By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The presentation of the book, Journeys around and with Kongi: Half a Century on the Road with Wole Soyinka written by the ebullient German journalist, translator and cultural activist Gerd Meuer provoked my own memories of my encounter with the Nobel Laureate as humanist and writer. I had personally chosen Soyinka as my own teacher; that was why I ended up at the Dramatic Arts Department of University of Ife (as it then was) where Soyinka was the Head of Department, leading the cast of lecturers such as Kole Omotoso, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Femi Euba, Olu Akomolafe, Segun Akinbola, Bankole Bello and others. The ambience provided by the presence of Soyinka made for a joyous engagement with his works.

The greatest discovery I made back then was Soyinka's refrigerator, which was always well-stocked with cold beer and wine! One evening when Soyinka was teaching my classmates in his house, he found me otherwise engaged in a corner. Aghast, the great man asked why I was drinking beer while my classmates were busy getting educated. 'Well, sir, beer is how I get my own inspiration!' I told Soyinka. He only laughed, before continuing to teach the other more serious students. Any other don would have rusticated me for such behaviour but Soyinka was much larger than them all. My best friend in the school was of course Soyinka's Ghanaian houseboy, Francis, who left the fridge and its multiform artworks at my mercy even as the legendary playwright taught my classmates at the department or travelled all over the world directing his plays.

Another boon companion of those days was the great Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek, author of Song of Lawino and a formidable tippler as well! My time with Okot is material for another day, however. My subject today is my mentor Soyinka, whose life and times one is hard-pressed to come to terms with in this offering. Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka, universally known as Wole Soyinka, was born on July 13, 1934. His father Ayodele whom he fondly calls 'Essay' in his acclaimed book Ake - The Years of Childhood hailed from Ijebu-Isara town while his mother Eniola or 'Wild Christian' came from Abeokuta of the selfsame Ogun State. With a father from the Ijebu section and a mother from the Egba zone Soyinka refers to himself as an 'Ijegba' man. His father was a primary school headmaster who rose to become a school supervisor. His mother was a trader who ran her shop with an iron grip that spared no debtor.

A precocious child, Soyinka began his elementary education at the age of four, attending St. Peter's School, Ake, Abeokuta, one of the elite primary schools in colonial Nigeria under the headship of his father. He was a brilliant, if rascally, pupil who played a lot of practical jokes. He had little interest in sports. In Standard III he performed the role of The Magician on prize-giving day. Thus was the early beginning of Soyinka as a dramatist. He was always the prankster amongst his mates, witty, inventive and unstoppable.

Aged 10 in 1944, he was admitted into his secondary school, Abeokuta Grammar School, popularly known as AGS, where the maverick musician Fela's father, Rev. A. O. Ransome-Kuti, was the principal. Fela was of course Soyinka's cousin. Soyinka was the youngest student in the school; most of his classmates could even pass for his teachers in age! Soyinka's early grooming by the principal Ransome-Kuti whom Soyinka fondly addresses as Daodu was matched by the mother-care offered the young lad by his famous wife Olufunmilayo whom Soyinka fondly refers to as Beere.

Even in his early years Soyinka had started building his stature as an activist by serving as a go-between between his own mother Wild Christian and Fela's mother Beere in the Women's Movement that demanded the abolition of the tax on women from the District Officer, the Alake of Egbaland and his Council of Chiefs.

Soyinka's father wanted his son to have the best of education available; in the young boy's second year at AGS he sat for examination to win a scholarship into the prestigious Government College, Ibadan (GCI). He passed the exam and was summoned for an interview in Ibadan. For the first time in his life he had to make a long journey without his parents or any elders. He was on his own, as it were. He eventually got admission into GCI but did not win a scholarship.

The students of GCI were drawn from all parts of Nigeria. Most of Soyinka's classmates were 'men' just as in AGS though a good number of the lads were nearer his age bracket. Some 24 students were admitted and they were divided into two groups to occupy either Grier House or Swanston House. Soyinka was allocated to Swanston House. One of his mates was Olumuyiwa Awe who recalls that even in Class Four Soyinka was so small in size that he was appointed the Captain of 'Mosquito Football Eleven', a team made up of Class One or Two students! He was a scorer for the cricket team, touring with the squad to such far-flung schools as Government College Umuahia, Kings College Lagos, Edo College Benin and Government College Ughelli.

Soyinka excelled in drama at GCI, being a prominent member of the dramatic arts society. He excelled in English and Literature while Mathematics was never his strong suite even though he surprised all by taking a credit in the subject. He left GCI in December 1950, and was in January of 1951 appointed a stores assistant in the medical stores of the Government Medical Department in Lagos.

Soyinka wanted to start a career in journalism. He applied to the Daily Times and took a written test with the other wannabes. The applicants were asked to imagine a market fight and report the incident for the newspaper. The other applicants wrote up their reports and left while Soyinka stayed on, writing furiously, filling up eight lined foolscap pages as though intent on writing up the entire newspaper. He was indeed expansive, giving the detailed histories of the market fighters and their extended families, their ill-assorted businesses etc. The exasperated white invigilator could not but snatch the foolscap sheets from the irrepressible young writer! This may well have been a blessing in disguise. Given the addictiveness of journalism, one wonders what would have become of Soyinka if he had not failed the Daily Times test. He quit the job at the medical department in September 1952 following his admission into University College, Ibadan (UCI).

Soyinka talks of his great excitement sometime in 1951 at having one of his short stories broadcast on the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. He mastered typing and bought his first typewriter. A major highlight of his UCI days was the founding of the Pyrates Confraternity aimed at abolishing convention, reviving the age of chivalry, ending elitism and tribalism. After reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island Soyinka and his mates were struck by the lives of the pirates as narrated by young Jim Hawkins. The original seven founders of Pyrates Confraternity are Wole Soyinka, Muyiwa Awe, Ralph Opara, Pius Oleghe, Ikpehare Aig-Imoukhuede, Ifoghale Amata and Nat Oyelola.

The critic Bernth Lindfors has traced Soyinka's first poem published in UCI to The University Voice, the official organ of the Students' Union, in January 1953. The poem of 98 lines is entitled Thunder To Storm and, to say the truth, was a very bad effort indeed. He was politically active on campus, belonging to the radical Progressive Party that opposed the policies of the Dynamic Party. He edited the cyclostyled newsletter The Eagle. His acting prowess was immediately recognized on campus, and he played the part of Tobias in the play Tobias and the Angel by James Bridie while his friend Ifoghale Amata played Raphael, to wit, the angel. He starred in other plays such as The Devil's Disciple by George Bernard Shaw. He was the source of admiration of the few young ladies around then.

He was of course very brilliant in his academics as a student of English, History and Greek. He led the class in English, competed with Gamaliel Onosode in Greek and slugged it out in History with Ifoghale Amata. It was back then that Soyinka read Bacchae by Euripedes in the original Greek, a play he would later write his own version of as The Bacchae of Euripides. He left Ibadan for Leeds University, England, in October 1954 but continued to send articles to the campus publications The Eagle and The Criterion edited by his friends Pius Oleghe and Ralph Opara respectively as 'Epistles of Cap'n Blood to the Abadinians'. In one of the articles he wrote of a white girl who kept staring at him until he felt he had won the girl's heart only for the girl to retort that she was only wondering how many average noses could be made out of Soyinka's big nose! In yet another article he wrote of the strong winds blowing in England which pushed his hand so sharply that he ended up shaking the person behind him when he had actually wanted to shake the hands of the man in front of him!

His short story 'Keffi's Birthday Treat', broadcast on the children's programme of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service was published in the Nigerian Radio Times magazine of July 1954. Soyinka was awarded second prize in the Margaret Wong Memorial Fund writing competition of 1956 for the short story 'Oji River'. He wrote poems such as 'The Other Immigrant' and two of his short stories were published in the University Of Leeds magazine The Gryphon. The first story, 'Madame Etienne's Establishment', appeared in the March 1957 edition of the magazine. The next story was, like Charles Dickens novel, entitled 'A Tale of Two Cities.'

He graduated from Leeds with an Upper Second Degree, and there is no truth whatsoever to the fable spread in certain quarters that Soyinka managed only a Third Class degree at Ibadan! Soyinka initially enrolled for graduate studies but soon turned his back on further university degrees. He fell in love with the young English girl Barbara who gave birth to his first son, Olaokun, born in November 1957. Soyinka eventually formalized his union with Barbara into his first marriage.

The Royal Court Theatre, London, was all the rage for all theatre wannabes in the Britain of those days. It was the golden age of British theatrical revival that was built on the success of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger. The great director and theatre manager George Devine held court at the Royal Court Theatre and young playwrights like Harold Pinter, John Osborne, John Arden, Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker, Ian Johnstone, Anne Jellicose earned their breakthrough under Devine's direction. There was the Sunday night innovation in which new plays were tried out and fledging playwrights earned ten shillings a script as play-readers. Soyinka was attached to the Royal Court Theatre as Play Reader between 1957 and 1959. He acted in the Royal Court production of Eleven Men Dead at Hola, dealing with colonial repression in the British detention camps, a production he made significant contribution to. His unpublished play The Invention was performed in the theatre on a November 1959 event 'An Evening without Decor' alongside excerpts from A Dance of the Forests and the much-anthologized poem 'Telephone Conversation'.

His play The Swamp Dwellers was produced in 1959 for the Sunday Times Students Drama Festival. In the same year, the earliest version of his comedy The Lion and the Jewel was produced in Ibadan alongside The Swamp Dwellers. Soyinka was building quite a reputation for himself even as he had not broken into print with a major publisher. Literally all his plays had not been published then. It was not until 1963 that plays like The Lion and the Jewel were published for the critical industry to dissect the written texts. Soyinka was a total man of the theatre who wrote, acted and directed plays. He could build the set, and knew so much about costuming. Many theatre enthusiasts at the time learnt at his feet.

Soyinka returned to Nigeria in January 1960. He had been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to travel all over Nigeria to study and record traditional festivals, rituals and masquerades rich in dramatic content. He bought a Land Rover with which he made his many journeys.

Soyinka's writing began to get some international attention with the 1960 publication of the great African-American poet Langston Hughes' African Treasury that contained some of the fledgling writer's poems. He formed The 1960 Masks, a drama company, to kick-start theatre activities in the country. His entry for the independence playwriting contest, A Dance of the Forests, won the first prize. After winning The Encounter Award, Soyinka discovered that after a thorough reading of the play some of the officials were not comfortable with the subversive nature of the play, and it was officially turned down as a part of the independence programme. The 1960 Masks produced the play at Ibadan to sold-out audiences. The speech of Forest Head, acted by Soyinka, himself underscores the relentless pessimism of the play.

It was in the selfsame 1960 that Soyinka earned the distinction of writing the first play produced on Nigerian television. The Western Nigeria Television (WNTV) reached the milestone at 8.45 pm on Saturday August 6, 1960 with the screening of the first full-length play produced in the Ibadan studios entitled 'My Father's Burden' by Wole Soyinka and directed by Segun Olusola. Continued    Source: www.burningpot.com | News source