Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose of acute consciousness of the determinate causes of rural poverty and
underdevelopment in colonial Nigeria in the time of his father’s gener-
ation, why does Soyinka give so much space and weight to the occult in
the Agunrin-Jagun mystical narrative? Soyinka’s answer to this would
be that one knowledge matrix, one “explanation” does not exclude the
other. Moreover, this question could only be put by readers or critics
unfamiliar with, or unsympathetic to the productive aporias and anti-
nomies of Soyinka’s best works of drama, fictional and nonfictional prose
and poetry which I have elsewhere explored extensively.
IfIsarais a work imbued with an acute sense of the complex interplay
between the “home” and the “world,” literally and metaphorically,Ibadan
is an exile’s book. It was written during the period of Soyinka’s exile, be-
tweenand, from Sani Abacha’s Nigeria. Of the author’s many
enforced exiles, there is no question that this was the most onerous, the
most dislocating. As the whole world knows, Abacha relentlessly hounded
Soyinka and other exiles who constituted a very effective external oppo-
sition to his regime, by placing a price on the head of Soyinka and some
other exiles like Chief Anthony Enahoro and General Alani Akinrinade,
and by having these men and others chargedin absentiawith the crime of
treason, a charge carrying capital punishment.Ibadan, we are informed,
began to take shape in the mind of the author at the uncertain beginning
of this particularly onerous of Soyinka’s many exiles:
I had long given up the President-Elect as a stubborn, irredeemable disciple of
the philosophy of nonviolence and, early that morning, had been in a totally
different kind of gathering. This also involved other fugitives from the mailed fists
of the Nigerian military, including the ex-soldier who was introduced as having
been involved in the attemptedputschofAprilagainst Babangida. At
the Swiss Cottage get-together, however I was struckby the contrast between
the moods of the two gatherings–both resolute and committed, yes, but one
upbeat while the other was somber. At the end of the earlier meeting, I knew
I was about to set off on a long journey, had no idea how long it would be, or
how it would end, but I found that I had come yet again to an acceptance of a
less pacific principle of response as being justifiable in the course of terminating
thepenkelemesof Babangida’s eight-year military despotism. I suppose that it
is at such moments that one tends to look back on one’s existence, and begin
to accept the necessity of setting something down. Certainly, I began to think
seriously of hoarding some exile time for the project. (Ibadan, xii–xiii)
This passage gives a very concrete, particular and different valence to the
well-known enforced or voluntary exocentricity of the genre of “exile”
writing because it speaks of the violence of the “penkelemes” of Nigeria’s