The Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, spoke this week at the Hay Festival in Mexico. In an extract from his talk, he tells Peter Godwin that now is the time to tackle militants in Nigeria.
Excerpts...
Professor
Soyinka, you’re not an ivory-tower kind of writer. You are not a
stranger to danger, and in fact you’ve been imprisoned on at least two
occasions, once in solitary confinement. Can you tell me what that was
like?
Writing in certain environments carries
with it an occupational risk. When I was imprisoned, without trial, it
was as a result of a position I took as a citizen. Of course I used my
weapon, which was writing, to express my disapproval of the [Biafran]
civil war into which we were about to enter. These were people who’d
been abused, who’d undergone genocide, and who felt completely rejected
by the rest of the community, and therefore decided to break away and
form a nation of its own. Unfortunately, the nature of my imprisonment
meant that I couldn’t practise my trade because I was in solitary
confinement for 22 months out of the 27, and I was deprived of writing
material. So I had to somehow break through the barriers, smuggle in
toilet paper, cigarette paper, scribble a few poems, pass messages
outside. I was able to undertake exercises to make sure that I emerged
from prison intact mentally.
Continue after the cut...
There have been high hopes
for some African leaders after they were elected – Meles in Ethiopia, or
Museveni in Uganda, or Kagame in Rwanda – but who then went to show a
more authoritarian bent. Are you an Afro-optimist or an Afro-pessimist?
I’m an Afro-realist. I take what comes,
and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society. I’ve
remarked how similar in many ways Mexico is to Nigeria, and to a number
of places: we have the same condition of unstructured, unpredictable
violence, both from the state and from what I call the quasi-state.
Whether the quasi-state is formed, as its basis, of theocratic
tendencies, or secular ideological rigidity, you always have forces,
even outside the state, competing for the domination of people. That’s
what’s happening on the African continent today. That’s what’s been
happening in the Arab states and what led eventually to the Arab Spring.
Gradually people come to the recognition after decades of supine
submission that they are not whole as human beings.
Your parents were Christians, Anglicans, I understand. How has your own religious belief evolved?
I consider myself very fortunate. I was
raised in a Christian environment in Abeokuta, but another side of me
was very much enmeshed in African values. I gravitated towards what I
saw was a cohesive system of a certain relationship of human beings to
environment, a respect for humanity in general. I came through a
traditional system, where children not only had rights, but had
responsibility. In the Western world today, especially in America, it
seems to be forbidden for children to have responsibilities…
I gravitated towards a deeper knowledge of the orisha,
which represents the Yoruba pantheon, very similar in many ways to the
Greek pantheon. You have reprobate deities, beneficent deities. I found
that more honest than a kind of unicellular deity of either Christianity
or Islam.
I don’t know if you’ve been following
the news, but just a few days ago some of these Islamic fundamentalists
butchered close to 50 students of a technical college. I cannot imagine
the religion I was brought up in having such complete contempt for human
lives. And yet these are supposed to be the world religions. So that’s
why I consider myself rather fortunate that I’ve been able to see what
other religions had to offer.
How should Nigeria deal with the Boko Haram, the Islamic militants in the north of the country?
All religions accept that there is
something called criminality. And criminality cannot be excused by
religious fervour. Let me repeat something I first said at the meeting
organised by UNESCO a few weeks ago, which was prompted by the recent
film insulting the religion of Islam and depicting the Prophet Mohammed
in a very crass way.
The first thing to say is that we do not
welcome any attempt to ravage religious sensibilities. That can be
taken for granted. But you cannot hold the world to ransom simply
because some idiot chose to insult a religion in some far-off place
which most of the world has never even heard of. This for me is a kind
of fundamentalist tyranny that should be totally unacceptable. So a
group calls itself the Boko Haram, literally: “Book is taboo”, the book
is anathema, the book is a product of Western civilisation, therefore it
must be rejected.
You go from the rejection of books to
the rejection of institutions which utilise the book, and that means
virtually all institutions. You attack universities, you kill
professors, then you butcher students, you close down primary schools,
you try and create a religious Maginot Line through which nothing should
penetrate.
That’s not religion; that’s lunacy. My
Christian family lived just next door to Muslims. We celebrated Ramadan
with Muslims; they celebrated Christmas with Christians. This is how I
grew up. And now this virus is spreading all around the world, leading
to the massacre of 50 students. This is not taking arms against the
state, this is taking up arms against humanity.
PG: Is freedom of expression something you see as a universal right rather than as some Western construct?
WS There are many
cultures on the African continent where days are set aside, days of
irreverence where you can say anything you want about an all-powerful
monarch or chief. It’s a safety valve. It’s a recognition of freedom of
expression, which perhaps has not been exercised, and bottled up
grievances; this is the day when you express your grievances in society.
So there is no society, really, which does not boast some form or
measure of freedom of expression. Now, it’s true that freedom of
expression carries with it an immense responsibility. Well that is why
laws of libel exist – that when you carry things too far, you can be
hauled up before the community, and judged to see whether you are right
to call somebody a thief, or a hypocrite, and damage his reputation. But
unless you establish that principle of freedom of expression, we might
all just go around with a padlock on our lips.
Audience member: I
read somewhere my freedom ends where your freedom begins. In Europe
there have been cartoonists who have mocked the Prophet. Should they
limit their freedom of speech?
Religion is also freedom of expression.
People want to express themselves spiritually. And they also exercise
the right to try and persuade others into their own system of belief.
Those nations that say it’s a crime to preach your religion are making a
terrible mistake. All they’re doing is driving underground other forms
of spiritual intuitions and practices.
If religion was to be taken away from
the world completely, including the one I grew up with, I’d be one of
the happiest people in the world. My only fear is that maybe something
more terrible would be invented to replace it, so we’d better just get
along with what there is right now and keep it under control.
The unrest which is taking place as a
result of Boko Haram, in my view, has attained critical mass. When a
movement reaches that state of total contempt even for universal norms,
it is sending a message to the rest of the world, and to the rest of
that nation, that this is a war to the end. The president of Nigeria is
making a mistake in not telling the nation that it should place itself
on a war footing.
There’s too much pussyfooting, there’s
too much false intellectualisation of what is going on, such as this is
the result of corruption, this is the result of poverty, this is the
result of marginalisation. Yes, of course, all these negativities have
to do with what is happening right now. But when the people themselves
come out and say we will not even talk to the president unless he
converts to Islam, they are already stating their terms of conflict.
Culled -Telegraph of London
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