Wole Soyinka

This is cute, although I found the obscurity, the assumption built into the very grammar of the sentences, that we would recognize all the references a bit annoying (but it's probably good for me to be annoyed in that way--like reading a Victorian novel would have been for Soyinka at Leeds). The only character more ridiculous than the shallow and venal traditional Yoruba is the modernizing fool Lakunle; the language is stilted in this pseudo-Elizabethan way that lends a spurious, but show more entirely charmingly so, dignity; everyone can summon up an all-singing, all-dancing chorus to tell a story at the drop of a calabash; and it's the only stories I've heard of where the ruttish old patriarch wins in the end without leaving a sour taste in your mouth. Because Baroka and his first wife/procurer Sadiku represent the ignorant, horny past, Lakunle the even more ignorant (Iignorant of the horrors it'll bring) future; and Sidi the site where they clash. Which is a retrograde plot, perhaps, but then Sidi takes it into her head to mess the whole thing around, making her more of a Pandora (with the expected unfortunate consequences for her), and when the Crocodile wins you cheer not only because it's done so playfully but also because at least it goes down as a loss in colonialism's column. show less

Soyinka has never believed in making life easy for the reader, and this — his first novel since 1972 — is no exception: the action of the plot keeps getting interrupted by long satirical asides that may or may not have something to do with the story. It's almost more of an extended essay with narrative interludes. But it's powerful stuff: Soyinka treats Nigeria with all the kid-glove delicacy of a 21st century Jonathan Swift.

His slightly fictionalised Nigeria is a kleptocracy where show more there is no longer any meaningful distinction to be made between politics, religion and organised crime. They are all just ways of getting to power and wealth whilst trampling on the faces of the ordinary people and bamboozling them with meaningless spectacle. In earlier times he might have held out some hope for the postcolonial world from African spirituality, but by now — or at least for the purposes of this satirical attack — he's clear that "tradition" and "religious law", whether they are indigenous or come from one of the two great imperialist religions, are just mechanisms the strong use to impose their will on the weak and satisfy their own desires and ambitions, whether at the level of the family or the state.

A bleak picture, and Soyinka doesn't show us any handy way to escape from it. The honest, upright characters in the story are never more than a pinprick annoyance for his arch-villains. But I'm sure he did cheer up innumerable readers by giving the most evil of the evil organisations in the book the name "Human Resources". We always knew... I'm sure a lot of evil HR managers will be getting this in their Christmas stocking. show less

This could well be classed as one of those books with a wilfully misleading title - unless you happen to remember from reading Aké that Soyinka's father was known by the nickname "Essay". It's actually an imaginative memoir about his father's life as a young headmaster in the colonial Nigeria of the thirties and forties, reconstructed from various documents that Soyinka found in a tin box after his father's death (the title is an allusion to John Mortimer's play about his own father, of show more course).

I didn't plan it that way, but it turned out to be very interesting to read it soon after The Interpreters, because there are a lot of parallels between the two - both focus on a group of clever, ambitious young professionals keen to better themselves and their country, but of course they are set a generation apart, one during the colonial period, the other soon after independence. The young men are all alumni of St Simeon's Training College, Ilesa (they call themselves the "Ex-Ilés", although the - British - college principal prefers the term "Simians").

The author's father - who is bafflingly never called "Essay" here, but appears as Akinyode Soditan or Yode - loyally teaches a curriculum full of pro-imperial propaganda, but isn't taken in by it himself, and doesn't really expect his students to be. Together with the other Ex-Ilés, he believes in a future in which educated Nigerians will take advantage of the skills they've learnt from the colonial powers to take over the running of their own, progressive and thoroughly modernised country. But they find that it's not as easy as all that - there are still strong forces in play that want to get rid of the poison of European ideas and take the country back to an - illusory - ideal of the African past. This ideological conflict is brought into a tangible form when the traditional ruler of Yode's home-town, Ìsarà, dies, and there are two obvious candidates for the succession, one a conservative and the other an Ex-Ilé with a civil-service job in Lagos.

On the whole, this is a lighter, funnier book than The Interpreters - the mood is closer to Aké - but it has its moments of dark violence and sinister magical influences as well.

I was amused to see that Soyinka manages to bring in a sub-plot in which a foreign conman is practicing an advance-fee scam on innocent Nigerians. Especially since the perpetrator is a Trinidadian-Asian based in London. Surely Soyinka wouldn't be using this as a way to tease a future fellow-Nobelist...? show less

The Interpreters probably came over as a very African novel when it first appeared, but the first thing that strikes you reading it now is what a very 1960s novel it is. A group of intelligent young men (and their girlfriends) are struggling against the dull, conventional and corruptly self-interested way of life of the older generation, a struggle that mostly takes the form of long, earnest discussions about politics, philosophy and religion, all punctuated by drink, sex and subversive show more music and undermined by a series of absurd accidents and social embarrassments that leave them more-or-less back where they started.

But it is African as well, of course: the young characters are caught between the temptations of aspiring to one of the competing value-systems of western capitalism (most of them have studied abroad) and "old Africa" - where the tribal gods are competing with Christianity and Islam. At the same time, they are confronted with the unholy compromises that the current postcolonial ruling classes have made to protect their own interests.

Soyinka knows very well that adopting the form of the novel means that he's committing himself to the metropolitan mechanisms of production and distribution that go with that - he has to get it published in London, and he knows that the audience he can deliver it to is restricted by language, the written medium, access to books, and the leisure to read. Unlike plays and poems - accessible to everyone because they can be delivered orally over the radio, or live wherever actors can find a space to perform - novels are read only by people-who-read-novels, which for Soyinka in 1965 means students, foreigners, and the wealthy middle classes. That's presumably why he's only written one other novel. And why this is such a complicated, literary novel, full of direct and implied references to other books of the time, mostly at least slightly mocking: One of the characters keeps talking flippantly about cultivating his negritude (by going out in the sun); another has mapped out a pastiche existentialist philosophical system based on the pleasures of defecation; there's an American refugee from a James Baldwin novel who also happens to be a James Baldwin fan; there is a faculty party given by a pompous professor and subverted by one of the drunken characters, who is gatecrashing - to make sure we don't miss the Lucky Jim allusions there, we keep overhearing someone in the background talking about the Madrigal Group. And so on.

The nasty portrayal of the gay Baldwin-fan, Joe Golder, was probably offensive at the time, and of course feels doubly so now, when we know about the ways that the notion of homosexuality as an "unafrican" import has been used to whip up anger against LGBT people in so many African countries. We keep expecting Soyinka as narrator to step back from his characters' disgust with the fact of Golder's homosexuality and put it in perspective, but he never does, and it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that (at least when he wrote this) he shared their views.

Soyinka is a magnificent writer with a great feel for surprising and devastating images (often in very unexpected places, e.g. Like two halves of a broad bean, the pachydermous radiogram and the Managing Director.). He is also a dramatist who knows exactly how to place a major speech or a deflating incident where it can have the most impact, so this is never a dull book. But it is a complicated book, with a very heavy load of symbolism that never quite gets resolved, and many people who read it seem to feel afterwards that they aren't much further on. Given that it was published on the eve of a terrible civil war, it's perhaps not surprising that there is no neat ending with a vision for the future of Nigeria. show less