Wole Soyinka

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I'm Harriet Gilbert and welcome to the World Book Club, where this month our special guest here to answer questions from an audience and sent in by BBC listeners about his childhood memoir Ake. Is the great Nigerian playwright, poet and Nobel laureate, Wally Shoyenka? Wally Shoyenka, welcome to the World Book Club. Thank you. I was just thinking about your achievements on the way to meet you today, and I did wonder whether, when you knew that you'd won the Nobel Prize in literature, that was a more splendid moment or a less-spended moment than the first time you sat in a theatre and watched one of your plays being brought to life on stage. Hmm, now let's see. Before I actually saw my play performing in the theatre, there was, I think, the publication was the other way around. Then you have to remember also that I began directing my own plays, the kind of theatre which we had in Nigeria at the moment required everybody to be able to do virtually everything, so I can't help you for the moment. Well, Wally Shoyenka did first make his name in the theatre, initially in 1950s England where he acted, directed and developed experimental dramas at the Royal Court Theatre. Then in Nigeria where he founded two theatre companies and began to write such major plays as a dance of the forest. In prison during the Nigerian Civil War for appealing for a cease fire, Onyu's release his work became even more powerful, combining Yoruba mythology, western theatrical traditions, song, dance and satire, to create a body of work that gives political theatre not just a good but a splendid name. Among his greatest plays from the 1970s are Madman and Specialists and Death and the King's Horseman. But Wally Shoyenka also writes novels, poetry and memoirs of which his childhood memoir Ake is internationally acknowledged as a classic. In it we follow the young Wally from inquisitive, greedy, dangerously adventurous infancy to his departure for the government college in Ibadan, on the way meeting his headmaster father, the gardening obsessed essay, a memorable supporting cast of family members and neighbours, and crucially Wally's mother Eniola, or Wild Christian as he nicknamed so. And Wally Shoyenka, I wonder if you'd introduce us to Wild Christian by reading a passage from the memoir where she's just found out that the young Wally has been munching his way through a tin of, I think, sweet baby food and she is remotely amused. She was not amused. She shouted for her stick and even before its arrival I found myself leaping about the backyard dodging wild blows from fists and feet, felled by some and rolling with others. The last moment, I kept fearing and hoping that she would attempt to transfer the event outside our own backyard. In my mind I rehearsed the swift movement down, the bundle of my possessions snatched up, and then a continuous run through the passing age, through the streets, heading nowhere but everywhere, away from a household whose subtle hostilities had begun to prickle my skin. That for long suspected that my place was no longer in that house. But the time it was over, I had decided that it would be best to pursue my original plans, pick up my bundle and seek my fortune away from the passing age. Thank you very much for that Wally Shoyenka. When I figured have a question from the audience here at Bush House for Wally Shoyenka, well yes, the gentleman at the front. My name is Stephen Cook, I come from Hertfordshire and I would like to ask you what caused you to write about your childhood. I set out to write about a period, a period which I found fascinating in retrospect, that period of my childhood which was vanishing very fast, changing all the time. I wanted to write about it and I was fascinated by the oversized stature of my uncle, Reverend Ioransom Kutti, whom I admired enormously. So I decided I was going to write his biography, through his biography capture that whole period which was so exotic for me as a child. He went and died on me and I was going to put sat with him and he treated me like an adult even when I was a child. So I forgot the project for a number of years, the idea of going through his papers by myself, doing the nursery research, just too much. I had my own work to do, but one day I said I can still capture that period, this time trying to look at it through my own eyes when I was a child. That's how Ake was written, it was not really meant to be about me. Wally Shoyenka, thank you very much and now another question from the audience. Margaret Busby, what characters do you think you inherited from each of your parents while Christian and NC? Most artists are considered to be very disorganized, the word is Bohemia and I think casual, improvisational, etc. Well, this particular artist is anything but that and I think that part is inherited from my father, he was a very disciplined person, I hate expressions like African time, I go wild and insane when people do not keep appointments on the dot. You know, I just can't stand it, and all that I think came from my father. Now my mother was very improvisational, especially when it came to beating. With my father, you knew how many strokes you were going to get, you could prepare yourself in advance. My mother, when she was ready, that was whenever, suddenly you had a shbop right on the side of the head and then blows followed. There were both very religious, my father was more intellectual leaning, even in terms of religion, in other words she could argue about religion, about Jesus Christ, the prophets and so on, and that analytical approach even in the heart of faith was something which I heard from her. My mother, the wild Christian, was just faithful, anything which went wrong had to be because she had slipped a little bit one way or the other, and I wonder why she never realized that maybe that slipping included beating me up when I did something wrong, I couldn't understand that. So this is the, they're both different, very charming, they are always, but very different. Thank you. We've got an email now from an Nigerian listener to the BBC World Service called Emmanuel Kamwalafi, who lives in Tallahassee in the USA now, and he wants to look at your father, who as you say was a discipline disciplinarian, but nonetheless a disciplinarian. And he reminds you of the time, the episode where the headmaster orders one of his schoolteachers to stick back onto its stem, a rose that he'd casually cut from essays garden. And he wants to know back in the days when patriarchs of families were known to be fearsome, to what extent do you think they influenced the upbringing of their children and the ones they adopted from extended families, in terms of letting them take initiatives and have free expression of themselves, comparing fatherhood then and now, what do you think? Eurobar culture is a very interesting one, it's, sometimes it seems contradictory, but when you analyze it thoroughly, you realize that it's always a sense of balance, I have a certain expression for it, especially in connection with child upbringing, you're supposed to be part of a group, you're supposed to be part of the community. And yet Eurobar culture recognizes, in many ways, that there are certain unique properties in children, and so Eurobar culture tries to balance the two in one way or the other. evolved a comparative, a dual expression, "autoluni" and "anjorni". "autoluri" means walks apart, one who walks apart separately and the other one is "anjorni" which means we walk together, must walk together and I think Rebecca is a study in the balancing of the two and I have a feeling that I was a testing ground for my parents in that respect. I recognize the fact that I was an "autoluni" but at the same time that other aspect of Eurobar culture, we demanded that I be part of the totality of the community, fulfilling my responsibilities, that militated against it so I got beaten for being an "autoluni", I got beaten for being an "anjorni", I mean it was very confusing for me and I had to sort out myself in between but my father disciplinarian and very, very disciplined was one who was more sympathetic to the "autoluni", he who tends to walk apart, who you know has his own, creates his own world. So my mother is a question of where is he, why isn't he here, go and call it, wherever he is and that was very problematic. Is this balance, this tension I think which has created many of us who come from the Eurobar culture? And what about subsequent generations of parents? Oh yes, yes. So do you think they're doing it better or actually worse in some ways? It depends on which kind of family you're talking about. We have for instance the offspring of what I call the colonial aristocrats, those who have imbibed the values of colonial cultures, civilization, or shall we say, mode of existence, who believe that children should be allowed to do exactly what they want and make excuses for them and the others who insist no, there are certain codes, certain ethos which holds the family together. So there is a confusion but I'm afraid the apparently predominant ones these days are those who want to prove that they are more quote unquote cultured, that means westernized than others and it's played havoc, havoc on current generation. Many of them the only think of rights and not responsibilities. We were brought up to understand that responsibilities in fact go to the making of your character and I prefer that. This next question was wrung into the program from Lagos State in Nigeria by Shegun Farquhuy and we can hear him now asking it. Hello Professor Shuringka, my name is Shegun Farquhuy, I'm a web developer from Lagos Nigeria but I'm also interested in literature and that's the reason why I want to ask you the following question. Anyone reading AK that's already years would spread away, realize the rich spiritual emphasis of the book. For instance, the book describes the Gungung masks, markets. We know markets in your belief are spiritual places and the book also talks about church and Christianity in the same vicinity. My question for user is for a child growing up in a place like AK where he sees the practitioners of traditional beliefs on the streets or in shrines and then sees the same set of people in church. Can this lead to confusion for the child about what to believe in and has it ultimately lead to atheism? Sorry and has it ultimately led to atheism but maybe the first question is did it lead to confusion having these two religions permeating your life as they both did? Not with me, it did not. It's very difficult to explain how I was able to reconcile these various religious impulses and expression forms of expression. Perhaps the way I reconciled it come to think of it now was in the social interaction between the various groups. At Christmas time my family would send typical Christmas food items to our Muslim neighbors, friends, teachers, colleagues. Come Ilya, the Ramadan when Rams is slaughtered, we also expected the hunks of meat from the sacrificed lambs. And I noticed also as a child that during the traditional festivals the kind of fundamentalist nonsense and brutality that you have today just did not exist at the time. Now that did not stop the Christians coming out on their evangelical days when they went around the markets, the quote-unquote pagan areas to try and preach the gospel and convert others. No, it seemed to me at the time to be part and parcel. I accompanied my mother a number of times and then I was quite fascinated by the interchained between all of them. So it was like there was a constant spiritual discourse going on. People tried to touch one another through the heart, so not by means of the knife and the suicide bomber. What we're witnessing today from is an obscenity and abomination, complete contradiction of any form of spirituality. So I didn't find any hard contradictions at the time and it did not turn me into an atheist. I think I grew up being bored by Christianity and then gravitated at was a phoenix. It had nothing to do with the confusion of religions. On the contrary, the social intercourse between the various religions was for me a very enriching period. Another question for Bolleshawinka, yes. I'm Emilie Filippe, some journalist. My question has to do with cultural identity and what you said before about it. I was wondering how you reconciled the use of the colonizer's language in English and of your own mother tongue whether that was difficult and whether you ever thought of writing prose in your own mother tongue. The colonizer's language, in other words, what in effect should be a political decision? Well, in colonized nations where you grow up utilizing a language that is not your own and when you are existing within nations which have been cobbled together into one artificial nation and you grow up with people who are trying to create a single entity out of various nationalities. You accept as a practical matter of cause the language which you see as being common to the various nations within this same national border. Then as you grow older and you examine the very question you've posed which many writers have had to contend with, you ask yourself what is the alternative? Do you adopt an internal language as the national language? And you know very well that to do that in many cases is to absolutely fire the starting pistol for a civil war. So the question of using an internal language as a national language is a non-starter for many colonized areas, not in Ghana, not in Kenya, not in Nigeria, not in the Cameroon. So what do you do as a kind of political response to that? You look for solutions like what we decided upon for instance when with the union of writers of the African peoples we decided to adopt Kishwahili as the continental language, black continent. In other words you diffuse the very dangerous policy of adopting a language from within one nation and you adopt a language which is not really associated with any one single ethnic entity within one nation. Kishwahili was the one language which fitted that bill. It is also a language very much information. And we adopted it, we call it all African writers to always ensure that their copyright for the African continent was retained so we could translate works into Kishwahili. This is followed by the African union of teachers adopting the same policy and are working with the Institute of Kishwahili in Tanzania, in Kenya, etc. and trying to refurbish and augment that particular language. We recommended that schools, Abandon, you know, jettison, comparatively useless subject in their curriculum and substitute Kishwahili so that over generations Kishwahili would become the national, the continental language. But in the meantime of course you're not about to stop creating, simply because you're waiting [BLANK_AUDIO] ac mae'n gweith i'n gweithio ac mae'n gweithio ac mae'n gweithio ac mae'n gweithio ac mae'n gweithio ac mae'n g yw'n gweld sydd hynny'r gwybod i'n gwybod sy'n gwybod sy'n gwybod sy'n gwybod sy'n gwybod sy'n gwybod sy'n gwybod sy'n gwybod sy'n gwy Mae'r ffordd yn y ffordd yn ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd Mae'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n ni'n i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w'r gweithio i'w gweithio i'w gweithio i'w'r gweithio i'w'r gweithio i'w'r gweithio i'w'r gweithio i'w'r gweithio i'w'r gwe Hwy'n gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gweith Mae'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n Dwi'n ddiolch yn ddiolch yn ddiolch yn ddiolch yn ddiolch yn ddiolch yn ddiolch yn ddiolch yn yn yng Nghymru yn fwy i'n gweith i'n gweith sy'n gweith i'n gweith i'n gweith i'n gweith i'n gweith i'n gweith i'n gweith i'n gwe Mae'n gwaith sy'n gwaith. 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