Wole Soyinka
and destroy the village if any attempt is made to test its workability. Told
in this dry paraphrase, this seems a conventional allegory of the morbid
fear of genius by mediocrity, but Soyinka’smannerof telling the story is
anything but schematic.
On a deeper level, the weight of the narrator’s portentous negative
indictment of the new post-independence age is validated by Soyinka’s
meticulous and imaginative attentiveness to the impact of the moral
order of the new elite on the inner, psychic lives of the “interpreters”
and other finely drawn characters like Monica Faseyi, Joe Golder and
Lazarus, the “aladura” prophet who claims, like his Biblical namesake, to
have risen from the dead. Among the “interpreters,” Sekoni experiences
great, traumatic suffering and after going through a period of nervous
breakdown, emerges from that region of ineffable anguish and disori-
entation with immense artistic power and spiritual grace. Joe Golder,
the near white African-American homosexual consumed by an intense,
race-driven self-hatred and sexual frustration, cannot possibly find ful-
fillment, even solace, inthisdebilitating human milieu. Monica Faseyi,
alone among the expatriates and foreigners in this novel, is totally free of
either the reactionary bigotry of colonial whites like Pinkshore and the
unresolved racial complexes of condescension and over-effusive “love”
of blacks like Peter, the German journalist slumming it through black
Africa; Monica suffers a lot from her marriage to Ayo Faseyi, an insuffer-
able prude and ingratiating social climber, but she retains a remarkable
control over her inner psychic life. The claim of the albino “prophet”
Lazarus to have risen from the dead is of course unverifiable, but as
Bandele remarks of him, whether or not his claim is true, he seems to be
a person who has undergone a searing, traumatic experience. Like all the
“aladura” prophets in Soyinka’s works, the taint of charlatanism hangs
heavy around his person, but his ministry of redemption and rehabilita-
tion of the social dregs of a fallen, degraded world strikes a deep chord
of responsiveness in Kola, the artist. Indeed, Lazarus’ cry of anguish at
the failure of his attempted conversion of Noah, the petty thief, carries
a powerful resonance with the diverse struggles of the “interpreters” to
find a transformative meaning in the surrounding sea of shallowness,
cynicism and predatoriness:
‘What is truly important to me is that I know the arithmetic of religion. The
murderer is your future martyr, he is your most willing martyr. Few fools know
that.’
‘Tell me, how did you convert Noah?’ Kola was only half-attentive, and the
albino’s reaction shattered his concentration.