Wole Soyinka
political pathologies. The word is a corruption of “peculiar mess” and
was coined by the popular supporters of the demagogic, charismatic
and populist politician, Adegoke Adelabu who had used the phrase
“peculiar mess” in the regional assembly to characterize the violent and
volatile fight-to-the-finish, take-no-prisoners political culture of the coun-
try’s postcolonial rulers. As deployed in the quote, the word signifies the
national political space as one that more or less makes exile as much
an interior, spiritual condition as it is an experience of external, physi-
cal removal from the national homeland. This is why tropes of “home”
and “homecoming” inIbadanassume a considerably more alienating and
dystopian expression than inIsara– or indeed any other work of Soyinka.
Written and published in the earlys but spanning the years
to,Ibadanis nonetheless hardly a work of recollection, as far as the
sections dealing with the Nigerian political “penkelemes” are concerned.
As Soyinka says in the book’s Foreword: “plus ̧ca change?” (xiv) Every single
crisis from independence into thes repeats, in ever-widening
and intensifying forms, that national political malaise of “penkelemes.”
Ibadan, on the author’s own testimony, is meant to be a setting down
by Soyinka of the facts and realities of this Nigerian “peculiar mess” in
order to redeem the amnesia which, in his despairing view, the condition
of “penkelemes” breeds in his compatriots.
The manner in which Soyinka sets about this task inIbadanmakes the
book extremely fraught and controversial in the way in which it weaves
a seamless, mutually reinforcing narrative between the “plot” of his own
political coming of age story and that of the larger story of the coming
into being and gradual unraveling of his new nation. And because much
of this conflation of personal biography and nationaltelosare in fact
quarried from many of Soyinka’s fictional and nonfictional works dealing
with Nigeria’s post-independence crisis,Ibadanreads far less like a work
of recollection than one of, as the post-structuralists put it, “repetition
and revision” of old and new texts. Indeed,Ibadancan be validly seen
as deriving each of its two conflated subplots – theBildungsromanof the
coming of age of the protagonist hero; and the national mock-epic of
rebirth after colonial bondage followed speedily by slow death throes –
respectively fromAk ́eandIsara.Ak ́ehad set the terms of the unique
individuation which would shape the personality and identity of the
adult artist as a visionary “okunrin ogun” (man of conflicts, of volatile
controversies) whileIsarahad problematized the social coordinates of
self in the expanding circles of family and kin, natal hometown together
with the congeries of nation, continent, “race” and the world. Thus,