Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose character,” and “indivisible national unity.” Given Soyinka’s predilection
for the metaphysics of the ineffable and the nuomenal, it comes as a sur-
prise to find that all the “auguries” and “portents” whose nullification is
mourned in this book are rooted in the concrete solidary movement of
the mass of ordinary Nigerians acting across the real and manufactured
divisions which had always kept them apart and therefore susceptible to
manipulation by political opportunists and nation-wreckers. This is why
in its most moving passages,Open Sorecelebrates the author’s apparently
newfound faith that it is the will of the Nigerian people and not that of
Ogunnian prometheans that will sound the death knell of military and
civilian despotism. This perspective even shows through in Soyinka’s
lyricization of the “heroic” virtues of patience and discipline displayed
by the Nigerian people – not generally credited with these virtues! – in
their response to the stratagems deployed by the Babangida regime to
prevent the elections of Junefrom taking place, or to make sure
that if the elections did take place, it would be so hopelessly botched
by deliberately organized confusion and mayhem that its cancellation
would be unquestionable. Thus, while it is true thatOpen Sore, in char-
acteristic Soyinkan penchant for mystical experiences and phenomena,
also celebrates, often with great poetic license, imponderable “auguries”
of nature, accident and circumstance in the defeat of Babangida’s efforts
to render the June,elections a non-event, it is really the interven-
tion of a popular electoral will across the length and breadth of Nigeria
that the writer credits with his sense of the “birth” of the nation on that
date. Except that in much of its contents, this book is not about abirth,
but an aborted delivery leading to a stillborn entity.
Open Soreis a deeply affirming and challenging book in many ways.
This point needs to be strongly emphasized because the final, closing
vision of the book is a despairing one, since its core thesis about the
nation-building project that is Nigeria is that all the crises prior to June
should be seen as either “birth pains” or “death throes.” The most
debatable aspects ofOpen Sorederive from its rhetorical, metaphorical
extemporizations on the motifs and images of death and mortality which
provide some of the book’s most memorable passages and insights: the
death of compatriots like Tai Solarin, Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other
Ogoni activists, the hundreds slaughtered in Lagos in the protests against
the annulment of the Juneelectoral mandate, and the “death” of
the passionate aspirations of the Nigerian people for a better life, for
recognition of their sense of innate dignity and self-worth against the
negations of naked, brutish power. All these literal and psychological