Wole Soyinka
protection.It was indeed at the height of this civil war-induced state of
emergency that the famous Agbekoya revolts broke out in many parts
of rural western Nigeria, ultimately culminating in a march on Ibadan,
the regional capital, where some police stations were stormed and raided
for weapons and the main prison at Agodi was “liberated.” But while
these tumultuous events which provide a context for Soyinka’s accounts
of his unique experiences are significantly left out of the narrative, it must
be acknowledged that as to the precise question of linking the civil war
“victors” to the beginnings of a brutal military dictatorship in Nigeria,
Soyinka inThe Man Diedwas virtually alone in warning the nation –
in particular the community of militants and progressive intellectuals –
of this development and its dire portents. It was not necessary, not in-
evitable, Soyinka argues, that in order to win the war and keep the nation
together a dictatorship had to be imposed on the country. And even if
one accepted this rationalization, why, Soyinka further asks, did the re-
pressiveness, the wanton violation of civil liberties continue and deepen
after the end of the war? The heinous incident which supplied the title
of the book as well as all the other incidents of power arrogance and
sadistic acts of military potentates documented in the Appendix to the
book, all of these happened, after all, wellafterthe cessation of hostilities.
And perhaps the most important political and ideological question posed
by this testament: what happens to a people on whom a dictatorship is
imposed and justified in the name of patriotism, and as a blackmail
based on the specter of the breakup of the nation and a descent into
chaos?
To give maximum moral and ideological force to his answer to this
question as well as place this “local” Nigerian sociopolitical tragedy in a
wider historical context, Soyinka makes a far-ranging comparison of his
nation in the aftermath of the civil war to other places and other times
throughout the world when tyranny in the form of partial or complete
police states are gradually imposed on a populace, quoting many writers
and thinkers on the imperative of political and spiritual resistance based
on uncompromising ethical absolutes. One of the most eloquent of these
is the Greek writer, George Mangakis, who is quoted by Soyinka for
his warning on one of the worst things that happen when dictatorship
is imposed on a people, this being a particular form of failure and its
consequences. This is the failure to
acquire an extraordinary historic acuity of vision and see with total clarity that
humiliated nations are inevitably led either to a lethal decadence, a moral and