Of Fraternities and Cults: The Scapegoating of Wole Soyinka

 

Last month, I finally picked up Wole Soyinka’s 2021 novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest Peoples on Earth. The novel gave neither joy nor sweetness and light. Besides its darkish subject, the style is heavy-going, baggy and constipated. Anyone unfamiliar with the Nobel Laureate's genius and prowess as a poet, dramatist, life writer and essayist would seek to get him out of their system and never return to him.

However, Soyinka is not only brilliant, but he is also prolific. His memoirs and autobiographies are some of the finest offerings in life writing. Therefore, after a brief post-Chronicles decompression, I pitched into Isara: A Journey Around 'Essay,' ‘Essay’ being Soyinka's epithet for his father. Isara is a marginally novelised narrative about the lives and times of ‘Essay’ and some of his townspeople. Again, like Chronicles, Isara is not Soyinka's lithest creation. Atmospheric and episodic, the book is overloaded with 'Ijegba' local colour.

Last week, in a work-in-progress, I referred to how Soyinka and six other undergraduates inaugurated the Pyrates Confraternity at the University of Ibadan in the early 1950s. And only a few days ago, I stumbled on a clip in which Soyinka returns to the University of Ibadan and reminisces as he accesses the 'alcove' where he and the other young turks launched the countercurrent Pyrates’ galley, propelled by the sea-change that was about to happen in colonial Nigeria.

I have never had the time to 'read' comments on social media posts, although sometimes I glance over a few to take the measure of human wisdom and idiocy – the latter is often more in evidence. I expected such adverse and ill-considered sentiments in responses to Soyinka's video, particularly from a section of the Nigerian society that harbours those whom he described as 'fascists.' I will not digress into the recent wrong-minded politicisation and coarsening of the Soyinka persona by the featherbrained, mickey-mouse fascists – it is not worth wasting precious time on.

However, for some years, I had wanted to write something about the misapprehension and misreading of 'fraternities' and the blaming of Soyinka for the irruption of vile, bloodthirsty and murderous secret cults on Nigerian university campuses and its overspill into the streets of cities and towns. There is a certain small-mindedness about this imputation. It’s an illustration of how incuriosity and philistinism have eaten into Nigeria’s body politic. A cursory reading of the history, definition and configuration of university fraternities and societies would easily have shown that Soyinka and his friends were only reenacting a centuries-old tradition of collegiate convergence, fellowship and camaraderie. American universities borrow classical terms like Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Chi, and Kappa Alpha to name their fraternities. In Germany, fraternities are called Studentenverbindung. Britain settles for societies.

Many years ago, I read a biography of Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970). One of my takeaways from the book was his membership of The Apostles, a Cambridge University society that was founded in 1820. Otherwise called The Conversazione Club, Cambridge Apostles is essentially a debating society. In the biography, I read about how members would brainstorm through the night on philosophical problems, mathematics, literature, etc. When Russell was a member, he fraternised with G.E. Moore (author of Principia Ethica) and others; a decade or so later, John Maynard Keynes invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to be a member. These were some of the most remarkable intellects of the early 20th Century.

As Soyinka clarifies, the Pyrates’ raison d’etre was (and still is) playful and ‘fun’ nonconformism and a ‘rebellious gesture’ against a ‘colonial, rather staid and stuffy atmosphere’ of pre-independent Nigeria. Even though it is almost always a civil and social affair in the UK and continental Europe, I am by no means implying that fraternities or societies are steeped in trouble-free child’s play all the time. College fraternities in America are considered the bosom of elitism, cronyism, racism, misogyny and binge drinking. Death via initiation hazing has been known, although this is rare. Even then, these are America-specific issues, and no one blames the founders of fraternities in American universities for these drawbacks.

Etiology – the study of causes of diseases and abnormal conditions – can only go so far. Who brought the idea of kidnap-for-ransom into Nigeria? When? Should we blame Festus Okotie Eboh and his train of drapery for the corruption and conspicuous consumption among the current cabal of Nigerian politicians? Who do we blame for the retrograde religiosity and God-parroting that are ruining Nigerians' collective psyche and intellect? European missionaries? Ajayi Crowther? The jihadists? Othman dan Fodio? The perverse scapegoating of Wole Soyinka for the explosion of cutthroat cultism on Nigerian campuses and streets and the atrocities they wreak would be puzzling if I did not know where it comes from – sheer lazy thinking.

Let’s attempt a counterfactual: if Soyinka and his friends had not set the Pyrates’ boat afloat, would all Nigerian undergraduates and youths be prim-and-proper, overwhelmingly acquiescent sheep today? Rabid cultism reflects the sociomoral state of play in the country - what Soyinka calls ‘anomy’ in the title of his 1974 novel, Season of Anomy. The season of anomie endures and is now acute and desperate. According to Soyinka, chivalry was one of the Pyrates’ terms of reference, and, as the great man gibes, today’s university cultists would spit on chivalry if it was offered to them on a plate. I daresay the word would sail over their doped heads.

Soyinka, Sartre and Style

 

Stylewise, Wole Soyinka's Baiting Igbophobia: The Sunny Igboanugo Thesis, the latest (and twelfth) outing in the Nobel Laureate's Intervention series, is strong meat. The book is strong meat, not exactly in the British sense of being so indelicately shocking and off-the-wall as not to everyone's taste, but strong meat, tangentially, in the biblical sense. In the Yoruba sense, too – Eran tó yi – strong, gristly, chewy meat. Of course, any number of readers would pass on Wole Soyinka as any random peruser of books would pass on any other author. It is simply a matter of taste. Some people would consider Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary unreadable or not readworthy, even in the sublime French original. Beyond the chasm of time and space that separates them, Soyinka is not Flaubert, and I would not even begin to compare the masters - both are terrifically larger-than-life figures.

Jean-Paul Sartre testifies to Flaubert's existential vastness and genius in the unfinished biogra-fiction The Family Idiot. The 5-volume, 3000-page literary alchemy is a nonpareil. Again, I will not attempt the merest aperçu into The Family Idiot. Not only would it smack of readerly showoffishness (more so in these unreaderlike times), but it is almost impossible. Joseph S. Catalano's attempt to condense the tomes into a smaller readable volume is effective and handy - handy in more ways than one. (By the way, speaking of taste, Catalano wasn't as taken with Madame Bovary as he was by Moby Dick.) Setting aside the potted edition, few mortals have indeed read all the five volumes of The Family Idiot. There is no sprinting through three thousand pages of text, still more when it is allusive and erudite. And not only are they as rare as gold dust, but they are also as pricey as gold bars, save the first volume, which is inexplicably reasonably priced. Anyway, enough of bibliophilic diversions.

The above is not as digressive as it seems. Soyinka recalls Sartre in a lot of ways. Sartre bestrode French literature and philosophy in the 20th century. As a litterateur, he wrote plays, novels, autobiographies and essays and was a giant of philosophy. Although he is a 'thinker' and intellectual in the Aristotelian sense, Soyinka does not write philosophy. But there are parallels between the men. They are similarly prolific; they are hugely brilliant; they are monstres sacré (sacred monsters); they are non-politically engagé; and they would have been fellow Nobel Laureates if Sartre had not rejected the prize in 1964. Some of their writings are dense, difficult, and well and truly caviar to the general. Soyinka's The Credo of Being and Nothingness may be a minor opus but the intellectual ballast - and bombast, so to speak - at its core is no less weighty than Sartre's summa existentia Being and Nothingness.

Now, here is the rub. How do I write about Soyinka's literary style without turning it into a parody, a parody of purple prose? And not just a parody of Soyinka's prose but also of the pastel shades of my own writing! Anyway, speaking of purple prose, in the tenth Intervention, Soyinka recounts how an English professor, whom he showed his collegiate attempt at writing a play, described his prose as 'purple.' Well, the don lived long enough to witness how purple became the new and rewarding black for Soyinka when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Beyond purple and black, how well does Soyinka's word-painting read and leap out from a canvas? For one thing, unlike, say, Vladimir Nabokov, Soyinka is not a prose stylist. Contrary to what some might think, he does not strain after effect. He is a writer whose genius errs on the side of tough-grained brutalism. If you possessed a fair amount of vocabulary, Soyinka would not send you to the dictionary as often as you might fear, but he might make you sweat, swear and hyperventilate because you could not make your way out of his labyrinthine constructions.

This is not the place and time to analyse Soyinka's redoubtable style. Where does one start? His plays? Poems? Novels? Life writing? Essays? The great man will be ninety this year, and something seems to be happening to his prose. No, it is not mellowing - it is indeed simmering, bubbling over. You could glean that from his Intervention series, which he began about fifteen years ago. The first five books are combative, vivid and reader-friendly; the middle three are brooding, adversarial and not reader-unfriendly, but the last four are... Well, they read as if they were written with ichor (golden blood) taken from the veins of Ogun, Zeus, Sango and Prometheus.