Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose he stepped onto the tarmac at Ikeja Airport, the end of a five-year absence. His
Land Rover had taken him through at least two-thirds of the country, probing
its ritual tissues for a contemporary theatre vision, or perhaps a mere statement
of being. Despite it all, he was left with the strange sensation of being poised
on the nation’s airspace all over again, floating in a cloud of the uncertain and
unknowable, wondering yet again what homecoming promised or would bring.
(–)
In the closing chapters ofIbadan, Soyinka provides an account of how
Nigeria lurched from one crisis to another betweenand.This
account, in the main, is a version of the “official script” of the mak-
ing and unmaking of Nigeria held by most of the country’s progressives
and radicals, especially the Southern-based formations and individuals.
This “script” holds that the political and administrative arrangements
put in place by the departing British to ensure the hegemony of the
most conservative political forces in the country – the ruling, neotradi-
tional, neofeudal elites of the North as unchallengeable senior partners
in a coalition with pseudo-bourgeois forces in the other regions of the
country – began to unravel in these years, causing a desperate backlash
comprising the use of the judiciary for repression and of the police and se-
curity forces for intimidation and terror. Furthermore, the “script” reads
Nigeria’s mid-s “penkelemes” as an expression of the fact that effec-
tive opposition to the fascist backlash resided in the uneasy and always
tenuous alliance of the spontaneous militancy of the rural and urban
poor, random and periodic work-stoppages and strikes precipitated by
progressive elements within the trade union movement, disruption of
the legislative process by the rump of the progressive, social-democratic
opposition parties, and protests, rallies and demonstrations organized by
the academic champions of popular causes.
Soyinka’s version of this same turbulent history and politics, as pre-
sented in the closing chapters ofIbadan, differs significantly from this
“script.” In Soyinka’s version, after the sellout of many leaders of the
labor movement which led to the collapse of the General Strike of,
and after the imprisonment of Chief Awolowo and other prominent
leaders of the Action Group in the treason trials of that year, no ef-
fective opposition emerged to a naked, vicious fascist consolidation of
the reactionary alliance of the Northern and Western regional govern-
ments, except perhaps in the East whose regional government was still
controlled by one of the populist, bourgeois-democratic opposition par-
ties, the NCNC. Soyinka’s version is vigorously insistent on this point:
many of the academic “radicals” were textbook revolutionaries, and the