Soyinka: A Celebration of Conspiracy, Hypocrisy and Esurience

By 

Nduka Uzuakpundu

chidi17june1972@justice.com

Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, the gargantuan pig-headed nincompoop, thinks that at the Biblical three score and ten he is well qualified to enter the much-prized Orwellian Kingdom. To the contrary. Truth is that wearing a well-distinguished snowcap – in a manner that presumptuously plagiarises the law profession – does not render Soyinka rusty – and so ripe for a hasty transmogrification into the nirvana that has long been prophesied by the wily, wild Christian in Brother Jero. It is a bit disturbing that since the fulfilment of the Jero prophecy: the much-applauded conquest of the literary Everest; Soyinka would seem to have turned his back on the vulnerable Orwellian pigs, in whose interest the lion in him had laboured and fought fiercely to merit the jewel. The honest thinking, in almost two decades, since then, has been that, in spite of the alluring comfort offered by the jewel’s blissful company – out there in the rare and dense savannah – at no night would the lion go to sleep. Since then, it has always been Soyinka, whom almost everyone – who was well aware of what was going on in the Orwellian Republic – saw as being unusually on the quiviv. Then, again, was a time when the man in Soyinka refused – with an audaciously, pig-headed touch – to die, in the face of an incipient tyranny from the wild, which was beginning to threaten a certain section of the citizenry of the Orwellian Republic.

But, just before the memory of all that gets too rusty or ripens into oblivion, Soyinka should, naturally, be hailed for his stout-hearted defence – in the early years of the last decade of the 20th Century – of his endangered tribesmen. It took a few initiated elements to see through the opaque, but brutally bloody war that doughty Soyinka was waging, then, like someone bent on preserving the tranquility, homogeneity and longevity of the Orwellian Republic – a republic from which he had been banned, though – because some of its policy-makers could not maw Soyinka confessing, in the heat of the revolutionary struggle, that he was hairlessly given to engorging pig without gastronomic options. As he put it then: “I eat everything. I don’t care.” And why not. At the time of Soyinka’s prize-winning confession, it was the tigritudinal attitude of some of his uncompromisingly rapacious critics that the obviously revealing admission of the product of Leeds was as verbose as the assertion of the apostles of Negritude.

In one of his critique’s of Soyinka’s gluttonous disposition towards pigs, Brother Jero, the General Overseer of the Akelian Evangelical Ministry, Ishara, was of the opinion that the Nobelist was sickeningly hypocritical – to the extent that after roaring, more than two decades earlier, at Senghor, a lion shouldn’t have bothered to unseal its beak – as if to advertise its winning molars – to “proclaim its tigritude.” And now, the half-baked rifle head of the Republic of Letters has just decreed that Soyinka should be expiated for his embarrassing confession. His fiat reads: “Soyinka should produce, within seventy days, two prize-winning works: the first, a satire titled ‘A Prized Pig’s Penance’, and the second, a seventy-page revue titled ‘Before The Sun Goes Down On The Lion.’ And the language of  both works,” he insists, “ must be pig-headedly opaque. In default, Soyinka should be Snowballed.” In agreement, Brother Jero thinks that Soyinka’s confessional verbosity was most unworthy of a snow cap that is eagerly looking forward to making the Orwellian Kingdom. “Who,” he demands, “in the Republic of Letters , does not know that a lion eats everything, especially when the prey is a potential, prize-winning jewel? Besides, didn’t the Supreme Being, in one of the earliest verses of the Biblical book of Genesis, give his children – including the lion himself – imperium over all the animals in the wild?” It would be recalled that following what Soyinka felt was an unclad instance of literary outrage by Brother Jero, the lion in him roared back to insist, in public, that “Yes, I did, in respect for the injunction of Heaven, eat everything, except the forbidden fruit. And that is because I don’t regard anything made by the good Lord as filthy. The Creator is clean. Therefore, everything made by Him, as a true reflection of His own image and likeness, is equally, transparently clean. But, Brother Jero should be honest enough, also, to make his own confession as to why he feels uneasy for my explicitly ravenous appetite. Could it be because I pig-headedly refused to share my prize money with false and hypocritical prophets, who are ruling our shores at this moment, which, they claim – in their blinding gammon – is ‘the end time’?” Umbrage! And the Brother Jero, whom Soyinka is very fond of jeering at, retorted – somewhat less persuasively: “Be careful Soyinka. This is the end time. You have no right to tamper with spirit of the Lord. You must repent at this very hour of rejuvenation. The Bible tells me – I don’t know about you – the Bible tells me, in the book of Exodus 20:13, that ‘Thou shall not kill’, and that includes you shameless, cannibalistic and greedy Soyinka. Since the glorious dawn, when my prophecy was fulfilled – that you would be crowned, meritoriously, with the Prize – you have never bothered to pay your tithe to the house of the Lord. All you have been basking in – in a show of piercing arrogance, bald ingratitude and shameless disrespect for the sixth commandment of the Lord – is the slaughtering of pigs and devouring them without gastronomic options. Have you no conscience? For holding those innocent revolutionary pigs in solitary confinement, in place of treating them with dignity as prisoners of conscience, in keeping with the Geneva Convention, or political detainees, I decree, here and now, that unless you –  Soyinka, the greedy demon – repent, you will never enter into the Orwellian Kingdom. And you must, henceforward, stop deceiving the gullible public that your wearing a prominent goatee translates to your transmogrification to Osama bin Laden. You are not! The prophecy that has made you so famous a literary personality that fights against injustice and social inequality, I’m sorry to say, shouldn’t have come true! You are an idiot and I have no apology for saying so. Nobel Prize my foot!” 

Perhaps, Uncle Kongi would like to satisfy the query – which is borne out of an intentional fallacy of his own construction – as to whether a lion should be credited or blessed with the appetite of a hack – and not the gourmand kind for which the fearless, great hunter of the wild is famous. If it is the former, Soyinka should explain why he wasted his youthful years writing all that he did – including “The Man Died”– in soy ink, to the extent that he reached the roof of the world in what, to this great day, remains a fair competition. The man in Soyinka should also explain why, in a show of moderation – not wanting to eat everything – he never contented himself with all the prizes he had clinched before the real Orwellian brain-worker in him decided, with a gargantuan straddle, to make for the ultimate. If the lion in Soyinka does not eat everything, in a genuine show of moderation, wouldn’t it have been worthy to spurn the Prize money – a la Satre – or take just thirty percent of it – and gleefully donate seventy to the rifle as an egregious encouragement for its notorious abuse of human rights? I eat everything! I don’t care! Who does, if Soyinka the great glutton doesn’t!

As a  real defender of the fundamental human rights of the citizens of the Orwellian Republic, Soyinka is not supposed to be an omnivore. Brother Jero thinks that, by today’s fanatical standard, the gluttonous kind in Soyinka cannot fast for forty days and forty nights, which is the only prerequisite for any lion that wishes to make the Orwellian Kingdom. It was a show of dishonourable cowardice that Soyinka deemed it convenient to open up only after he had been used to fulfill the Jero prophecy. Otherwise, the honest thinking was that the policy-makers of the archaic, rifle-run republic, who had detailed Dickensian Barsad after him, would have essayed to make his roaring conquest unrealistic. They would have said, in their usually brazen Tartuffian vogue, that the lion in Soyinka was not only obscenely esurient, but, also, that, as one of the shiniest products of mission schools, his unabashedly omnivorous feeding habit was a venal transgression of one of the saintly virtues: moderation. They would have gone to the preposterous extreme – on the spur of that glorious dawn in global

literary history – to deploy every barbaric weapon at their disposal – including the unexpected, but misappropriated gargantuan windfall of the diastema years, to thwart the inevitable conquest of the Everest. They were the shameless lot, who would have said Soyinka’s filthily esurient feeding habit had denuded the savannah – and should, for that reason, be held responsible for the attendant desertification, ecological catastrophe, environmental calamity and acute food shortage in the land.

Nevertheless, it is well documented that it took the majestic arrival of the roaring lion in Soyinka to not only send the foreign powers threatening the legendary tranquility of the Orwellian Republic to their tents, but also to discontinue their dishonourably idle and wasteful debate – as to the desirability of that same Orwellian Republic, which was – and still is – the real Republic, sharing a rather seamless, if uncomfortable geographical border with their own republic, which was being tyrannised by the black beret and its spurious, unintelligently awkward Squealers. As Brother Jero

recalls: “When the lion in Soyinka roared, all the idle disputatious Squealers – who had, since the genesis of total theatre, taken almost everyone in, to the effect that they were as good as any Orwellian prize-winning sow – dialogued with their heavily-muscled limbs, for fear of being captured and sent to Tartarus, in a criminal breach of their constitutionally-guaranteed rights, before being devoured by “our own W.S.” Those were the antiquated propagandists who felt that the close propinquity of their structurally maladjusted and drained republic to the Orwellian was not helping the edifying progress of their offspring.

But, as Soyinka was to discover, sometime on the eve of the 21st Century, one of the basic reasons for the rifle’s obstreperously farcical furore, over the behaviour of the pigs of the Orwellian Republic, was that they claimed to have fantasised a clear and

present danger of their own republic being invaded and ravaged – in a sickening imitation of the classical, if rare political achievement of his tribesmen. They would have felt a lot snugger had the lion in Soyinka gone to sleep – refusing, with the stubbornness of a pig, to intervene – on the night of the dishonourably idle debate. Again, those were the same propagandists who – in their hypocritical fashion – felt they had the right to choose who should be their neighbours, but could conveniently jeer at Brother Jero’s opaque literary, if peremptory prize-winning commandment that they should love their neighbours – including the likes of those clean pigs: the ones that the lion in Soyinka would never abhor to devour without gastronomic options; as themselves. Soyinka reasons that the Squealers of the rifle-run republic were stupendously stupid. An invasion – and a brief occupation of their republic – sans any shadow of passive or violent resistance – by the Orwellian pigs, he figures, would have been a good occasion for the revolutionary pigs to crack their brains towards a genuinely classless and people-oriented structural re-adjustment of their rifle-run republic, such that over a given period, it would metamorphose – far more rapidly than Brother Jero – into something akin to the original, gargantuan republic founded by Ulyanov – the greatest, and the most intelligent pig that has ever existed in the revolutionary history of humankind. Such a pig will be quite palatable to devour. And Soyinka knows full well that, by now, such a monstrous, classless republic – characterised by the egregious absence of the looters of the treasury and a gargantuan body of law-abiding pigs who’ll never dream of holding a radio station to ransom – would have been a riotously stainless sty of potential gold medalists in all the departments of the Olympics, the second oldest profession – espionage, astronomy, cosmology and the non-orthodox art of pacifying (its) lawless and indubitably perfidious flanks. The same monstrous, classless republic would have set a world record in producing the longest-serving foreign affairs pig. Such an unmistakably dirty pig, washed squeaky clean, could, by  Soyinka’s irresponsibly partial judgement, be exceedingly esculent.    

In his unpublished critique titled ‘Seventy Lions Alive In The Nobelist’, Brother Jero makes the point that Soyinka’s much-acclaimed campaign for the rights of pigs to co-exist – peacefully – with two-legged human beings, in a republic where all animals shall be (un)equal, “has ceased – since the roaring conquest – to make any meaning.” For instance, he wonders where the man in Soyinka – who’s always looking down like a pig, as if he’s looking for his long-lost jewel – was, when British Prime Minister, Tony Blair – no relation of Eric Blair! – was committing genocide against Orwellian pigs – the veritable beasts of England – on the false charge that they were vectors of foot and mouth malady? History, he prognosticates, will not

forgive Soyinka for not roaring or speaking out in defence of those innocent, esculent pigs. The man in the lion ought to have dragged tyrannical Blair to The Hague or Arusha for his crimes against humanity. There is an unconfirmed rumour, though, which, at this very historical hour, is fast gaining currency in Idanre and Ishara, that the man in Soyinka felt it was okay to die, at the time of the genocide, because someone wanted to have the massacred citizens of the Orwellian Republic as some cheap aliment to “wash my throat.”

Nonetheless, Brother Jero holds that Soyinka can still make up for his ignoble conspiracy against his tribesmen: “The lion in the conqueror,” he offers, “should write a protest letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Kofi Annan and the President of the Security Council beseeching them to set up an international crimes court to try Blair and his brutish collaborators for the genocide against the beasts of England .” The snag, though, is whether someone who has confessed to devouring pigs without gastronomic options – in a style that is undisguisedly genocidal – ought to have any locus standi in a moral case like this. In the meantime, Soyinka should look at what is left of Solzhenitsyn’s land and see whether he could wade in to neutralise the incipient tyranny therein. Remember, “Uncle Wole”, that the man dies in him that keeps quiet in the face of tyranny. The post-Orwellian politics that is going on there, it is true, poses a gargantuan threat to your tribesmen. It is the kind of politics that inspires rib-ripping classics. Brother Jero believes, very strongly, that it would require the classical roar by the lion in you to extinguish the Jones-like slugabed that is attempting to keep the jumpy, revolutionary pigs in servile fearfulness. If that is done – at this revival hour – Soyinka would have taken a first, gargantuan jump towards readying himself to be rusty and ripe for a triumphal entry into the Orwellian Kingdom, which will surely come in three decades.

FILE NAME: SOYINKA70 08/07/04 .