Wole Soyinka became the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and is now one of the continent’s most revered authors. But two decades earlier, he was sent to prison without trial for speaking out about the civil war in his native Nigeria.
While in solitary confinement he scrawled notes and poems using meat bones, handmade ink and toilet paper. Those ideas became the memoir “The Man Died,” published in 1972, which is now the framework of a movie of the same name that recounts the playwright and novelist’s life at the height of the civil war.
The following interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Larry Madowo: What did it feel like to go to prison just because you were agitating for what you felt was right?
Wole Soyinka: It was a very testing period for me. Twenty-two months in total isolation, denied books, denied paper, my cell constantly searched, nothing at all to sustain my mind.
I think one of the most cunning categories of humanity that I’ve ever encountered is the prisoner. The prisoner has to survive. It’s a survival test, not a question of self-advancement.
And (in solitary confinement) what is the most space-economic enterprise you could undertake? The mental enterprise, calculations, mathematics. I made my own ink with dirt; I made my own pen from the bones in the meat of my food, creating a complete self-sustaining mental micro-world of my own. It was also a dangerous period for the mind.
I remember when I used to hallucinate, so I would leap up and try and destroy those kinds of hallucinatory images that came out. But eventually, I mastered all that period, and after that, I began recollecting those formulae in geometry and trigonometry which I had hated, and I began pulling them back, making calculations on the ground.
Believe it or not, I rediscovered the theory of permutations and combinations. Those things I had hated in school became my sustenance.
LM: You wrote about those prison years in a memoir which has now been turned into a movie, “The Man Died.” Have you seen it yet?
WS: No. Let me put it this way, turning anything in my life into something other people can watch, pains me. I assisted them in trying to locate a house in which I hid and operated during the civil war. They were looking for something close to one we were using during that period.
But it’s not just about me alone, it’s also about a particular period. I might watch it eventually, but not immediately. Even this very interview we’re doing, I won’t watch. It always takes a while to bring myself to watch me.
LM: You don’t make a big fuss about your birthday, but you just turned 90, which is a big deal.
WS: Well, the annoying thing is that I don’t feel 90. But I will confess that I do share some kind of ritualistic aspect of the birthday. So it’s not a question of dislike, it’s just that I like to have it on my own. Usually what I do on my birthday is disappear into the forest. That’s my normal way of spending birthdays.
LM: Do you remember when you became politically active?
WS: I was a great eavesdropper on my parents’ conversation, especially around my father’s (a school principal and priest in the Anglican church) colleagues. I remember sitting behind an armchair listening.
My mother would arrive and report what had gone on. My father’s whole circle was also involved that way, so I would say that this was the beginning of my political involvement.
When the women rioted in this very town where we are now, Abeokuta, my mother was involved as a lieutenant of (women’s rights activist) Mrs. Ransome Kuti, (famed Afrobeat musician) Fela Kútì’s mother. So as a child, when all the rioting was taking place, I became a courier between the various women’s camps passing messages.
LM: Seeing your mother involved in this political activism appeared to have planted the seed for your life’s work.
WS: That’s correct. Being actually within the environment, that struggle of militancy against an unacceptable situation that these women were facing, how their goods were being seized by police in the marketplaces, if they didn’t pay taxes, some of them beaten up, roughed up, and so on.
Being part and parcel of this and seeing them set upon on their way to go and pass more oppressive legislation, I took the side of the women most naturally (and) that reflected in my writing. No question at all.
LM: There’s a legend about you sneaking into a radio station and swapping out a political speech for something more critical, what’s the truth?
WS: Well, the first thing I have to remind you is that I was tried and acquitted. Yes, it’s true, there’s no point in denying it any longer that I felt compelled to stop the further broadcast of false results.
I witnessed firsthand the destruction of polling booths, even the tearing up of results. I was already heavily politicized at that time, but when I saw this oppressive regime about to reinstall itself, and people have to remember, it was the most cynical regime, which went so far as to declare on radio to say, “we don’t give a damn if you vote for us,” it just triggered my already highly honed militant sense. So it was part of an ongoing struggle on so many levels. Yeah, guilty, but there was no alternative at that time.
LM: After receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, it took a long time for another (Black) African to receive that honor. What did that feel like at the time?
WS: Isolated. I was most relieved when the next African came because so much was demanded of you. It was like overnight your constituency expanded simply because you come from the African continent. On the one hand, of course, a sense of recognition, which is very good. Opening certain doors, but then there were not many doors which I was looking to enter anyway, I just enjoyed my profession, full stop.
But at the same time, especially in societies like ours, it exposed you a lot more. I always remind people that one of the most brutal dictators we had here, Sani Abacha, would’ve gone to his grave a happy man if he hanged a Nobel Laureate, if he may be able to put that on his CV. As it is, he had to be content with hanging an activist, a writer, and his eight companions. I’m referring to Ken Saro-Wiwa.
So it exposed me to very great dangers because I refuse to back down on my beliefs, on my activities simply because I’ve become a Nobel laureate. Why should I stop things which preoccupied me before the Nobel?
But it was grand when one after the other (African Nobel winners) began to come in. Now, I’ve been able to enjoy for some time now being a Nobelist rather being feeling sometimes like a showpiece.
LM: You told some students of an exchange program named after you that you still hope to go to space. What’s your fascination with space?
WS: It began as a child, and I was just fascinated by the stars and constellations. I wrote in one of my essays that I used to close my eyes and imagine a state of total nothingness, and from that, the notion of actually going to space. I recollect when Armstrong stepped on the moon, I was in prison at the time, so that childhood exercise also served me in good stead. My prison bars dissolved overnight just imagining them on the moon. Then space exploration began.
One day, by mail, one of the associations of human development that I belong to had some free tickets for a zero-gravity flight simulator; by then I was 70 years old. I went to San Jose (California) and had my space experience and that is one of the most thrilling experiences of my life.
LM: Richard Branson is taking people to space these days.
WS: If Branson came now and said, I’ve found space for you, I would terminate this interview right now. I’m still in reasonably good shape and I think I can take the gravity stress; I’m convinced I can. I’m willing to do anything. Shoot me into space, I don’t even mind if something happens over there, that’s okay. Then I’ve experienced that childhood obsession.