Reviewed by David White
Wole Soyinka. You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir. Random House. 2006. 499 pages. $26.95
Politically engaged young writers are supposed to mellow when they grow old. With experience and recognition, you somehow expect them to become more settled in their chosen craft, less fired-up, more removed from the fray. But not Wole Soyinka. Twenty years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African to do so, he has pitched himself back into the seething politics of Nigeria, “the place I never should have left”. Age, exile and international acclaim have only whettedhis desire for a direct part in events.
Early on in this autobiographical work he quotes a saying in Yoruba: “As one approaches an elder’s status, one ceases to indulge in battles.” But he does so only to laugh it off. “Some hope! When that piece of wisdom was first voiced, a certain entity called Nigeria had not yet been thought of.”
This restless sense of political obligation runs through this dense memoir of Soyinka’s adult life, concentrating more on his activities in Nigeria than his long periods abroad, and on the interplay between the private writer and the public figure he feels the urge to become. Soyinka is a maverick: a playwright who cut his teeth in London theatre, he has also been an actor (even on one occasion in French, to his own embarrassment), director, poet, novelist, essayist, professor and activist.
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is infused with a boyish ambition to be a man of action, always with a dash of swashbuckling bravado. He is arrested and beaten on a charge of robbery with violence - a jape involving the substitution of a radio tape. A single-handed peace mission to Biafra leads to two years in jail. An elaborate exploit to recover an iconic bronze head from a collector in Brazil misfires when the trophy turns out to be a copy. Escaping from the despot Sani Abacha by motorbike and canoe, Soyinka nurses his sore thighs and dreams of a long, cold beer. The accounts are at times poignant, at others farcical, and on occasions faintly preposterous.
Soyinka has a complex, conspiratorial relationship with the political world. He spends a chapter trying to explain away how he came to serve in a military regime, bizarrely heading a road safety initiative. He has old scores to settle, among others with Nigeria’s current president Olusegun Obasanjo. Following his latest homecoming, we see him considering the blandishments of those who want him to seek the presidency himself.
It is not an easy read. His magisterial style occasionally tips over into preciousness, and the structure is not always straightforward, starting with a first chapter devoted to memorial tributes. The long cast of characters in Nigeria’s succession of nasty regimes will leave many readers confused, and there is no index to turn to.
Literary and theatrical anecdote is mixed in with politics and forays into diplomacy. We meet everyone from Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden - with a terrific description of Auden’s face as “a compressed lump of volcanic lava in controlled convulsion” - to Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev.
In the narration, Soyinka seems to be two people, the detached writer and the globetrotting celebrity. He even slips into referring to his public persona in the third person, as “W.S.” About his personal life he says little, although he writes movingly of his friendship with Femi Johnson, an insurance entrepreneur. Mention is made of one of his marriages crumbling. Sons make unannounced cameo appearances. He does not tell us much, either, about the business of writing. What he is most eloquent about is the pang of exile, and the pull of his Yoruba roots, his “cactus patch”.
The heart of the book is a personalised history of the nation Soyinka has watched since the first days of African independence. He speaks for a bewildered generation that vested great hopes in the continent’s future, and then felt a fierce sense of dismay and betrayal over the way it turned out.
Originally published in the Financial Times
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