WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

 Wole Soyinka

opposition parties outside the East were in disarray, and at any rate had
no credible response whatsoever to the state terrorism being unleashed
on the country. Into this void steps Maren, relying mostly on rehabili-
tated lumpen and criminal elements and a few academic radicals who
coalesced around the ideological and ethical centre provided by Maren’s
exemplary heroism. The last four chapters ofIbadanshow Maren picking
up the pieces of the dispersed, fragmented opposition forces and giving
the consolidated fascist leadership and their agents the fight of their lives,
sometimes using their own tactics of intimidation and terror through
thugs, and more refined underground conspiratorial, vanguardist tac-
tics. This last, Maren claims, he uses to foment the famous rural and
urban mass revolts ofandknown as “Weti e” (“Douse him
with petrol and set him aflame!”). This grandiloquent claim that he,
Maren, was the sole planner and formentor of the popular uprisings
in western Nigeria inandruns counter to the mainstream
view of most Nigerian progressives that those revolts were spontaneous
irruptions of popular anger and resentment that were never effectively
organized into any strategic shape until the emergence of the Agbekoya
uprisings during the Nigerian civil war.
Incontestably, many of the incidental and circumstantial facts on
which Soyinka bases this account of the Nigerian crisis of the mid-s
will be challenged, and perhaps refuted by other future accounts of this
period of Nigerian history. Indeed, this Soyinkan version is somewhat un-
dermined by the fact thatIbadancontains a myriad of minor errors of fact,
chronology and detail, all of which could easily have been corrected by
assiduous editorial work on the manuscript before publication.These
minor errors apart, there are more substantial questions of authorial
taste and judgment provoked by this account of his heroic role in the
Nigerian “penkelemes” of the mid-s, an account which indeed marks
the denouement of the extraordinarily moving, eloquent and problem-
atic memoir,Ibadan.
It is significant that each of Soyinka’s three books of biographical
and autobiographical memoir,Ak ́e,IsaraandIbadan, ends with a long
concluding section which, in racy, dramatic and action-filled narrative,
tells of a sociopolitical struggle against the entrenched forces of reac-
tion, corruption or terror. InAk ́e, this is the famous Egba Women’s
Revolts of;inIsara, it is the struggle for succession to the throne of
Isara, a struggle which pits progressive, modernizing elites against reac-
tionary traditionalists; inIbadan, as we have seen, it is the struggle of one
man, Maren, supported only by a small band of friends, colleagues and