Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment with the Nazis.But since by itself punning is not high on the totem
pole of poetic metaphorization, Soyinka makes a recourse to linking
wordplay in this poem to a truly Swiftian fixation on the deranged logic
of the comparison of Nelson Mandela to Nazi war criminals. This yields
a ballooning, spiraling send-up of Mr. Botha’s statement by transforming
Mandela to the evil genius behind all the atrocities, all the “crimes against
humanity” (U.N. Declaration against apartheid,) of not only the
Nazis but also of the apartheid regime itself:
Got you! Trust the Israelis.
I bet they flushed him out, raced him down
From Auschwitz to Durban, and Robben Island.
Mandela? Mandel...Mendel...Mengel...Mengele!
It’s he! Nazi superman in sneaky blackface!...()
Cute Mandgela, sought everywhere,
Cooly ensconced on Robben Island.
I saw your hand in Biko’s death, that perfect
Medical scenario, tailormade for you.
And hundreds more of young Icarus syndrome-
Flying suspects, self-propelled
From fifty-story floors
To land on pavements labeled – WHITES ONLY!
You question them only in white preserves –
How would a high-rise building fit in shanty-town? ()If these lines push the illogicality of the ideological discourses of the
apartheid regime to their grotesque limits, the allegorization of the phan-
tasmic aspects of the apartheid imagination exceeds those limits in the
poem, “‘No!’ He Said.” This poem celebrates the legendary steadfast-
ness of Mandela in the face of the use of every ruse and stratagem to
make him renounce the struggle against the apartheid regime and cut a
personal deal with both that regime’s power brokers and the foreign Cold
War geopolitical pragmatists who, to the end, sustained the apartheid
regime by the specious logic of global “Realpolitick.” In the elaborate
allegory outlined in this poem, Mandela is bearded in his solitary cell
on Robben Island by tempters in a modern-day version of a medieval
mystery cycle. This produces in this poem one of the most accomplished
pieces in all of Soyinka’s poetry of the sub-genre of narrative poetry. And
this is hardly surprising because in this poem, there are several speaking
voices and the juxtaposition of these voices entails the fusion of the lyric,
dramatic and narrative modes at a consummate level rare in Soyinka’s
formal verse but often almost effortlessly achieved in the poetry of his