Edited by Osa Mbonu-Amadi 

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka may have lost the stomping strides captured in the 1970 Ossie Davis-directed film, Kongi’s Harvest, where he stars as an African dictator, but he has remained nimble for a man of 89. One can almost see through the thinning white crown of hair as he enters the hall at Freedom Park, Lagos, to engage the literature students of Nifty Steps College, Ikorodu, Lagos. 

Handshakes done, 15-year-old Adeola Ogunleye, spokesperson for her mates, declares: “I am excited standing before the literary icon, Professor Wole Soyinka. My colleagues and I are encouraged today that our love for literature has exposed us to the company of one of the finest literary minds in the world.”

What was the process of becoming Soyinka?

It’s very complex explaining the process of becoming Soyinka. First of all, I was a voracious reader as a child. I always read everything which came my way, anything in print. And sooner or later, I began, for some reason or the other, very difficult to explain, saying, well, I can also produce stories like this. Let me try my hand at it. And so that’s how I began writing.

And of course, I came up in a family of storytellers and the elders used to tell us stories. I’m sure you too have been through that.  I began to say, okay, let me tell this story which they told us in a different way and see how it sounds.

So from very early stages of my existence, I was always interested in adjusting things which I heard. Which is the beginning of fiction writing. Right. That’s childhood. Now, one grows up, one has more experiences, more encounters; one meets different kinds of people. And so the inspiration to continue writing came simply from humanity. In other words, I see people acting, suffering, enjoying themselves, triumphing, or receiving, encountering setbacks in life. And so it is life itself which began to inspire me as a mature person.

So that habit which I cultivated as a child then became transformed into attention to larger issues of life. For example, to indicate something which will touch you, you heard the word ‘Chibok’, haven’t you? Chibok. What does that trigger up in your mind when you hear the word Chibok?

Kidnap

Good. You know it had to do with the kidnapping of school children, some of whom are still lost today. Well, I hate to use the word inspire for such an event but let’s just say that such an event touched me so deeply that to be at peace with myself, I had to write a long poem to the Chibok girls. You understand why I use that example? It’s like something which should never have happened – something which is a tragedy for the entire nation, something which hits home to every family by thinking, for instance, suppose my children had been among those kidnaped kids. What would be their fate now? So it’s that kind of extraordinary, unusual events which instigate in one’s mind the process of writing. Some happy events, while others, like Chibok, are tragic events. But that, really, is a source of my inspiration. Next question.

Did your poem, Telephone Conversation, address your personal experience?

Oh yes, of course. It’s an experience which I don’t wish any of you. Racism is a cancer in the body of humanity. And yes, when I was hunting for an apartment, that incident actually happened. I could not believe my ears.  After saying, listen up, I’m African, I’m black. And then heard the words, how dark? It was quite a shock. And my response was exactly as I said it in that poem.

I went to the UK full of very great excitement. First of all, I was glad to be out of the supervision of my parents. I could smell absolute freedom. As I was in boarding school, I enjoyed some of that freedom. But now, to actually be out of their sight, looking after myself, I had a feeling I had become an adult. So, there was that excitement. Now, while here also, I had come in contact, of course, with the European world, with the district officers, the colonial officers, and so on. Watched their manners, customs. There was a British Council here, with a very good library. I told you I was a voracious reader. So, I was a constant at the British Council library. It was not a strange place to me, really. But it was a shock encountering racial discrimination. In Leeds, it was not so bad. There was more curiosity about black people. When you got to places like London, as I did when I went on holidays, racial discrimination actually hits you in the face. And, of course, there were race riots in which I was involved from time to time. And you fought back when you encountered naked, especially violent, physical forms of racial discrimination.

I enjoyed my student days enormously at the university. I had marvelous professors who made me look at my own culture in a far more valued way because I saw what culture meant to them. And so, what I used to take for granted, thinking this is just normal, I suddenly realized that this actually was a possession, a value, which could be explored, which I could insert into my creative instincts, exploit in so many ways I’d never thought of before. So, it was a very exciting period for me, to be on the loose, to just go in whatever direction I wanted, intellectually, mentally, outside even my immediate discipline.

Many of your works are in traditional Nigerian settings, yet you write with a deep command of the English language. Would you say that your study in the UK impacted the flow of your writing?

I didn’t take myself seriously as a writer until, shall we say, about 16. Just after I left school, I think I was one of the very first, young as I was, to have his or her play broadcast on the national radio. So, I began to consider the likelihood of this actually being something I wanted to do professionally. So, there’s a shift, inevitably, between my immature period of creative writing and the period which I call the mature side, when I actually began to study literature, the literature of others, on a deeper level.

You see, being thrown inside, within the culture of works which you had merely encountered on the pages of a book, makes a difference. And being plunged into the culture from which those works emerged in the first place, it then makes you to start considering what manner of literature you could bring out from your own culture. And of course, the skills and styles and themes of that society into whose literature you’ve been thrown in that way, must affect your writing. That’s unavoidable.  So yes, there must be a greater sense of experimentation, instinct to experiment. Sometimes it could even be as an exercise to deliberately write in the manner of a writer whom you admire. All of this goes on until you find your own style, your own instinctive language. I hope that eventually, I did come out with my own voice, despite the culture into which I’d been thrown.