Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose the conflation inIbadanof the subplot of an epic hero’s life with the
subplot of a national telos that is anything but heroic will, alas, give
this work an undue, simplifying weight in future studies of the complex
relationship between Soyinka’s writings and his tumultuous career as a
public intellectual.
The coming of age and growing into young adulthood subplot does
not begin with the motif of the promethean hero. Indeed, it takes a
while for the young, pint-sized boy who arrives at Government College,
Ibadan, from Ak ́e, Abeokuta, to assert himself decisively as a “top dog”
among the usual hardened pack of bullies and tyrannical seniors. Like
Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’sPortrait of the Artist, the first impressions
and feelings away from home of Maren – the moniker which Soyinka
assumes in this memoir – take shape around a sense of freedom to pursue
promptings of spirit and imagination and the usual boyhood predilec-
tions for mischief. Except that the lighthearted nature of the narrative in
the secondary school sections of the work also contain intimations of the
writer-intellectual whose fate it would be to serve as the bell-weather for
his country’s diverse seasons of “penkelemes.” As the following passage
makes clear, it was in secondary school at Ibadan that an inkling of this
special destiny began to take shape in Maren’s consciousness:
Then the iconic names of nationalism – Azikiwe, Imoudu, Herbert Macaulay,
Mbonu Ojike, Tony Enahoro – all came alive in Government College, Ibadan,
bolder than the boulders of Apataganga. It was from Apata that he had played
truant and traveled to Mushin in Lagos to listen to Imoudu’s fiery oratory after
the massacre of Iva Valley miners, and later to watch Hubert Ogunde’s musical
drama on the events,Bread and Bullets, and be no longer surprised that the
colonial Government would ban the play and imprison Hubert Ogunde for his
daring. And then, of course, his own bloodying in numerous petty battles with
bullies and the trivial and not-so-trivial causes, but all passionate, of life-and-
death magnitude on a secondary school scale: from the very first entry through
those gates he had guessed that the place would mark him for life. There was
something about Ibadan itself, a definite feeling, both restraining and exciting,
that he had taken away with him after his final year in school, a year earlier than
more than half the class, since he was one of those not selected to participate in
the post School Certificate year, newly introduced.
This feeling was that it would not be Lagos, where he had first earned a
living and which might therefore claim to have turned him into an adult; and
that it would not be Abeokuta where, after all, he had been born; nor Isara,
his second home and birthplace of his truculent grandfather; nor indeed any
place that he had yet to visit, but Ibadan itself, with its rusted arteries, its ancient
warrens and passions and intrigues, that would confirm what he had begun to