Wole Soyinka
contribution to the genre of modern African and English-language au-
tobiographical memoir. Particularly notable in this regard are sections
which, in fragmentary and discontinuous vignettes, detail the single-
mindedness with which Maren seeks to retain his own unique spiritual
and moral selfhood and protect its intuitions and insights while at the
same time remaining deeply and irrevocably responsive to diverse life-
enhancing and affirming values and projects. These include the work of
creation with other writers, artists and performers; genuine solicitude for
the disenfranchised; and permanent engagement of causes promoting
nation-weal and the unity and progress of the African continent.
IfIbadan, with its achievements and serious flaws, shows the formidable
challenge of writing about the self where that self is both a vital participant
in, and a compelling witness to great sociopolitical upheavals,The Open
Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisisshows Soyinka
rising brilliantly to this challenge of writing the self while writing history.
The Soyinka that we encounter in this book speaks as much in his own
idiosyncratic and inimitable voice as he does in the exteriorized voices
of his fictionalized surrogates or doubles in the other memoirs. This is
becauseOpen Soreis a passionate affirmation of popular energies and
a celebration of elemental bodily and cultural solidarities as bulwarks
against those reifying abstractions of the modern African nation-state
like “territorial integrity” and “national sovereignty” which are used by
tyrants and oligarchs to justify and rationalize their misrule, their iron-
fisted grip on power.
Open Soreis an extended meditation, in three essays and a postscript,
on the “birth” and “death” agonies of the Nigerian nation in its transfix-
ion throughout most of thes ands as a vast military camp
under the regimes of Generals Buhari, Babangida and Abacha. Be-
yond these regimes, the book’s purview extends to the corrupt police
state created by the civilian government of Shehu Shagari (–). In
Soyinka’s reckoning, at the centre of this historic perspective on military
and civilian autocracy in Nigeria are two particularly portentous events.
These are the “pacification” of Ogoniland in the Niger delta by units of
the Nigerian army, together with the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and
the other eight Ogoni environmental activists on November,,
and the annulment of the results of the presidential elections of June,
.These two events take on significance for Soyinka because to him,
they showed in the clearest manner possible, the destruction unto nullity
of all the most hopeful auguries and portents of egalitarian, humane and
multicultural “nation-being,” all in the name of abstractions like “federal