Wole Soyinka, African literature’s first Nobel laureate, has through a series of memoirs given critics a wealth of biographical material to digest. Reading his oeuvre, spanning seven decades and every literary genre imaginable, as well as his continuous political activism alongside his biographical accounts of his life proves, however, a daunting task. Grasping Soyinka’s aesthetic and philosophical experiments with Yoruba cosmology throughout his drama, poetry, and prose is difficult enough, causing many critics to avoid his writing for the more easily accessible work of Anglophone African literature’s other giants (Kole Omotoso’s title Soyinka or Achebe? remains a poignant framing of Soyinka criticism in this respect). In addition to the formal complexity of Soyinka’s literary output, the mass of extraliterary artifacts he has produced—from his chairing Nigeria’s Federal Road Safety Corps to his infamous radio station holdup, from his anti-apartheid activism to his experiments in popular music and cinema—make any summary of Soyinka’s lifework difficult.
In this regard, Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola’s Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation is a welcome addition to scholarship. Although multiple monographs on Soyinka do exist, Dauda and Falola take a different tack than most. They set out to write an unauthorized biography of the “greatest literary mind from Africa” (xiii), focusing less on situating Soyinka’s oeuvre within literary history or postcolonial criticism than on offering a historical account of Soyinka as a cultural icon. This is not to say Dauda and Falola sidestep literary scholarship (they draw frequently from the work of Biodun Jeyifo, James Gibbs, Derek Wright, and Tunde Adeniran, for instance). Rather, their unique contribution to scholarship lies less in interpreting Soyinka’s writing than in historicizing the man as a sociopolitical phenomenon who has for seventy years and counting “engaged in social engineering and reengineering using different genres of literature … to offer alternative public policy options, and to inform (and sometimes to incite) and mobilize civil action” (270).
The book is structured into four parts. Part 1 summarizes scholarship on Soyinka and briefly frames the writer within his socio-historical context, arguing that his “global influence can be linked to the timeline of his birth and the environment that nurtured him” (34). Part 2 delves deeper into this context: Soyinka’s hometown, his cultural traditions, his aesthetic and political ideologies, and his personal relationships and lifestyle. Part 3 focuses on Soyinka’s literary output: examining his novels, drama, poetry, as well as the relationship between his politics and literary practice. Part 4 concludes by way of summarizing Soyinka’s achievements and contributions to African and global literature and culture.
The strengths of this book are its moments of broad historicization and its dispersed narratives of Soyinka’s many fascinating life experiences. Part 2 is the strongest section, particularly its cultural history of Abeokuta, Soyinka’s hometown. For Dauda and Falola, Soyinka must be contextualized within the “cultural elite” that emerged from Abeokuta beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing throughout the twentieth century. This elite includes, of course, Ransome-Kuti (Soyinka’s great aunt) and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (Soyinka’s cousin), as well as numerous cultural reformers and political figures. For most literary critics, historically contextualizing Soyinka typically means taking into account his formal education, his imprisonment during the Biafran War, and the immediate political context of individual texts. Dauda and Falola’s framing of Soyinka within a tradition of the Abeokuta intelligentsia (beginning with the establishment of the first missionary school in 1850) thus brings a fresh and historically wider perspective to Soyinka criticism.
Two interrelated weaknesses of this book are its engagement with literary criticism and its interpretations of individual texts. For example, to anyone familiar with the body of Soyinka criticism, the first chapter’s literary review will appear oversimplified. The summaries of key texts by Tejumola Olaniyan, Jeiyifo, and Gibbs, for instance, read less like the beginning of a monograph and more like an introduction to a master’s thesis. Moreover, the logic behind Dauda and Falola’s choices of texts to include in this review appear at times bizarre. Why, for instance, dedicate nearly four pages to a seemingly random undergraduate thesis offering basic plot summaries of Soyinka and Achebe? Likewise, for anyone familiar with Soyinka’s writing, Dauda and Falola’s interpretations of key texts will offer little to no critical insight (an exception is their argument in chapter 11 that Soyinka prefigures Afrofuturism). Another weakness is that needless repetition weighs the book down. Basic facts of Soyinka’s life are reintroduced, for example, in every section. A tighter compositional focus, and perhaps more rigorous editing, would have greatly benefited this book.
These weaknesses notwithstanding, Dauda and Falola paint a compelling portrait of Soyinka’s life. The book is stronger as a cultural history of a literary celebrity and activist than as a contribution to literary criticism. For anyone first delving into Soyinka’s work, it will undoubtedly be a helpful introduction. For those familiar with his oeuvre and the body of criticism written in response, Dauda and Falola’s book will function best as resource to mine for historical insights.
