Directed by Soyinka himself, the work is an angry denunciation of dictatorships and the abuse of power. Its main character is Gen. Baasha Bash, a potbellied, cowardly buffoon who, says Soyinka, is a caricature based on African dictators such as Abacha, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Cote d’Ivoire’s recently-deposed military head of state, Robert Guei.
Soyinka, a Nobel Prize-winner who fled Abacha’s brutal regime in 1994, spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Ivan Watson on opening night. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What was it like, putting on a play in Nigeria after all these years?
Wole Soyinka: It’s more difficult to put on plays in Nigeria right now with the total decay of infrastructure. And of course, something has happened to the arts here, to the quality of artistic life. It struggled very valiantly through these dry years, but you can tell.
The play is a pretty savage description of dictatorships and political figures. None of the characters is particularly nice. Is this what you mean when you say you want to rake people’s faces through the muck?
Yes, not just dictators, but also the public themselves. The public, the citizens of any society are very often the victims. But you also have situations where the people become their own worst enemies. In many ways, they are not only compliant, but they are complicitors, and I think it’s important for us to constantly remind ourselves that it’s not just the people at the top who are the enemies of the people but that sometimes the people sometimes can be their own enemies. For me, this is a very important dimension. We experienced it in this country not so long ago, and in many societies it’s the same story. So it’s not just dictators I want this play to be about.
One of the characters comments near the end of the play that the lies to the people are continuing. Is this a lesson that Nigeria still has to learn?
I wasn’t thinking specifically of Nigeria, I was thinking of the many fake dictatorships which exist on the African continent. [I’m] talking of one-party states, talking about phony elections and talking about even characters like [Zimbabwe’s Robert] Mugabe, who began very well as a liberation fighter and a true liberationist and now has become a terror to his own people–playing the racist card in order to make himself King Baabu.
Is this play going to make some people angry?
Oh, yes, I hope so. Absolutely.
Who would they be?
Those who see themselves as being portrayed through action. Those who recognize themselves. Obviously it’s not intended to appease them. I’ve deliberately changed some names to sound like some of the villains who have been testifying before the Oputa Commission [Nigeria’s Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, chaired by retired judge Chukwudifu Oputa.] I want people who come to see the play to recognize the names, despite their slight distortions here and there. Those who’ve raped this country and who think that they are sort of covered in the cloak of immunity. I expect them to be angry when they come to see it and to understand that even if the law does not touch them, there are other areas of communication which will continue to remind people what they did and what they still are.
And when the play is seen in the rest of the world? What message do you want audiences to bring home?
Just the message of the total corruptibility and grotesquerie of power in whatever form–sometimes in very mild, laughable forms. Ultimately, I find power really ridiculous. It can be fatal, it can be vicious and it often is, but really, it’s a scarecrow. A power scarecrow. Because you have to wrap yourself in so many layers of coccoonery to disguise the shivering ninny within it. The only kind of power which is respectable is not power at all…. In other words, freely, genuinely freely elected, answerable to people, constantly being monitored, never being alienated. What this shows on stage is alienated power taken to the extreme.
Who is Baasha Bash/King Baabu based on? He looks a lot like Abacha, sounds a lot like Abacha.
I deliberately made the name, the sound, resemble Abacha, evoke Abacha.
Some of your foreign audiences might not believe that somebody would chop off limbs, that somebody could take control of a government so quickly and buy off people so quickly.
This is compression into a play. [Laughs] I hope when people go to theater, they realize that what’s happening is really not represented by the span of time. And as far as the chopping off of hands is concerned, all the people have to do is look at their newspapers. Look at the war in Sierra Leone. Remember [Belgium’s] King Leopold, who I believe introduced hand-chopping into this [continent.] I think that’s when it began. We’ve had brutal wars, but we never got to the level of hand-chopping of innocents until after colonial times. And it’s important for me to let us remember that this is happening–and also when it began to happen.
Some of this is very recent history for Nigerians.
That’s why I’ve been happy to take time off from other things and stage it here. Because this is the way to carry on the resonance. The Oputa Commission is doing one thing, I’m doing the same thing virtually in a different format–even taking off from the occasional incorrigibility that I’ve seen at the Oputa Commission, where the torturers actually come to the commission in effect to inflict additional trauma on their victims by lying in their faces. By saying to the victim, I virtually don’t know you. Or, when you came I treated you with absolute courtesy like my own father. That kind of language to people you slapped, you tortured; people you wrapped up in fetus positions. For me, all this is part and parcel of the same dialogue going on in the nation. And I would like to see it continually resonated, until we’ve finally purged ourselves of this period. [It] should not happen as quickly as many people piously hope.
You yourself suffered under these regimes.
My suffering is nothing to compare with many others. I suffered, but if you know the people who suffered on my account, suffered simply for looking like me, for having my pictures in their bag when they arrived in the country. For having something written with the name Wole Soyinka. [They spent] months in horrendous conditions in some dungeon or the other. Do you know how many people were pauperized simply because maybe a picture, a photo of Wole Soyinka was there. So my anguish is less my own personal one [than] one which I experienced vicariously, but very intensely. I know many of these people; I’ve met them since and some of them wrote to me. [I have] no resentment, but for me it’s very painful that people should actually suffer on my account.
Are you planning to stay in Nigeria?
I’ve been back for some time. In fact, sometimes I feel like I’ve never been away. But I have all sorts of commitments outside. And sometimes it’s more logical to operate from outside [the country]. At least the phones work [laughs].
