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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 Sore
celebrates 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 June
from 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 that
Open 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 a
birth
,
but an aborted delivery leading to a stillborn entity.
Open Sore
is 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 of
Open Sore
derive 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 June
electoral 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
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
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