Wole Soyinka Interview (page: 7 / 9) Nobel Prize for Literature	Print Interview

You were still living in London when you wrote your first well-known plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel. What was the impetus for writing those?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: I was trying to recapture certain features. Community, we spoke earlier of the community. In The Swamp Dwellers, for instance, I was trying to capture a sense of community which I'd known in Nigeria. And The Lion and the Jewel was also, again, it's a comedy of course, and it is to capture the transition between traditional society, the concept of Western, quote unquote, "civilization," and trying to see the weaknesses in either. One was not necessarily a progression on the other. These were just expressions of my own observations of society.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

At this time, the movement for independence in Nigeria was coming to a head. How did you see that at the time?

Wole Soyinka: At the beginning, there was single-minded direction, which was independence. Independence from the British. So the nationalists were at the fore, negotiations were going on about independence. Groups came to London, Lancaster House, meeting to discuss with the British Home Office, which it was called at the time. Eventually, in 1960, independence began. Unfortunately, the process into independence was flawed, because the British wanted to leave their surrogates behind, on their own admission later on, but this was evident even at the time. It's all coming out in the wash, of course, with the Official Secrets Act ended. The British deliberately manipulated, into a position of power, a section that was more feudal in Nigeria, because they felt they would serve their own interests. They were not as radical as the Southern part. So the grounds were already laid for political dissension. And later, oil was found, and then oil politics began to complicate matters even further.

You returned to Nigeria in 1960, just as your country was gaining independence. Can you talk about the early years of independence and writing the play A Dance of the Forest? Was it written for Nigeria's independence celebration?

Wole Soyinka: Well, the period of close scrutiny began while I was in England.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. These waves of nationalists used to come for conferences to discuss independence in Nigeria, and I couldn't help observing that yes, they were committed nationalists, but at the same time... You see, I always had, probably because of my background -- elitism and privilege are subjects to which I respond confrontationally immediately. Because I really had ingrained in me this egalitarian principle and the sense of service. And I saw the first-comers as being very -- almost as if their basic motivation was to step into the shoes of the departing colonial officers, the British colonials. Some of them were already positioning themselves to take over power. Power and privilege seemed to be more important to them than service and commitment to the community.

Perhaps this will become even more understandable if you took into consideration the fact that I was already heavily politicized. I was acutely aware of what was happening in South Africa, the hardening of the South African apartheid system. My very first play in England was directed at apartheid South Africa. It was called The Invention. And a group of us, during the holidays we'd come together, go to work to earn pocket money, and sit down at the West African Union, discussing politics. National politics, continental politics. We felt that our main mission, our first mission, was to go and liberate South Africa. We had no doubt at all in our minds that this was our immediate mission. Now this got derailed when we then encountered the first flag-bearers of our national independence.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We began to ask ourselves, "Shouldn't charity really begin at home? Isn't this the first line of concern we should have?" Because I began to see them as neo -- as potential internal colonialists. And of course, events have proved us right. So my attention became diverted towards Nigeria. And I couldn't wait to get back, and of course I wrote The Dance of the Forest as a warning play, that what we saw indicated quite clearly that we might have to fight the war of independence all over again, this time against our own leaders. So all this came about because of this politicization and the habit I had developed of examining issues very carefully. In other words, not getting carried away by slogans. Trying to see what lies behind the slogans, and how after one phase of struggle is ended, the next phase might have to be confronted.

In your memoir The Penkelemes Years, you discuss your first years back in Nigeria after independence. What did you mean by that title? What were "the Penkelemes Years?"

Wole Soyinka: "Penkelemes" (pandemonium) summed up for me the mess, the political mess into which we'd got ourselves. It was an expression, actually, by one of the politicians who was a great populist, by the way, a very fascinating character, but representative of the corruption of the politicians of that particular time.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. "The Penkelemes Years," I use that expression to describe the abortion of our expectations. The crudeness which accompanied politics, the violence, the ballot-rigging, the violence which carried over even into the House of Assembly. The fissures had become quite open, had blown wide open. And so I eventually settled into the politics of Nigeria itself, which for me was sad. It was a sad recognition, even though it's just affirmation of what I had predicted, but it was still sad to find it coming to pass. So receding constantly was that vision of the entire continent marching down south to liberate South Africa, which I'd thought should have been our priority in the first place. And so I got that frustration from the two sides. Frustration from a diminishing of that continental vision, because I saw Africa as one entity, and then a frustration about not being able to right the anomalies within my own society. I got deeper and deeper involved in Nigerian politics.

When the British left Nigeria in 1960, they falsified the national census, tipping electoral power to communities that were less progressive. Why did they do that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: Well, because colonial powers never really want to leave anywhere. They leave only because they find they are compelled to, by war, direct militant action, or because they are clever enough to realize that they can maintain a continuing neo-colonial linkage with their possessions by granting independence. But they keep the contact. And they do that by leaving their surrogates behind. And that's what the British did. They picked on the least progressive part of the country, falsified the census, falsified elections to make sure that when they left, they handed over power to them.

You were still able to play a constructive role. What led you to founding the Road Safety Corps?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: I just got tired of going to the funerals of my colleagues and my students. The Ibadan-Ife road, I named it "Slaughter Slab." There was no day I would drive on that road when I didn't come across a fresh accident. I would take the injured to the hospital or take them to the morgue. Just virtually no day. And each time I was teaching in Ife, there'd be a new space in my classroom, lost to the road. So my most brilliant colleagues, one at least that I can think of immediately -- brilliant medical doctor -- surgeon, became a paraplegic as a result of spinal injury he sustained on that road. And finally I said, "I'm tired of feeding heads with knowledge and then scooping up those brains on the road. Something has to be done."

So I sat down and drafted a proposal for a kind of voluntary force made up of respectable, knowledgeable citizens, who would have higher powers of education, discipline, and so forth, complemented by a small, uniformed corps, which would educate and also discipline people on the road. The idea grew, and people came from other states to come and learn what we were doing, and went back to form similar things. Eventually, when another military regime came, the statistics went up, because the politicians came in and virtually dissolved the Road Safety Corps. See, they didn't like the Road Safety Corps. We've talked about elections and corruption and so on. During the elections, the roads, naturally, have to be free for elections to be rigged. It's a phenomenon, the connection between all of these. The thugs take over the roads. They are carrying fake ballot boxes from point A to point B. They are storing them. Some of them are also transporting fake military uniforms and guns and so on.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the first things I taught my corps was to respect nobody on the road who committed any infringement, whether he were a judge, whether he were a soldier. The first thing is, "On the road, everybody has got to be equal." Which meant that the Road Safety Corps would stop these vehicles, because they never even behaved -- all they had to do was behave themselves on the road and get their, you know, criminal material from A to B. But no, that was not enough! They had to show their power on the road. They had to defy everything. And of course they collaborated with the police. So the one organization which could and did -- many times -- prevent aspects of election rigging was the Road Safety Corps. The number of vehicles we stopped where we found stuffed boxes, fake ballot boxes, fake police uniforms, and we were able to track them to warehouses, where all this illegal material was stopped. It was just too much for the political party in power. And so, when the next elections were approaching, they decided to uproot some kind of colonial law which arguably gave the right for official presence on the road to the Ministry of Roads and Works, or Transportation. And so Road Safety Corps all over the states were shunted off to one side. And of course the statistics rose. So when the military came over, and even they began to lose their soldiers by the score on the road, much more than on the battlefront, the military government appealed to me to please resurrect what we did in Oyo State on a national scale. So that's the story of the Road Safety Corps, my involvement with it.

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