By Mark Adebayo
Professor Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka needs no introduction. Anywhere in the world, this literary icon has no identity crisis. He is a global citizen.
Beyond literature and fantabulous prose construction of the blue-ribbon genre, Kongi is an out-of-this-world multidimensionalist with humanism as the linchpin of his activism.
His definition of a university even entails its human essence when he said a “university is the quintessence of humanistic striving”. Wole Soyinka himself is a quintessential academic with formidable credentials of spectacular creativity.
But, he is more than an academic giant.
This was no more pronounced than his struggles on the ill-fated June 12, 1993, presidential election which was absurdly annulled by the self-styled Evil Genius, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the erstwhile military president of Nigeria.
Long before then, Kongi, as he is fondly aliased, had been a major voice and face in the struggle to end the Nigerian-Biafran bloody civil war that eventually claimed 8 million lives, most of who are Igbos from 1967 to 1970. Wole Soyinka wanted to prevent a total genocide by internationalizing his campaign to stop arms supplies to the belligerents on both sides, especially to stop the Nigerian government from destroying the Southeast and its people. He even traveled to the war-torn Biafran enclave in solidarity with the Biafrans.
He offered himself as a willing sacrificial lamb to stop the carnage and potential unmitigatable humanitarian catastrophe.
For that, he earned the angst of the state. General Yakubu Gowon’s military junta wouldn’t have any of that and threw him into solitary confinement for twenty months. He almost ended it all there.
This is why his prowess cannot be diminished by a mob of bigoted online smatchets who have no sense of history or who deliberately rewrite history to suit their ethno-political narrative of sponsored targeted attacks on his person.
They have done all they could, they have lied all they could, they have whined all they could just to diminish his literary stature and demonize his personality sometimes by making ludicrous comparisons with those who could only qualify as academic midgets where Wole Soyinka stands or sits. It is like comparing Ogun river with the Atlantic ocean. He stands much taller than most of his peers. He set the pace and the bars of academic/literary excellence and then goes ahead to break them facilely.
Kongi is not just exceptional, he is a stupendous and extraordinary real life character among the constellation of global literati. Like a spider’s spinneret, he sculpts words into sophisticated beauty of arts that dulcifies the appetite of the educated mind and the intellectually inclined. He embroiders pages of books with a creative concourse of words that assume a life of their own, tasking the fertile mind to the full expanse of its resource.
Wole Soyinka demolished the limits of creativity by projecting creative freedom to explore beyond the traditional boundaries of predetermined intellectualism. In the African space, he pioneered limitless possibilities in literary exploration and stamped the African continent on the global academic map. Yes, he is not alone in this historic achievement, but he is primus inter pares, nonetheless.
A prophet is not without honor except in his city, so declared Jesus Christ of Nazareth in Mark chapter 6:4. It held true two thousand years ago, and still holds true today. Due to Nigeria’s politics of attrition and ferocious ethnic bigotry, an army of social delinquents have been unleashed on Wole Soyinka who have unsuccessfully tried to reduce him to their status of nonentity. Even the educated hirelings among them, smarting from misplaced envy and warped inferiority complex, decided to structure basic facts awkwardly with the tragic consequence of selfinflicted flagellation.
I join millions globally who celebrated him on his 90th birthday on July 13th. Far beyond the shores of Nigeria, Wole Soyinka was celebrated like the global icon that he is.
Even in North Africa, on July 9th, 2024, in Rabat, Morocco, the Royal Academy of Morocco, in collaboration with the Pan African Writers’ Association (PAWA), honoured the Nobel laureate on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
The event was correctly tagged “Africa Celebrates Wole Soyinka…”. The occasion was attended by cultural Ambassadors, prominent academics and high-calibre diplomats to celebrate his superlative contributions to both African and global literature.
“The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny” – Wole Soyinka.
Happy birthday, Kongi.
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