MemoirThe publication of Wole Soyinka's new memoir is timely. Last month, Nigeria held presidential elections, which should produce the first democratic transition in Nigerian history from one civilian leader to another.
Election observers reported widespread fraud, with the EU estimating that at least 200 people had been killed during the polling. A winner did emerge, Umaru Musa Yar'Adua of the ruling People's Democratic Party and, on May 29th, President Olusegun Obasanjo - a figure who looms large in Soyinka's new book - is due to hand over power.
That the conduct of the election was, by general consensus, a bitter disappointment to the Nigerian people no doubt pained Soyinka, who has long been viewed as the country's principal voice of conscience. Born in 1934, the poet, playwright, novelist and essayist returned to teach in Nigeria after studying in the UK in the early 1960s. Optimistic in the immediate post-colonial period (Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960), Soyinka was quickly disabused of his hopes. The inaugural generation of elected leaders (prior to the first military coup of 1966) were simply "flamboyant replacements of the old colonial order", men who viewed the nation as a "prostrate victim to be ravished". Soyinka was soon staging his first political satires.
But the author, who in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was from the start more than a mere authorial observer of the multiple coups and dictatorships that have shaped Nigeria since independence. From the meetings in the 1960s with Biafran leaders in an effort to avert civil war, to those 30 years later with Shimon Peres and others when plotting the armed struggle to overthrow Sani Abacha (Abacha died while Soyinka was still in Israel), Soyinka has remained engaged.
His efforts twice landed him in prison and ultimately - during Abacha's regime - resulted in his exile to the US. You Must Set Forth at Dawn, which follows on from Soyinka's autobiographical trilogy, describes this interweaving of his own life with modern Nigerian history over that 30-year period. Part of its fascination lies in the intimate glimpses it offers of Nigeria's string of military dictators as they usurp power from one another and implement their respective brands of despotism.
DESPITE THE AUTHOR'S fate being intimately bound up with a number of these men, and despite an explicit moral outrage, he retains a capacity for reportage and a writerly curiosity. Of Obasanjo - with whom he remains "albeit qualified" friends - he says, "I suppose I subconsciously acquired the attitude that, as a writer, I had proprietary rights over such a phenomenon . . . and I began to regard him as a private preserve for compensatory study".
With regard to the effects of successive dictatorships on his people, Soyinka writes of Nigeria as a loved one who is disintegrating before his eyes, until the norm is one of "citizen sycophancy and self-abasement" in the face of petty administrators attempting to trump each other in their sadism.
Death is a preoccupation and figures almost as a character at times. When Abacha came to power in 1993, Soyinka was hounded. "The thought of real death - not the remediable conceit now of exile as a mimic death - became an insistent, strident companion." Years earlier, before death became hideous and arbitrarily determined, it had a sense of proportion. On roadside carnage: "Those early scenes of death had a solemnity about them, a graceful announcement of leave-taking where the precedent violence is gently absorbed by, indeed sublimated beneath, that shawl of multiple existences that the Yoruba wrap around their consciousness as a testament of continuity . . . ".
As the years pass and death too often results from the whims of those sadistic administrators, Soyinka acquires a reluctant acceptance of violence as a legitimate, occasionally necessary response. "A monster had reduced us, collectively, to a plantation of slaves, and the word 'liberation' could not be restricted to . . . a mere rhetorical device". His take on violence - an acknowledgement of its "limpet attachment . . . to the very genes of humanity" and an admission of its presence in some accommodating space within his own genes - appears typical of a lifelong approach to the woes that have beset his country. Pragmatic and unsentimental, he lobbied, for instance, against Biafran secession, not because he believed in the sanctity of national unity, but because he believed Biafra was incapable of surviving the repercussions.
There are moments in the book when Soyinka captures the inanity of life under these rulers. In 1993, then-president Babangida bowed to international pressure and permitted elections to take place, only to annul the results when balloting resulted in Bashorun Abiola winning. A popular uprising began to brew and Soyinka, having been in on planning the anti-Babangida protests, cut short a trip to Europe to return to Lagos. Unable to fly into the city because of the riots, he landed in Cotonou in Benin, from whence he set out with a taxi driver on the overland journey to Lagos.
What follows reads like an absurdist thriller - a harrowing expedition through myriad checkpoints that no one but he likely could have lived through. Recognised everywhere (though not always as quickly as he'd have liked) as "the Prof" - Nigeria's national hero - Soyinka survives threat after threat, his driver gripped by a rising mania as he witnesses his famous passenger's invincibility.
DRIVEN BY THE "categorical imperative" of justice, Soyinka has attempted - even while in exile, as Abacha conducted a long-distance smear campaign against him - to turn justice, too, into something more than a rhetorical device. The effort, of course, ate into his creative work. Interestingly, however, he seems to suffer none of the anxiety of lost time that plagues most writers. "I have never felt under a compulsion to write," he says. " . . . I underwent no pressure, no sense of a dereliction of duty. There were always other things to do with one's time." The memoir is a chronicle of some of those things. Wry, authoritative and humane, it serves not only as a delineation of his own life and the political life of his country, but as a testament to those who have shared his sense of justice as a categorical imperative.
• Molly McCloskey's latest book is the novel, Protection (Penguin Ireland). She is currently working for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia, based in Nairobi
• You Must Set Forth at Dawn By Wole Soyinka Methuen, 499pp. £18.99