“Wole Soyinka would like to have lunch with you”, the book publisher Bankole Olayebi, CEO of Bookcraft Africa Ltd, told me one bright day in Lagos sometime in 2018. I was startled. “Really, why?” I replied. “He read your book, BIG”, Bankole replied. “He liked it, and I think he would like to discuss the ideas you expressed in it and get to know you more”. BIG, for the uninitiated, is the acronym for Build, Innovate and Grow, my fourth book that was published in February 2018 and in which I set out a bold vision for Nigeria and how to actualize it. I had offered that vision to my compatriots as I launched an intrepid, “Third Force” bid for the Office of the President of Nigeria ahead of the 2019 general elections. That seems like such a distant memory now!
Soyinka is perhaps unique in his combination of a long, distinguished literary career with an equally tumultuous one as a political activist. His literature and his political dissidence cannot, in fact, be separated. The former was his prime vehicle for the latter. The idea that justice is the ultimate value in human existence lies at Soyinka’s core.
Soyinka cares deeply about Nigeria. He has done some very controversial things in his political-activist career, and paid the price of imprisonment, near-death at the hands of military dictators, and exile. In the 1960s, as the Nigerian political crisis degenerated, he condemned the military coups of 1966, the killings of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and the Northern Region Premier, Ahmadu Bello, and the pogrom of tens of thousands of Igbos in Northern Nigeria. After Col. Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, then Military Governor of the Eastern Region, announced the region’s seccession as the Republic of Biafra, Soyinka visited the region in an effort to broker peace. For his pains, and for speaking up against the plight of the Igbo, the Nigerian authorities imprisoned Soyinka without charges in solitary confinement for two years. His famous memoir, The Man Died, was written during his time in jail.