Price of dissent high for playwright Wole Soyinka

By David Hough

PERTH, Australia (JP): Wole Soyinka is Africa's greatest living playwright and Africa's first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Because of his sustained outspokenness against successive military regimes, he lives away from his Nigerian homeland, in Europe and North America.

He quietly slipped out of the country in 1994 when his passport was confiscated by the current military dictator, General Sani Abacha.

"But I am not a political exile," Soyinka insists. In Nigeria, the price of dissent can be high.

In 1995, the Nigerian writer and environmentalist, Ken Saro- Wiwa, and eight others were hanged for incitement to murder four traditional chieftains. They were convicted before a special tribunal hand-picked by the government. There was no right of appeal for the condemned men.

Significantly, Saro-Wiwa had campaigned against massive environmental pollution by Royal Dutch Shell, a company exploiting Nigerian oil reserves.

There was international outrage at what was described at the time as "judicial murder". Soyinka's protest was a part of that world-wide condemnation.

Ninety-six percent of Nigeria's foreign revenue comes from oil.

Soyinka has called for an international embargo on the purchase of Nigerian oil, a call endorsed by South Africa's President Nelson Mandela. Britain, the former colonial ruler of Nigeria, and the Netherlands, the home of Royal Dutch Shell, have blocked a European embargo. The Clinton administration and the United States Congress are still making up their minds.

General Abacha seized power and the presidency in a 1993 post-election coup. He canceled the democratically-held elections that marked the return to civilian rule. He jailed the president- elect, Moshood Abiola, for "treason". He also jailed another pro- democracy leader, president Olusegun Obassanjo.

Soyinka, anxious about his own safety, came quietly into Australia recently to see the staging of his latest play, The Beatification of Area Boy.

The play is set in Nigeria's capital, Lagos, in a typical big- city locale -- a plaza street corner in front of a department store, in the shadow of a freeway flyover. A street gang, called "area boys", control the precinct but the play does not romanticize them. It is a witty and perceptive celebration of the common people's indomitable spirit.

The production is by a British touring company, West Yorkshire Playhouse, which provides guest artists at this year's Festival of Perth. The company is based in Leeds, the home of the university Soyinka attended in 1956.

According to the play's director, Jude Kelly, "The true character of Soyinka is that as much as he would prefer to be perceived as an artist, he is absolutely prepared to live his politics if necessary. He has never stood by as a mere cultural commentator."

His play and this production will resonate with meaning for audiences far and away from the Nigerian capital.

Soyinka was born in western Nigeria in 1934, into a devoutly Christian home. After an education at the local university, he went to England. The 1950s was a period of great experimentation in the theater, in England and France especially.

While a student at Leeds University, he became involved with the new drama movement at the London-based Royal Court Theater. He was much influenced by this experimental theater movement. While in London, two of his plays were staged in Nigeria in 1959 and 1960.

The Swamp-Dwellers is about the social and political changes necessary to make land productive in rural Nigeria. "The Lion and the Jewel" is a comedy, one of his most popular, involving the village chief and a school teacher who compete for the hand of the most attractive girl in the village. The play explores a conflict of values between traditional ways and European innovation.

Soyinka returned to Nigeria in 1960 and established a theater company that produced his first major play, A Dance of the Forests. It was intended for independence celebrations but was interpreted as a critique of pre-colonial history. The play underplayed the cultural significance of colonial Britain but revealed a number of themes that run through Soyinka plays.

For him, the past, the present and the future are three inter- locking worlds -- worlds that symbolize the dead, the living and the yet unborn.

Most of his writings illustrate variations on this inter- relationship, and blend Western experimentalism with African folk tradition. He is constantly interested, too, in the role of the artist in society.

Then in October 1965, Soyinka was arrested. He was said to have seized the Western Region radio station and made a political broadcast disputing the results of the recent elections. He was acquitted in December, after three months in jail.

This experience prompted his next play, Kongi's Harvest. It is about the abuse of power and the way such abuse can corrupt a whole society. It was performed at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts in 1966.

When Nigeria erupted into a ferocious four-year civil war, Soyinka was detained without trial in August 1967, and released in October 1969 -- but only after an intense international campaign. He then went into exile. One result of his imprisonment was the personal memoir The Man Died, published in 1972. "The man dies," he wrote, "in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny."

Although he was appointed professor of comparative literature at a west Nigerian university, he was prevented from taking up the appointment. He was awarded visiting professorships to Cambridge and Sheffield universities.

Soyinka's latest book, The Open Sore of a Continent, just published, is a personal narrative of the Nigerian crisis. He does more than describe the events and explain the processes at work since Independence (1960) of what was once a jewel in the British colonial crown. He also explores the wider issues of nationhood, identify and the present state of African culture and politics as we head toward the 21st century.

When I asked him if he had any hope for Nigeria, he replied, "Hope is a problem." It is unlikely that the military who holds power will surrender it, he said, or that there will be any lessening of violence against the civilian population. "The violence is already there. I won't, and can't, condemn the use of the same violent ways against the dictatorship."

It is the civilian community, however, with whom Soyinka's hope resides and who derive the most inspiration from his banned novels, poems, plays and essays. These are smuggled into Nigeria and quickly disseminated through a ready and cooperative network of distributors.

Soyinka still feels the international community has not done enough to bring pressure to bear on the Nigerian regime. "Absent cries make empty phrases," he says, and singles out Nelson Mandela as an example of someone who could have done more. "Mandela," he says, "is the moral voice on the continent." Neither Mandela nor his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, have visited Nigeria's imprisoned opposition leaders. President-elect Abiola was invited to Mandela's inauguration, and former President Obassanjo visited Mandela in jail.