Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression "The Fall into the Quotidian." When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?                        - Herzog by Saul Bellow.

If Nigeria -Wole Soyinka’s “cactus patch”- has been the bad mood of the gods, he is certainly a benevolent grant from them. For that his mind is a national treasure and an international marvel. He is the best thing that has happened to the Yoruba civilization after the pantheon of the gods, Oduduwa, the Ifa corpus, the Yoruba slaves who ultra-asserted the consciousness and gods in Latin America and the Caribbean, Bishop Ajayi Crowther, D.O. Fagunwa, Hubert Ogunde, Obafemi Awolowo, Tai Solarin, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Gbenga Adeboye and, Susanne Wenger.

 

Like Saleem the protagonist in Rushdie’s Midnight Children: ‘I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape.’ Whenever history is being made or unmade in Nigeria, Soyinka is always present either as a causative organism or an active agent but never a spectator. Having sensed while completing his undergraduate studies in England, the profligacy and apparent stupidity of the politicians primed to take over from the colonial grip, he reckoned that his energies would be redemptively needed at home. He flew forth sky high and descended on Nigeria first of January in the year of the nation’s independence. He really has to be from the gods and his memoir You Must Set Forth At Dawn tells us why.

 

Being the heftiest of his offerings so far, Set Forth, is enough to bring to quiet all the critics who dismissed Kayode Fayemi’s memoir, Out of the Shadows: exile and the struggle for freedom & democracy in Nigeria as an egospheric monument. Yes Soyinka is Africa’s legendary intellectual but never before has he himself documented such large claims for his moral pre-eminence, his exemplary fulfilment of the intellectual’s mission in the African society as its representative, its curator of memory, its specialist of consciousness, and its looming conscience.  In effect, he is   the first intellectual of consequence to publicly and volubly nominate himself for sainthood or deification.

 

Who else except he who is from the gods could toss such grandiloquent self-referrals and ego roars like: “Akara Ogun”, “African Prince”, “one-third continental symbolism”, “Olori-Kunkun and Ori Olokun”, “You can leave your heart with Wole and travel to Hong Kong. When you come back, it would still be beating.” “Perhaps my mummy is lying in one of the catacombs of the [Egyptian] pyramids.”

; “Only W.S. could mount a successful overseas campaign.” “You who speak and the earth/opens its mouth in wonder/welcome.” “What had happened to the national edifice, its pillars, in my absence?” Compared to this story of an old woman in Jamaica who refused to let go of her roots and name her new environment in Jamaica, Bekuta. Obviously from Abeokuta, in Nigeria in her old age, she found solace from constantly feeding her gaze on a mountainous rock when no one of the younger ones shares her love for the culture not even her kids and grandkids.  When she died, a stormy weather came, the neighbourhood hills imploded on Bekuta and ‘the jungle reclaimed its space.’  This story as a parable is striking. One only needs to look around properly and see how the hearts of younger culture activists continue to beat strong. And always will.

 

Set Forth is written with a sustained accent on coming home; in fact opening and closing with it. But it is not to his triumphant coming back to Nigeria that the author speaks of only. Homecoming represents many things. There is an implicit euphoria of homecoming to his roots and tributaries, his god, Ogun, his bush animals, his people, and his Yoruba culture as a whole. Born out of an intense dignity and a shared obstinacy of the Yoruba slaves that exported the gods and culture to the ‘new world’ through the middle passage, Soyinka sweetens the prose infectiously with an unusual profusion of Yoruba values, gods and archetypes, proverbs, Yoruba worldviews, social philosophies, and Yoruba intellectual amenities, knowing fully well that the written word is core to the love for a culture and its transmission. So that something far larger would not die and the jungle would not reclaim its space. What had happened to the cultural edifice, its pillars, in my absence? To prevent such seems to be a parallel motive of this book.

 

A disfavour the memoirist is doing for the Yoruba civilization is to ‘wisely give up’ his project to translate the remaining classic works of the Yoruba novelist D.O. Fagunwa having done A Forest of Thousand Daemons.  Only him, as of now, has the resources to exactly translate the rest of Fagunwa with his taxing density of Yoruba dictions.

 

The life achievements of Soyinka as a creative energy and social restlessness taut with purpose are not a deterministic outcome of the gods’ spell; there was an existential effort on his own part, and that is the most important. At age three, for instance, when his mates are rightfully being kids at home, he forced himself on primary school one morning. He was so impatient with childhood. Such precocity, such impatience with the status quo, such endless curiosity and energy and countless enthusiasms drive this 50-year span autobiography. Deconstructing the title says it all. It’s a charge from a poem in Idanre his first anthology: Traveller, you must set forth at dawn i.e., in life if you want to succeed, to go very far which is what travelling means, you must set forth at dawn.

 

What is more, dawn is the interface between night (the past) and morning (the future). Wole Soyinka had set forth into the future when others were still in the night sleeping. Hence he becomes the first to see light ahead and leave darkness behind. At that sublime period, the memoir adds, ‘you owed the road and all that lay revealed along its rises and plunges, its contortions, and its arrow directness on both flatland and crest that sometimes appeared aimed at the horizon shimmering at the very edge of the world.’ And the road which he has possessed, is a ‘magic lantern’ with ‘infinite resources.’ No doubt in 1986 he became the first African to conquer the Nobel Prize for literature, and at a relatively young age of 52. About 40 years before then was when Albert Camus the French writer and philosopher got the prize at a young age of 44!