Out of Africa
The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis
by Wole Soyinka
Oxford. 110 pp. $19.9S
This book, by the Nigerian playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, is a cry of the heart. Based on three lectures given by Wole Soyinka at Harvard, The Open Sore of a Continent is neither particularly well-organized nor even well-written; but its anguish—or rather, its very great anger—is palpable, and easy to sympathize with.
The greater part of the book consists of a passionate denunciation of the present Nigerian regime, led by Sani Abacha, which came into power after the annulment of the elections of 1993 and the imprisonment of the man who won them. But Nigeria’s plunge into autocracy and brutality hardly began with the new military government. Soyinka reflects here on the entire history of his country since independence from Great Britain in 1960, a history which in many ways is paradigmatic of sub-Saharan Africa in general.
As Soyinka tells it, Nigeria exemplifies both the highest hopes and the worst disappointments of African nationhood. The largest African country, with a population exceeding 90 million, it covers a vast territory and harbors rich natural resources, including huge oil reserves. When it emerged from British colonial rule, there was every reason to think it would not only become an economic success but assume the leadership of black Africa.
That was not to be. Like other British ex-colonies, Nigeria was launched with the institutional accouterments of Westminster-style democracy, a judiciary trained in the common-law tradition, and a fair-sized educated middle class. But again in a pattern characteristic of all the new African states, Nigeria’s borders, drawn when the European powers were carving up the continent among themselves, bore little relation to the sociological realities on the ground. In particular, Nigeria contains a multiplicity of ethnic groups with little in common, and religiously it is split about evenly between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, with a strong admixture of indigenous African religions.
Creating a nation out of all this diversity would have been no small task under the best of circumstances. In the event, independent Nigeria has witnessed a seemingly endless cycle of democratic beginnings followed by military dictatorships, pervasive inefficiency and corruption, and persistent ethnic and religious animosity. The bloodiest phase was the civil war occasioned by the attempted secession of eastern Nigeria in 1967 to form the independent state of Biafra. That secession was crushed with great cruelty, as similar secessions have been and are still being crushed in other parts of Africa (Soyinka repeatedly invokes the struggle in southern Sudan).
No more graphic emblem of the current state of affairs in Nigeria can be imagined than the event with which this book concludes: the execution of the civil-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues from the Ogoni ethnic group in November 1995. According to Soyinka, the execution was so botched that Saro-Wiwa had to be hanged three or four times before he finally died. His last words on the scaffold are reported to have been: “Why are you people doing this to me? What sort of nation is this?”
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“What sort of nation is this?” That is also Soyinka’s question. And he goes on to ask an even larger question, one that is imposing itself almost everywhere in the world today: what is a “nation,” anyway?
All too often, this question is asked—by Bosnians, Chechens, or Kurds—in the midst of horrendous bloodshed. It is also asked, under more merciful circumstances, by Quebecois and Catalans, and for that matter by Americans pondering the implications of multiculturalism. Although Soyinka poses the question with an admirable sense of urgency, his answer does not get us very far.
Soyinka sharply criticizes the principle, considered virtually sacred by the Organization of African Unity and indeed by almost all African governments, according to which the borders of each presently existing state are inviolable and permanent. He points out that this principle serves the interests of whichever rulers are in control of a given “nation space,” and not necessarily the interests of the people who have to endure their rule. “A nation,” he writes correctly, “is a collective enterprise; outside of that, it is mostly a gambling space for the opportunism and adventurism of power.”
Equally bracing is Soyinka’s rejection of a favored piece of conventional wisdom. The chaos into which Nigeria and other African countries have descended has routinely been blamed on their former colonial masters. But, as Soyinka points out, there is more to it than that. The colonial history of Africa does indeed do little credit to the European powers; but in the post-colonial period, the wounds have been largely self-inflicted. “What color,” Soyinka asks “are the hands that dehumanize our African peoples today, as they have done for nearly four decades of independence?”
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Beyond these assertions, however, Soyinka is not especially helpful in explaining the determining causes of the national debacles of which he writes. Perhaps he comes closest when he observes, “Man is first a cultural being. Before politics, there was clearly culture.”
The relation of African cultures to African politics is indeed one of the big puzzles in the world today. Soyinka is hardly alone in ultimately failing to come to grips with it, but he is certainly right to note the lack of congruence between the new political and the old ethnic/cultural maps of the continent, which imposes a formidable handicap on any society seeking to take off into modern economic development. (This handicap, incidentally, was not faced by the successful societies of East Asia.) Other factors at work include the general absence of an idea of private property, especially in the ownership of land; patriarchal and polygamous forms of family life; an ethic of machismo, in comparison with which the Latin American version seems positively feminist; and still other features of African culture that may have functioned well in a premodern economy but are clearly dysfunctional under conditions of modernization and urbanization.
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Even if we understood more fully the cultural factors that have contributed to the fiasco of African politics, however, we would still be a long way from prescribing remedies. Cultures do not change easily, and they are particularly resistant to deliberate, policy-driven interventions. In Africa, any initiative in this area would almost certainly have to involve religion—now as always a force conducive to swift and radical cultural change. Nigeria, however, seems an unlikely candidate for an experiment of this kind, which perhaps ironically has a greater chance of success in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa. Indeed, the outcome of that new cultural/political enterprise will carry important lessons not only for Nigeria but for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
But I do not mean to criticize Wole Soyinka for the book he did not write. The one he did write is both useful and moving—a “j’accuse” that bravely eschews the tactic of blaming all Africa’s woes on racism, imperialism, and colonialism; a ringing affirmation of humanity; and an instructive reflection on the moral foundations of nationhood.