Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose spiritual withering, or to a passion for revenge which results in bloodshed and
upheavals. (TMD,)
Except for the fact that a second civil war has not taken place in Nigeria
and the “passion for revenge which results in bloodshed and upheavals”
has not taken the extremely savage and bizarre expressions that have
taken dreadful political and human tolls in other African countries like
Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, every single one of these dire warnings spelled
graphically in the text ofThe Man Diedhave been played out in Nigeria in
the three decades since the book was published. This makes this work a
great human and political document, one of the notable antifascist writ-
ings of the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, but for certain
moral and ideological lapses in the book’s powerful and eloquent expo-
sure of the equivocations and complacencies of an entire citizenry which
make dictatorship possible, the quality of the antifascist testament ofThe
Man Diedwould have placed the book in the ranks of the greatest political
testaments against authoritarianism of the century like Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’sThe Gulag Archipelago, George
Orwell’sAnimal Farm, C.L.R. James’Mariners, Renegades and Castawaysand
Vaclav Havel’sThe Power of the Powerless. It is no accident that these are all
prose works, for prose has incontestable advantages over other literary
forms in the testamentary mode of writing to which these works belong
precisely because the ethical burdens and generic conventions of the
idiom of prose compel maximum use of the classical prose “virtues” of
clarity, elegance, and eloquence, just as it enables astute appropriations
of the most economical and expressive features of the genres of drama
and poetry.
The best literary and moral aspects of the narrative ofThe Man Died
are traceable to the strengths of this testamentary writing. In the best
expressions of this tradition of writing, without condescension toward
one’s compatriots, sustained narrative focus on deeply personal experi-
ence of privation and suffering merge with a powerful, unsentimental
and selfless solicitude for the general wrongs done to defenseless or dis-
possessed victims of terror. The sections of this prison memoir which
record Soyinka’s encounter with other prisoners and his identification
with their condition are unequaled in his prose writings for their clarity
and evocativeness. Particularly affecting are the sections on the treatment
of the detained Igbo prisoners, on his observations on the peculiar world
of condemned prisoners on death row, and the pathos of the inmates of