Nigeria’s Larger-Than-Life Nobel Laureate Chronicles A Fascinating Life

By Chimamanda Adichie

As he turns 80, a look at Wole Soyinka’s unique memoirs, including his latest, ‘You Must Set Forth At Dawn.’

To read Wole Soyinka’s memoirs is to encounter many delights. His humour, by turns playful and biting, ranges over the stories he tells. Then there are the stories themselves. Perhaps because he has an unwavering faith in ideas — democracy, progressive politics — or because he does not merely dream of a better world but is eager to roll up his sleeves and lay its building blocks, his life is unusually filled with dramatic incidents.

In 1965, amid political tensions, regional elections were rigged by the ruling party in Western Nigeria. The main radio station was scheduled to announce, and thereby legitimize, the fraudulent results. If the announcement could be stopped, then the opposition might have some time to challenge the fraud. Soyinka, 31-year-old, a gun in his pocket, slipped into the radio station, and stopped the announcement. Of his action, which has taken on a near-mythical status, Soyinka quips in You Must Set Forth At Dawn, “The Western region was boiling and frankly, I felt deprived of my rightful share of action.”

He was arrested, tried and, thanks to a technicality, acquitted. Two years later, Nigeria’s fissures had widened. The central government was unpopular, and a group of young Army officers carried out a coup. They were unsuccessful, but because most of them were ethnically Igbo and most of the politicians killed were Northerners, the coup itself was perceived in the North as an “Igbo coup.” There, thousands of Igbo people were massacred; in other parts of Nigeria, they were attacked, arrested, harassed. Most fled to the east. Soyinka, already a well-known writer, spoke up against the federal government for doing little to stop the carnage, and against some non-Igbo for their complicit silence.

When the Easterners seceded and became the independent state of Biafra, Soyinka was sympathetic to their grievances but did not support secession. A true confederation, he believed, was the answer. Nigeria declared war and Soyinka threw himself into efforts to prevent it. He lobbied to ban the sale of arms to both sides. Then he decided to sneak into Biafra and persuade its leader of his position. The meeting, unsurprisingly, did not go as Soyinka had hoped. Back in Nigeria, he was promptly arrested. He spent two years in prison, often in solitary confinement. Much of The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka was written on scraps of paper and tissue during his humiliating imprisonment, and his language sometimes takes on the terse poetry of a man grasping on to his sanity. He would have been imprisoned again—or worse, perhaps—in the 1990s, if he had not escaped Nigeria. The country was choking under a murderous military dictatorship and Soyinka was an outspoken, unapologetic campaigner for a return to democratic rule.