetry, novels, essays, memoirs and criticisms. However, he remains at heart an artist whose chief concern is beauty. He is also an intersectional figure in whom the themes that define as well as bedevil Africa intersect. Thus, his art (literature) is connected to his religion (sacredness of Yoruba cultural tradition) which is connected to his ethics (justice) which in turn is connected to politics (rights and freedom). But it is the art that is primary even to his political activism. It is where aesthetics meets religion and politics.
However, there is also a larger context in which Soyinka’s works must be situated, which is not just the colonial but also the postcolonial context. This is sadly missing in the book in any thorough-going sense. Where are the postcolonial theorists, thinkers and writers - Fanon, Rusdie, Spivak, Ngūgī Wa Thiong’o and indeed Achebe - whose works could relevantly have been brought into the conversation? I must stress that there are references to some of these authors in the book but largely in passing. Take an example. In Death and the King’s Horsemen Soyinka depicts the ritual suicide of the Elesin - the man who must commit suicide upon the death of the King in the belief that he and the king’s horses would continue to serve the king in the afterlife. The white character in the play Simon Pilkings (representing the colonial authorities) deems this practice barbaric and wishes it to stop. Interestingly, we find similar echoes in Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak (1988), where she describes the British attempt to ban the Sati – a Hindu widow’s ritual immolation on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Both Soyinka and Spivak show with remarkable similarity and clarity how the narrative of primitive barbarism of the other was built around both practices, allowing the British to saunter in and to present themselves as saviours or civilisers of primitive cultures, when in fact they had disrupted and distorted cultures about which they know very little or nothing. While Spivak further pursues her concerns of gender silence or muteness by citing the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri to show how and why the subaltern cannot speak for herself, Soyinka attempts not to speak on behalf of the voiceless but to open a space for the voiceless to find their voice and speak for themselves through a process of recovery and recrudescence, i.e., the recovering of the indigenous voices and languages that colonialism had suppressed and taken away from them, which in turn had rendered them mute. It is about freedom, empowerment and justice. Thus, Soyinka is an exponent of the positive ontology in African writing that captures the human condition.
Finally, despite its flaws, the book has merits. In fact, it is a good book that contributes to Soyinka scholarship. There is evidence that the authors are supremely knowledgeable about their subject. The book also shows that Soyinka is not just an African writer but a writer whose canvas transcends the African world. All the ingredients are there but the reader must work a little harder to reassemble some of these themes to build a coherent picture. This is no bad thing. It is just that the book could have been better; but then again, every book could be better.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986[2017]) “Biographical Illusion” in Biography in Theory 210-217 (edited) Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders and Gregor Schima. Berlin: De Gruyter
Carlyle, John (1841) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.
Soyinka, Wole (2019) Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions. Yale University Press.
Soyinka, Wole (1975) Death and the King’s Horsemen. London: Secker and Warburg
Soyinka, Wole (1976) Myth, Literature and African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Gabriel O. Apata is a research scholar and writer whose works cut across the humanities and social sciences. His interests include Philosophy, Sociology, Aesthetics, Religion, Post-colonial Studies, African history and politics and Diaspora Studies.
