It was late morning. The notorious, dense and usually agonisingly
slow vehicular traffic on the Old Marina, in Lagos, has melted away. The
human traffic was light. The heat from the sun, far from unkind, was
alluringly mild. Somewhere between the Apongbon area, near where once
was the UTC stores and Martins Street junction, stood, on the rugged,
pedestrian sidewalk a fairly tall, well-built young man, who was dressed
in deep blue jeans jacket and trousers.
There was a bag slung on his right shoulder. Not many, even as the young man stood, for more than half-an-hour on the Marina, may have noticed that it was Professor Wole Soyinka, who, about a decade later, was to win the Noble Prize for Literature. But a young secondary school graduate, who was passing by did. His immediate thought was: “That’s the man who stubbornly insists on crafting poems that are difficult to comprehend. A writer who is irritatingly obsessed with how best to hide meaning through the avoidance of logorrhead! The writer, who, almost as if by design, sent countless secondary school children away from English literature class.
As the young school graduate stood, at a safe distance, with his eyes fixed on Soyinka, he noticed an occasional smile beamed by the playwright. Soyinka may have walked from Idumota area to where he stood on the Marina to face the lagoon, possibly to appeal to his muse for inspiration. Had Soyinka been seen at the Bar Beach, it would have been surmised that he was trying to arouse a certain shade of Wordsworth or Coleridge in him.
That was about 1977/1978. The same period was one of the peaks of Cold War politics in Africa – with special reference to decolonisation. Then the Augustinho Neto-led, Marxist-oriented Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) – with the morally justified assistance of Nigeria – was sure of winning the Angolan war of independence, one of the bitterest in colonial Africa.
Soyinka did say, in a brief chat with Africa magazine, published by Ralph Uwechie, that the victory of the MPLA – over two other contestants – Dr. Jonas Savimbi’s Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and Holden Roberto’s Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which were seen as too cozy with apartheid South Africa and the West – was a clear case of a heroic African struggle against colonial rule and the quest for freedom.
Besides, said he, the MPLA’s victory issued mainly from the fire power a unique African arsenal; not, necessarily, as a result of foreign assistance from, say, the Soviet Union, which was sympathetic to the cause of the MPLA as a barrier to the extension of apartheid South Africa’s influence and western colonial designs in Central and Southern Africa.
At the time of Soyinka’s opinion on the Angolan war of independence, the din of the Biafran War – in which the famous playwright made a laudable move to no avail – had ended almost a decade earlier. Soyinka’s personal opinion on the outcome of the Angola war of independence, which peaked with the MPLA, forming, in 1978, that country’s first – and since then, the only one-post-colonial administration, was an attempt to interpret or deconstruct the Cold War history, as seen from the African theatre.
The implied non-recognition, by Soyinka, of the strategic assistance, offered the MPLA warriors by Moscow, was, seen from either literary or political perspective, a case of intentional fallacy. One truth about the Angolan war of independence was that it was a revolutionary one. And how Soyinka did not realise that they were revolutionary pigs that were fighting against all manner of western imperialism in that part of Central Africa, so that Angolans would be free, was quite a surprise.
Still, it is plausible to argue, in retrospect, that Soyinka’s implied non-recognition of the strategic aid given by Moscow to the MPLA was a form of protest against the Soviet Union: abuse of human rights, harassment of intellectuals, abuse of press freedom, suppression of the well meaning dissent. Recalled that it was the Soviet Union’s intervention on the side of the Gowon regime, on the eve of the Biafran War, that made a similar move by western powers inevitable. All that was to buoy the Gowon regime in its preparation to slug it out – in a senseless carnage – against the Biafran secessionists.
Soyinka may have felt frustrated and betrayed by the war-like intervention of Moscow, especially at a time when he was on a rare mission to prevent one of the ugliest and darkest chapters in Nigeria’s political history. But, in retrospect, again, it is very likely that well after the Biafran pogrom, Soyinka may, at certain moment of sober reflections, attempt to rationalise the unstoppable trigger for the Biafran War that the Soviet Union’s intervention was: the Biafran battle was a form of revolution; therefore, where there’s a revolution, revolutionary pigs, you should naturally expect, would intervene to whet their egregiously notorious appetite for a sanguinary war.
The intervention by exceptionally gifted, wild, revolutionary pigs in the Angolan and Biafran crises, Soyinka may have felt, was a calculated attempt to decimate the Roman Catholic population, especially in the Biafran enclave. All that may have been, no less, to spite the Vatican and the imperialistic West that were Cold War foes of Moscow. With a palpably deep touch of regret, Soyinka may have reasoned that Moscow’s spiteful intervention was no less aimed at him because he was a devout believer in the Cross.
It is no less plausible, in this revolutionary discourse, that Moscow steeped itself on the side of the Gowon regime because it knew that Soyinka commanded no battalion of frighteningly armed troops. And who was he, anyway! Would Soyinka’s salvo on the eve of the Biafran War have had a global support had he and his associates declared openly their intent to prevent the carnage? Would that open declaration – as opposed to Soyinka’s stubborn decision to sneak, with an opaque touch, into the Biafran enclave – have discouraged foreign powers from fuelling the Biafran War? Whatever the case, Soyinka thinks that the foreign powers, especially the Soviet Union, that augmented the war efforts of the Gowon regime, should be blamed for his unpleasant experience in solitary confinement during the Biafran War.
Soyinka once said that there was a time – a little after the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) – he suspected that it was the Soviet Union, which sold the idea of his solitary confinement to the Gowon regime. For, truly, it was the same Soviet Union that hounded Soyinka’s rascally tribesmen – including Andre: Sakharov and Anatoly Schcharansky; a special breed of exceptionally gifted, wild, revolutionary pigs, that were deeply suspected by Moscow as spies on the pay roll of Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv. But when the behemoth that was the Soviet Union – the world’s largest country – disintegrated, in late 1991, it was as though Soyinka‘s supplication to the Supreme Being, via Jesus Christ, whom he identifies as my personal Lord and Saviour, had finally, been answered.
The flip side of this revolutionary discourse is that the same Soviet Union was in support of the campaign by the African National Congress (ANC) for an end to the evil regime of apartheid; just as it demanded the release of Dr. Nelson Mandela and others who were convicted at the Rivonia trial from prison. Today, with a better understanding of the African chapter of the Cold War history, Soyinka may admit that he ought to have accorded some merited recognition to the crucial role played by the Soviet Union in the Angolan war of independence. He is also likely to admit that he was wrong to have allowed his painful experience behind bars to influence his opinion on a given aspect of the Cold War years in Africa. Soyinka, besides, may admit that he was in support of Moscow’s anti-apartheid position – and hence, in Oslo, he called for Mandela’s release from Robin Island.
There was a bag slung on his right shoulder. Not many, even as the young man stood, for more than half-an-hour on the Marina, may have noticed that it was Professor Wole Soyinka, who, about a decade later, was to win the Noble Prize for Literature. But a young secondary school graduate, who was passing by did. His immediate thought was: “That’s the man who stubbornly insists on crafting poems that are difficult to comprehend. A writer who is irritatingly obsessed with how best to hide meaning through the avoidance of logorrhead! The writer, who, almost as if by design, sent countless secondary school children away from English literature class.
As the young school graduate stood, at a safe distance, with his eyes fixed on Soyinka, he noticed an occasional smile beamed by the playwright. Soyinka may have walked from Idumota area to where he stood on the Marina to face the lagoon, possibly to appeal to his muse for inspiration. Had Soyinka been seen at the Bar Beach, it would have been surmised that he was trying to arouse a certain shade of Wordsworth or Coleridge in him.
That was about 1977/1978. The same period was one of the peaks of Cold War politics in Africa – with special reference to decolonisation. Then the Augustinho Neto-led, Marxist-oriented Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) – with the morally justified assistance of Nigeria – was sure of winning the Angolan war of independence, one of the bitterest in colonial Africa.
Soyinka did say, in a brief chat with Africa magazine, published by Ralph Uwechie, that the victory of the MPLA – over two other contestants – Dr. Jonas Savimbi’s Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and Holden Roberto’s Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which were seen as too cozy with apartheid South Africa and the West – was a clear case of a heroic African struggle against colonial rule and the quest for freedom.
Besides, said he, the MPLA’s victory issued mainly from the fire power a unique African arsenal; not, necessarily, as a result of foreign assistance from, say, the Soviet Union, which was sympathetic to the cause of the MPLA as a barrier to the extension of apartheid South Africa’s influence and western colonial designs in Central and Southern Africa.
At the time of Soyinka’s opinion on the Angolan war of independence, the din of the Biafran War – in which the famous playwright made a laudable move to no avail – had ended almost a decade earlier. Soyinka’s personal opinion on the outcome of the Angola war of independence, which peaked with the MPLA, forming, in 1978, that country’s first – and since then, the only one-post-colonial administration, was an attempt to interpret or deconstruct the Cold War history, as seen from the African theatre.
The implied non-recognition, by Soyinka, of the strategic assistance, offered the MPLA warriors by Moscow, was, seen from either literary or political perspective, a case of intentional fallacy. One truth about the Angolan war of independence was that it was a revolutionary one. And how Soyinka did not realise that they were revolutionary pigs that were fighting against all manner of western imperialism in that part of Central Africa, so that Angolans would be free, was quite a surprise.
Still, it is plausible to argue, in retrospect, that Soyinka’s implied non-recognition of the strategic aid given by Moscow to the MPLA was a form of protest against the Soviet Union: abuse of human rights, harassment of intellectuals, abuse of press freedom, suppression of the well meaning dissent. Recalled that it was the Soviet Union’s intervention on the side of the Gowon regime, on the eve of the Biafran War, that made a similar move by western powers inevitable. All that was to buoy the Gowon regime in its preparation to slug it out – in a senseless carnage – against the Biafran secessionists.
Soyinka may have felt frustrated and betrayed by the war-like intervention of Moscow, especially at a time when he was on a rare mission to prevent one of the ugliest and darkest chapters in Nigeria’s political history. But, in retrospect, again, it is very likely that well after the Biafran pogrom, Soyinka may, at certain moment of sober reflections, attempt to rationalise the unstoppable trigger for the Biafran War that the Soviet Union’s intervention was: the Biafran battle was a form of revolution; therefore, where there’s a revolution, revolutionary pigs, you should naturally expect, would intervene to whet their egregiously notorious appetite for a sanguinary war.
The intervention by exceptionally gifted, wild, revolutionary pigs in the Angolan and Biafran crises, Soyinka may have felt, was a calculated attempt to decimate the Roman Catholic population, especially in the Biafran enclave. All that may have been, no less, to spite the Vatican and the imperialistic West that were Cold War foes of Moscow. With a palpably deep touch of regret, Soyinka may have reasoned that Moscow’s spiteful intervention was no less aimed at him because he was a devout believer in the Cross.
It is no less plausible, in this revolutionary discourse, that Moscow steeped itself on the side of the Gowon regime because it knew that Soyinka commanded no battalion of frighteningly armed troops. And who was he, anyway! Would Soyinka’s salvo on the eve of the Biafran War have had a global support had he and his associates declared openly their intent to prevent the carnage? Would that open declaration – as opposed to Soyinka’s stubborn decision to sneak, with an opaque touch, into the Biafran enclave – have discouraged foreign powers from fuelling the Biafran War? Whatever the case, Soyinka thinks that the foreign powers, especially the Soviet Union, that augmented the war efforts of the Gowon regime, should be blamed for his unpleasant experience in solitary confinement during the Biafran War.
Soyinka once said that there was a time – a little after the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) – he suspected that it was the Soviet Union, which sold the idea of his solitary confinement to the Gowon regime. For, truly, it was the same Soviet Union that hounded Soyinka’s rascally tribesmen – including Andre: Sakharov and Anatoly Schcharansky; a special breed of exceptionally gifted, wild, revolutionary pigs, that were deeply suspected by Moscow as spies on the pay roll of Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv. But when the behemoth that was the Soviet Union – the world’s largest country – disintegrated, in late 1991, it was as though Soyinka‘s supplication to the Supreme Being, via Jesus Christ, whom he identifies as my personal Lord and Saviour, had finally, been answered.
The flip side of this revolutionary discourse is that the same Soviet Union was in support of the campaign by the African National Congress (ANC) for an end to the evil regime of apartheid; just as it demanded the release of Dr. Nelson Mandela and others who were convicted at the Rivonia trial from prison. Today, with a better understanding of the African chapter of the Cold War history, Soyinka may admit that he ought to have accorded some merited recognition to the crucial role played by the Soviet Union in the Angolan war of independence. He is also likely to admit that he was wrong to have allowed his painful experience behind bars to influence his opinion on a given aspect of the Cold War years in Africa. Soyinka, besides, may admit that he was in support of Moscow’s anti-apartheid position – and hence, in Oslo, he called for Mandela’s release from Robin Island.
