Wole Soyinka
“deaths” presage, for Soyinka, the “death” of the nation since, nations
are made of people, not abstractions. But Soyinka does overextend the
metaphor of birth and death with respect to June,. In sacralizing
this date as the unique, originary moment of the “birthing” of Nigeria,
Soyinka is of course exercising a writer’s prerogative, much as he had
done with the figure of the Half-Child as a symbol of the newly inde-
pendent nation in his first major play,A Dance of the Forests, significantly
his contribution to the Independence celebrations in. But the po-
etic playwright is in great tension with the theorist of radical democratic
politics here, for except in sutured, symbolic narrativizations of the life
and demise of imagined nations, no one single, liminal and “auspicious”
event or moment can serve as the birth or even conception, either of a
truly democratic polis, or of the nation itself. This observation needs to
be understood in all its complexity: the elections of June,were
the freest and most democratic elections ever held in Nigeria, even if
those elections were conducted under the aegis of a military dictatorship
which did everything possible to prevent free and fair elections and, ulti-
mately annulled the elections on the fateful day of June,. Thus,
there are concrete political and strategic considerations for regarding
June,as a watershed in Nigeria’s political evolution and these
are open to principled debate and discussion. Soyinka in the book does
in fact extensively engage some of these factors, but primarily within an
over-poeticized discourse which sacralizes June,and this tends
to move the event outside and beyond such discussion and debate.
To say this is to give acknowledgment to two underlying features of
Soyinka’s political prose which make his observations and reflections
on the projects of nation-building and democratization in Africa and
the developing world in this particular book one of the most important
interventions in recent debates on postnationalism and civil society in
postcolonial societies of the developing world. One of these defining
features of Soyinka’s political prose is the brilliant use that he makes
of anecdotal, unwritten, unofficial “scripts” and discourses. As he says
himself at the beginning of the second essay in the book, “The Spoils of
Power: the Buhari-Shagari Casebook,” it is necessary “to provide perti-
nent space for the anecdotal material of history, far too often neglected
().” Arguably, some of the best written and the most moving passages
in the book are the sharp, memorable vignettes of the outsize villains,
opportunists, and cynical power-mongers on the one hand, and on the
other hand, the selfless altruists and patriots. What is involved here is
perhaps Soyinka’s impressive acuity of vision in his attentiveness to the