Why do i fast wole soyinka analysis

About Me RayS View my complete profile. Review : Nigerian playwright is imprisoned and fasts during the Nigerian Civil War In this essay he describes the experience and the various psychological impressions he undergoes.

His jailers want him to stop fasting but he will not. I need neither drink nor food. Soon I shall need no air. That taxation extended to taxation on crops. And they were collected from women coming in, bringing their crops to the market. So in addition to, let us say, the market levy, which is traditional — markets had to be kept tidy, you know, facilities have to be made.

People never resented all of that. But now came the point where additional levies were being made on the actual goods being brought from the farms. And sometimes the women would be arrested, their goods seized completely. Finally this movement of the women, self-improvement movement, spear-headed by my aunt, Mrs.

Ransome-Kuti, decided to take on both the district officers and the traditional king. Wole Soyinka: Well, I was already co-opted. Anybody was co-opted who happened along. So when I came in, Mrs. Take on those women.

So I did teach some of the women to read. I assisted my mother, I assisted Mrs. Kuti, and I enjoyed it. You were a young boy — age eleven — when you left Abeokuta for Government College, Ibadan. When did you return? At least three times a year: the Christmas holiday, the long break, and sometimes some holidays in between, special holidays, a long weekend. But some holidays I did spend with our relations in Ibadan. For me, going to Government College was freedom!

I wanted to work first, before going to college, and I worked in the Medical Stores for a year-and-a-half before going to college. I was always going to go to university. In fact, I should have gone earlier, straight from school if my father had his way. But I left secondary school at a very early age.

My father wanted me to go straight to university, and I just felt I needed some experience of the world before going to college. So I refused to take the exams the first year, to University College. I went straight to see my uncle in Lagos. He was a pharmacist. I wanted to get a job in a newspaper.

I wanted to be a journalist, a newspaper correspondent. But somehow we compromised. They still felt I was too young to strike out on my own. I left Abeokuta and insisted on being in Lagos, so I went to work at a pharmacy, the pharmacy department. My uncle was the chief pharmacist, and eventually I was put in charge of a store. Probably the youngest person ever to be in charge.

It was rather interesting. I was in charge of what you call Section B. But Section B, I eventually became the head of that division and was sending things like dressing, catguts sutures , surgical equipment, to all corners of the nation — Bauchi, Lagos, Enugu — where the government hospitals were.

It was very heady stuff. I came to that position of responsibility very, very early and purely by accident. I was just another sort of clerical assistant in that store, and then something happened to the head of the store, whether he was transferred or he left to go to study in England. And by default, I was the next senior, most educated person in that store, and so I stepped in there and somehow I remained there.

I took a photograph, I remember, in my apron, telephone on the one side. Very proud of that photograph. I was about… just under Wole Soyinka: Yes, yes. In any case, I felt I was ready now. I wanted to earn some money first, quite frankly. My father was ready to pay, but I knew how much he was earning, and there were other children and so on. Anyway, I had to sit the exam. I got a scholarship, and so I went to University College, Ibadan. Wole Soyinka: Ah. That controversial organization!

University life had always fascinated me. The fraternity culture in Germany, in the United States, in France, everywhere. Many of them were children of rich people, what we call the children of colonial aristocrats, and they brought that mentality of colonial aristocracy into the college setting.

Totally divorced. They considered themselves divorced from the rest of the community. That sense of responsibility with which I grew up, it was just not there. They had these clubs, a number of clubs. There was the social club, for instance. Mimicking British — what they considered British — culture. Always dressed up in ties, jackets and so on. The college atmosphere was modeled on Cambridge and so on. You went to dinner, high dinner, high tea. You had to wear robes to go to dinner.

I hated all that stuff. It was all typical student fun. Unfortunately, in later years, mimic organizations began, which were rather nasty. Complete debasement of the confraternity idea. By this time I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I hated mathematics. I had no time for physics or chemistry. Even though I managed to struggle through, it was a struggle in school. Once that was done, I threw my books — all my mathematics books — out of the window.

Concentrated on literature. And then, when I was ready to go for the final years, the honors course in literature had not been started. And so my scholarship was extended to go to England. Wole Soyinka: First of all, there was the fact that you were now totally independent.

But then you were in a different culture, with a lower sense of community. Or maybe I should say, with a sense of community diffused. A more isolated kind of existence. You had to make new friends.

You had to study the natives and see how you could fit yourself into it. You experienced also the racial discrimination, which was still very strong at the time, even though the British are very hypocritical about it. But then you gradually began to form your own community, which meant that during the holidays you went to work in places like Hull, Liverpool, London.

The West African Students Union, for instance. You have your own community. That was the main difference. I used to gather my siblings and perform sketches based on stories, folktales, and sometimes even improvised comic turns in which we mimicked the adults around us and their peculiar ways and so on. And then I took part in a school operetta quite early, very early.

I took the lead part. It was called The Magician. Wole Soyinka: Yes, I finished at Leeds. Took my degree there. And then I was supposed to start working on my doctoral thesis, and so after, but then after the first year I found I was more — again, I knew what I wanted to do, and somehow I got my — I wanted to write.

I sent a play to the Royal Court Theatre in London, and it was not immediately accepted for performance, but sufficient interest was generated for the artistic director to invite me over.

So I spent most of my time just watching rehearsals, reading plays in London instead of doing my thesis in Leeds. So I consider myself a doctoral dropout. What was the impetus for writing those? Wole Soyinka: I was trying to recapture certain features.

Community, we spoke earlier of the community. One was not necessarily a progression on the other. These were just expressions of my own observations of society. At this time, the movement for independence in Nigeria was coming to a head. How did you see that at the time?

Wole Soyinka: At the beginning, there was single-minded direction, which was independence. Independence from the British. So the nationalists were at the fore, negotiations were going on about independence. Groups came to London, Lancaster House, meeting to discuss with the British Home Office, which it was called at the time. Eventually, in , independence began. Unfortunately, the process into independence was flawed, because the British wanted to leave their surrogates behind, on their own admission later on, but this was evident even at the time.

The British deliberately manipulated, into a position of power, a section that was more feudal in Nigeria, because they felt they would serve their own interests. They were not as radical as the Southern part. So the grounds were already laid for political dissension. And later, oil was found, and then oil politics began to complicate matters even further. You returned to Nigeria in , just as your country was gaining independence.

Can you talk about the early years of independence and writing the play A Dance of the Forest? Wole Soyinka: Well, the period of close scrutiny began while I was in England. Because I really had ingrained in me this egalitarian principle and the sense of service. And I saw the first-comers as being very — almost as if their basic motivation was to step into the shoes of the departing colonial officers, the British colonials.

Some of them were already positioning themselves to take over power. Power and privilege seemed to be more important to them than service and commitment to the community. Perhaps this will become even more understandable if you took into consideration the fact that I was already heavily politicized. I was acutely aware of what was happening in South Africa, the hardening of the South African apartheid system.

My very first play in England was directed at apartheid South Africa. It was called The Invention. National politics, continental politics. We felt that our main mission, our first mission, was to go and liberate South Africa.

We had no doubt at all in our minds that this was our immediate mission. Now this got derailed when we then encountered the first flag-bearers of our national independence. And of course, events have proved us right. So my attention became diverted towards Nigeria.

So all this came about because of this politicization and the habit I had developed of examining issues very carefully. In other words, not getting carried away by slogans.

Trying to see what lies behind the slogans, and how after one phase of struggle is ended, the next phase might have to be confronted. In your memoir The Penkelemes Years , you discuss your first years back in Nigeria after independence.

What did you mean by that title? It was an expression, actually, by one of the politicians who was a great populist, by the way, a very fascinating character, but representative of the corruption of the politicians of that particular time. The crudeness which accompanied politics, the violence, the ballot-rigging, the violence which carried over even into the House of Assembly.

The fissures had become quite open, had blown wide open. And so I eventually settled into the politics of Nigeria itself, which for me was sad. And so I got that frustration from the two sides. Frustration from a diminishing of that continental vision, because I saw Africa as one entity, and then a frustration about not being able to right the anomalies within my own society. I got deeper and deeper involved in Nigerian politics. When the British left Nigeria in , they falsified the national census, tipping electoral power to communities that were less progressive.

Why did they do that? Wole Soyinka: Well, because colonial powers never really want to leave anywhere. They leave only because they find they are compelled to, by war, direct militant action, or because they are clever enough to realize that they can maintain a continuing neo-colonial linkage with their possessions by granting independence.

But they keep the contact. And they do that by leaving their surrogates behind. They picked on the least progressive part of the country, falsified the census, falsified elections to make sure that when they left, they handed over power to them.

We are all mothers weeping right now. Resistance to death and sickness and violence can ultimately lead to peace. Chose peace. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The Stage Is On Fire, a memoir about hope and change, reasons for voyaging, and dreams burning down can be purchased on Amazon.

Turner Syndrome , Well Being. Maxine Greene Philosopher and Education Scholar. Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake. Armstrong, John. Autumn PDF copy. Kafka, Franz. Call Number: PN S85 Martin's, A record of 27 months of imprisonment of a Nigerian writer held as a political prisoner in at a time of civil war and secession of the state of Biafra.

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