Wole Soyinka Interview (page: 2 / 9) Nobel Prize for Literature	Print Interview

You wrote about your prison experience in a memoir, The Man Died. Did you actually begin work on that book while you were in prison?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: I began writing, scribbling notes, you know, in prison. But it wasn't actually published until after I'd come out. Writing became a therapy. First of all, it meant I was reconstructing my own existence. It was also an act of defiance. I wasn't supposed to write. I wasn't supposed to have paper, pen, anything, any reading material whatsoever. So this became an exercise in self-preservation, keeping up my spirits. It also, you had to occupy very long hours of the day, you know, not speaking to anyone. And I even -- it wasn't just writing. I evolved all kinds of mental exercises, even went back to those subjects which I said I hated in school, in particular mathematics. I started to try and recover my mathematical formulae by trial and error, and created problems for myself which I solved. You know, anything to keep the mind alive. As I said, it's an exercise in self-preservation. Writing was just part of it.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Did your case ever go to court?

Wole Soyinka: My case never went to court. Once I was taken from Lagos to Kaduna and placed in solitary confinement, I knew I would never be tried. They were sharp enough to realize that if I was tried before a court, it would just be a platform for me to express my views about the war. So I knew I would never be tried in court. So all I did was write, communicate, just breaking through that isolation. It was mostly for other people, not for myself. Just to make those who were anxious on the outside know that I was okay.

What led to your release in 1969? How did you go back to normal life?

Wole Soyinka: Combination of events. First of all, the war was coming to an end, so the government felt they could now afford to yield to some international pressure. I think it is a combination of those two. The federal government had become very self-confident. The international community, apart from France, maybe Tanzania, had swung behind the federal government, and of course war is always won both on the battlefield and on the field of public opinion. They probably had nothing to worry about. I could shout myself hoarse, didn't matter, they got what they wanted. So they could afford to make this magnanimous gesture of releasing me. When I came out, I tried to go back to normal life, but I knew I wasn't going to be very comfortable for long. There was a triumphalist atmosphere on the Federal side which I found very grating, so I quietly made up my mind that I would go into self-exile at the first opportunity.

When you went into exile, you completed your book The Man Died. Where did the title come from?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: I've never really ever gone into complete exile, you know. In other words, I've never succeeded in cutting off my environment, and I kept in touch with people at home, of course, and I got the news all the time, the misbehavior of the military especially, because we were now under full military dictatorship. And I took an interest in particular in one young man who had been brutalized by the military at a social occasion, to the extent that he had to have an amputation. I was following that case and working with others inside, within Nigeria, to make sure that he got his dues, the people involved were punished. One of them was a governor of one of these regions. And then I got a telegram one day which said, "The man died. He died from his wounds." And so I used that expression as the title, the title of the book.

You returned to Nigeria after President Gowon was deposed in 1975. How did you know it was time to go back?

Wole Soyinka: Well, from the moment that he was deposed, and I studied the new, incoming dictatorship, it was obviously time for me to come back. The man who took over, Murtala Mohammed, showed signs immediately of his wanting to absolutely dismantle the oppressive machinery that had grown under Gowon. So it was time for me to return.

General Gowon was the man responsible for your imprisonment during the Nigerian Civil War. How many months were you in prison?

Wole Soyinka: Actually 27 altogether. Twenty-two in solitary confinement.

Yet you're no longer opponents. What is your relationship like with the former leader, General Gowon, today?

Wole Soyinka: Very good. Very good.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Something which I discovered when I came out of prison, some time after I came out of prison, was that Gowon was obviously an inexperienced young officer who was thrust into this position. He relied, as many leaders unfortunately do, on the kind of information he is given by his security agencies. Ultimately, the responsibility of course is his, because he signs the papers. But you find, you discover, when you investigate, when you analyze all these situations, you find that the man at the head, actually, probably is the least knowledgeable about many things which transpired during his incumbency. And the first indication -- no, in fact, by the time Gowon began to seek me out, by the time he began to seek me out, I had already come to my own conclusions.

I had already made my own inquiries. I wasn't inquiring about myself so much, but about that whole period, so I knew what was going on. I'd seen documents. One always exists within a certain network, and it's in documents and things, so I know exactly what happened, how all these lies came to be told. So nothing against him personally. When I was passing through England, he asked one of our ambassadors, asked him if he could arrange for us to meet. I said, "I have no objection." Unfortunately, we didn't really get around to meeting. He tried to arrange dinner, but I was away when Gowon was in England. We missed each other. I knew sooner or later we were going to meet. On top of that, there was a certain massacre, which made me so bitter about the conduct of that government during the civil war and which I blamed on Gowon.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The massacre took place in what is now the state of Benin, in which innocents were lined up. Men, women, children were gunned down in cold blood. I learned about that. I wrote about it. And Gowon, I discovered, did not know anything about it. And when he learned about it later, he actually paid a visit to that place to apologize to the people of Benin. He met the Asagba of Asaba, the traditional ruler, who met him in council, and he was received by the citizens and so on, because by then, the very fact that he came there to apologize made a great impression on them. So there was never known, up to a certain point, anything, any personal thing -- my holding him personally responsible ceased not long after I came out of prison, when I began my inquiries into the conduct of the civil war. Many things which I placed on his head -- and he apologized to me personally. When he did, I told him, "Listen, you don't have to apologize to me. You've apologized to people already. It's nothing, nothing at all." So we're friends.

Friends?

Wole Soyinka: He even came to my birthday! I invited him. It was a banquet which was thrown by the governor of my state, and also another governor, on my 70th birthday. He was in the first rank of the guests whom I said must be invited.

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