By
Wole Soyinka
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Prof. Wole
Soyinka (1st right) arriving Unizik for the lecture/Pic: Premium Times
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Nobel Laureate, Prof.
Wole Soyinka, delivered this lecture at the annual Zik Lecture Series at the
Faculty of Social Sciences, Nnamdi Azikiwe University (Unizik), Awka, Anambra
State, Nigeria, on Friday, 14th November, 2014.
Stop Press!!!
The following is from yesterday,
Thursday, November 13, and a more auspicious introduction to this address is
one I would find difficult to imagine. Just listen to this, a report from
THISDAY newspaper. Headlined “Unmanned Space Probe Lands on Comet”, the
report reads:
The
European Space Agency’s Philae lander has made space history by successfully
reaching the surface of comet 67P Chryyumov-Gerasimenko. The landing, which took
place at 11.03 AM ET was accompanied by rapturous scenes at the ESA’s control room
in Darmstadt, Germany. Philae is the first probe to land on a comet.
Consider
yourselves forgiven for pondering the question - what has this playwright to do
with space rockets? You would have been even more astounded, could you have
watched him four days ago, chewing his lips at Heathrow airport as he followed
the make-or-mar fortunes of the space probe Philae, launched ten lunar years
ago, as it made its final descent on the comet 67P when it appeared that, while
the harpoons of the space probe fastened, the anchors did not “shoot”.
The
difference between the anchors and the harpoons did not concern him in the
least – all it meant for him was that something had gone wrong, and he was now
silently haranguing his god Ogun, whom he had assigned to all space ventures,
to fix whatever it was, so that he could enjoy the vicarious fulfillment – the
latest of many - of watching a man-made object hook onto a celestial body, a
body estimated to be 2.5miles wide in deep space, then waltz together through
the cosmos at 84,000 miles an hour.
Think
of it! 311 million miles to rendez-vous with one of those rare manifestations
streaking across the sky in a fanfare of sparks, a phenomenon that has inspired
poets, sages, and dreamers, among them William Shakespeare, eliciting from the
pen of that poet for all time the – admittedly - feudalistic lines:
When beggars die, there are no comets seen
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes….
But
now consider the transformation! The hands at the control centre on earth, in
the city of Darmstadt, could be descended from beggars, vagrants, farmers,
factory workers, petty chiefs, blue aristocracy and so on, so are the hands
that dreamt, designed built and set on its micro-precision trajectory the
terrestrial object that made this historic journey, to unite with the fiery
body, the comet, on its own voyage of consummation with – no less than the
majestic orb that gave its name to the solar system, life-giver to the planet
you and I inhabit - the Magic Lantern of the entire universe – the Sun!
And
now, I invite you to take a walk with me – beginning where it all begins – in
the mystery rooms of childhood. In those colonial days – I am certain some of
us here recall - unless you came from one of those special homes – usually
missionary homes, the homes of ‘been-to’ families or others belonging to those
we called the ‘colonial aristocrats’, there was no such thing as a children’s
playroom, no toy room stacked with the latest gadgetry.
There
were no prototypes of today’s logo sets, no early models of Kubrick’s cubes, no
mechanical dolls, toy cars or railways engines and coaches, no jig-saw puzzles
where the pieces eventually metamorphosed into exotic sceneries, no plasticine
– the ‘oyinbo’ clay which you could knead into all sorts of creatures and
objects without getting your fingers caked with loam. Hardly ever picture
books, no room festooned in postcards and coloured maps, no battery operated
mini-dioramas that created a fictional world - from all of which a child’s
aesthetic sensibilities were formed. The majority of our households were
totally bereft of such exotic knick-knacks.
Nonetheless,
it would be correct to claim that we also did possess them, and a lot more
besides. We possessed them because childhood was, still is, and will ever
remain the autonomous republic of make-believe. In the world of make-believe,
anything is possible. There may have been no physical playthings but - we were
not without imagination, and that primal realm, the imagination, is the child’s
playroom, the warehouse of rare beings and entities that gradually fade away
with adulthood.
Eventually
they vanish altogether – for most - under the sheer burden of survival and/or
the prior claims of earning a livelihood. A few, just a handful, convert such a
resented necessity into an instrument of its own neutralization – that is, they
make the exercise of the imagination provide them a creative living – writers,
musicians, poets, painters, designers etc. - now, that is what qualifies to be
known as - poetic vengeance!
Actually,
in my own case, childhood sort of scraped the peripheries of the kind of
household I spelt out earlier. We lived within a missionary compound and
therefore owned, or would encounter form time to time, in homes with a similar
background, quite a few of those rudimentary toys. I recall that we had toy
soldiers, hardly ever numerically sufficient to stage a minor skirmish, much
less a full-scale war, but again, guess what happened! Imagination once again
took over. We were never content with what those toy figures were meant to
represent in real life. Instead, we opened out the transformative potential of
the colorful miniaturized beings beyond their physical limitations, beyond
their permanently frozen expressions and postures.
We
changed their designated characters into others to render vivid the stories and
exploits that we had heard or read about. My recollection today is that those
toy figures were inducements embedded in tins of lozenges that appeared with
the passage of a mystery aunt of ours - another source of limitless
speculations - who breezed in and out of our home from time to time and further
fired our imagination.
The
presents she brought for the family were as exotic as was her name – ‘Dot’.
What a disappointment, how close our world came to crashing don when we
discovered that ‘Dot’ was not her real name but the shortened form for a
familiar Yoruba name – ‘Dotun’. We preferred her as ‘Dot’, like a dot on an
atlas map, a punctuation mark that lacked dimension, yet was infinite with
exotic evocations, with breath and scents of whatever geography we could
conjure up around this petite being who supplied the lozenges, toffees, and
mints, spicing our routine world with the rare and wild.
Well,
we consumed the lozenges and kept the toys. They acquired names and characters
that changed with contexts that we ourselves invented. For instance, in
one play session, a drummer dressed in a uniform from the Crimean war, might be
turned into Yarinbo, the wife of Ijapa, the irrepressible tortoise of a million
wiles, only to become the giant Goliath the following day.
There
was no incongruity in our minds. Roles could be determined by the colours or
costume but were mostly acts of arbitrary designation – we willed them to
become exactly what was required at the moment, even as we fought over who
should possess or operate which miniature, transform it into what we wished,
press it into service as a character from recollection or invention. I cannot
truthfully say that they added any extension to my aesthetic armoury, despite
the fact that the contest for possession was often determined by the colours of
the costumes, or physical postures of the wearers.
However,
there was an exception, one play object which stood apart. That came close to
qualifying as the one that I would consider my most formative encounter with
shapes and colours as discrete entities in the visual ordering of our universe.
That instrument was called - the kaleidoscope. With the rapid, truly
bewildering evolution of modern play gadgetry – walkmans, video games etc -
both as leisure aids and as functional or instructional tools, it is possible
that many of us no longer recall – if at all we did encounter it – what this
object was like. In any case, each model probably differs from the next in
various parts of the world, so, let me describe what mine was like.
It
was shaped just like a telescope. You placed one eye against the lens and
gently turned its tubular frame. With that rotary movement, the various colour
transparencies form and reform in their multiple shapes – triangles,
rectangles, cones, rhomboids and ovoids in all colours of the spectrum, rising,
surmounting and cascading, interchanging with one another in infinite
variations and combinations. It provided an endless feast of criss-crossing
colour definitions, linear forms and conical, sharp-edged or beveled, and
tinted in endless gradations and nuances.
Within
that kaleidoscope, the imagination was truly let loose and unbridled. You felt
free to discern towers, cathedrals, rooftops, market stalls, seas, mountains
and valleys and even faces – such as one from my mental album of iconic
characters, the parsonage priest, whom all referred to as ‘Canon’, and appeared
built like his namesake, the cast iron tubular weapon that fired canon balls.
The imagination was set free, albeit provoked into being by those slivers of
coloured glass that were magically buried within the tube. Naturally, I only
discovered much, much later, that this was how the magic was effected – just
broken pieces of coloured glass that rotated, fell, and clambered up again as
you slowly spun the contrivance.
Our
excursion continues, and leads us a new chamber of marvels. While still in
primary school, the mind still dominated by the kaleidoscope, an itinerant
showman came into our school with the real thing – the Magic Lantern. Now, that
was the name given it – the Magic Lantern. For this display, which was made up
of slides projected onto a screen, we were obliged to close the wooden louvred
windows so as to darken the schoolroom.
The
projection began. This time, there was no predilection towards conjuring images
out of forms, no function for the imagination – the images were all ready
prepared – and only in black and white. No colours. And the images were set.
The slides had done all the work. Mountains. Rivers. Waterfalls. Lakes.
Manicured parks. It was more like a geography lesson – albeit without the
disciplinary cane for dullards. Landmarks from the colonial homestead
predominated - Buckingham Palace. Big Ben. The Tower of London. Canterbury
cathedral. The British House of Parliament. All remote from the audience,
but that colonial distancing was also bridged with human faces – mostly past kings
and queens. Explorers. Missionaries. There were photo slides from the
ceremonial changing of the guards outside the royal palace.
Thankfully,
we were also treated to more than just the colonial fixtures. There were
exotica from various lands. I am not sure now, but I believe that the magic
lantern show also featured the Seven Wonders of the World. Warriors. Rulers.
Mountains. Certainly the Taj Mahal. A Dome. A minaret. The Kaaba. Something or
other from Jerusalem. Why have I suddenly become uncertain of some of
these specific sites?
Memory
has something to do with it, but I suspect it is because, in many instances,
there was personal superimposition. I had seen them – that is, variations of
them - in that earlier, rudimentary, non-specific image spinner – the
kaleidoscope of rotating, multi-coloured glass fantasy world. These new
realities appeared to have been contained in the earlier inchoate shapes. In
that earlier encounter with the kaleidoscope, imagination had intervened and
completed the pictures, even inventing new ones.
Imagination,
yes, but even imagination stems from encountered realities. I already had
specific, graphic inputs into that fluid habitation of still life. Here is one
example, acknowledged in my childhood biography, AKE. Embedded in the walls of
the Anglican church into which, as children, we were all dutifully marched
every Sunday, were stained-glass windows with portraits of the early
missionaries, plus a representation of St. Peter, after whom our church was
named. The kaleidoscope therefore was like a restless, three-dimensional
tubular housing for the two-dimensional stained-glass window portraits, and
thus an incubatory for the latter projected shapes and forms that could also
evolve into human definitions.
This
was how the early contrivance, that rudimentary kaleidoscope became, and
remained for me, the true Magic Lantern – in capital letters. The other,
advertised as the
magic lantern by the traveling showman – try and read that in small letters -
never held the same sense of wonder, the same plenitude of possibilities as
that first tubular hive of fluid but dynamic shapes and colours that
transformed themselves at will, and on which I could impress my own evoked
reality – yes, even, including facial expressions, gestures and postures – just
as adults, supposedly rational beings - do when looking as clouds – some even
going so far as to claim they have seen the face of God in the clouds, or in a
lighted church window.
By
contrast, the mechanical magic lantern – small letters - was programmed, fixed,
sealed and delivered. It had little or no magic to it. I felt vindicated when I
eventually discovered that it had been saddled with another, and more
appropriate name – the projector. Or more specifically - the Slide
Projector. The kaleidoscope, however, remained the true Magic Lantern, a
limitless warehouse of images, while the so-called magic lantern slid downwards
to being a mere mechanical device – exotic, yes, but not magical.
I
ought to stop at that stage of development of this technological toy, since I
must be careful not to appear to denigrate the utilitarian importance of the
latter invention – the slide projector. Among its further refinements are the
now near indispensable laptop projectors known as Power Point which projects
what we might term digital slides onto a screen – not just images, maps,
graphs, statistics etc. but even words – entire sentences, paragraphs and
summaries, presumably for the benefit of audiences whose attention span is considered
inadequate.
You
not only hear the words from the presenter, you read them at the same time.
Unquestionably that instrument, Power Point, has been at work before in this
very hall, maybe educating its audience on the menace of HIV Aids, or ebola. This,
however, is not the occasion to go into the principles of that presumed advance
in communication – its pluses and minuses if any, and what effect it might have
- or already has - on the reading habits of many, or indeed on the enhancement
or retardation of literacy in general, not to touch upon the appreciation of
literature itself. We can safely leave those questions to the constituency of
book fairs, reading clubs, literary conferences and libraries.
My
interest in these technological play things is thus limited for now to the
partnership role of technology in the freeing or inhibiting of the imaginative
function, a rather paradoxical role, towards which end I have merely drawn upon
the rudimentary gadgets that intruded upon, and contributed to the formative
existence of the child – one, the kaleidoscope, the other, its problematic
twin, the one I consider a usurper - the magic lantern, better known as the
slide projector. In the mission of not only setting free, but actively
propagating knowledge universally, there is no question which of the two has
the practical advantage.
I
readily concede that reality: my own field, which is Literature, and which is
synonymous with communication, would be painfully restricted without
technology. Online publication, for instance, has become a reality of our
times. So is the iPad, plus its bewildering array of relations – iDad, iMum and
whatever else! I even get asked the question – is our age witnessing the end of
the book as we know it today? My answer is always ‘Not in the least’. The
technological development poses only one problem for us writers: how to ensure
that we collect our full royalty entitlements from online publication.
The
extract from these beginnings is that the contest – and collaboration - between
the two – in effect, between Sciences and the Humanities – provided, I suspect,
the grounding for my holistic understanding of the creative process – in itself
a near magical operation - and underscores my bewilderment at any effort
that is geared towards placing bounds on the protean nature of both. Their
contrasting roles notwithstanding, they have become partners as destroyers of
boundaries and the liberation of the imagination – in short, a formidable team
in the Humanities and the Scientific enterprise. The moveable type in printing
revolution began it all centuries ago, literally freeing the word, and
knowledge in general, from clerical cloisters. And today?
We
must be cautious. Remain on our guard. There are those who claim equal
dedication to the elimination of boundaries – but for one sole purpose – the
erection of even more rigorous boundaries against the limitless
constituency of the mind. After all, some rampaging hordes of – I suppose we
must call them – humanity - however else their acts define them, have
taken to wading across national boundaries in floods of blood, breaking down
national boundaries wherever a breach is on offer – such as troubled nations
like Somalia. Or Syria, Iraq. If alarm had not been triggered off early enough,
they certainly would have broken down the boundary between Mali and
Nigeria.
And
what do they propose as standard currency within the new formed, unbounded
territory? No need for guesswork - their wares are advertised long before
arrival - their approach is paved with severed hands, heads, their roads lined
with twenty-first century crucifixions. So, yes indeed, you could claim that
they also are engaged in the removal of human divisions. However, while we work
to break down barriers in order to irradiate the enclaves of atavism with new
notions, new vistas of the world, new insights into history, new propositions
of human relationships – of gender, race, beliefs, classes, identities, to
identify with the individual in a kaleidoscope of humanity - these others
would, if they could, seal up all vectors through which knowledge, that primary
destroyer of boundaries, passes from human to human, from community to
community.
They
would assault the most basic means to communication – be it the occasional pamphlet,
the television, video or the Internet. They would proscribe it, tie its hands
behind its back if they could, cut its throat and behead it – ideally
publicizing the act through that very technological innovation – Internet – the
product of the skills and the vision of others, that they denounce as
abominations in the sight of god.
They
would – and they do – burn down the masts that carry, not just information but
the material of knowledge, truncate its mission of sowing the very seeds of
enlightenment, of experimentation, of the excitation of explorations into the
unknown, in whatever field, and with all the uncertainties and risks involved
in trials and errors. They would restrict knowledge to the narrow dictates of
primitivism where only learning by rote, and the regurgitation of frozen texts
is permitted. That expansive world that you and I could make and re-make at
will through the exercise of the imagination, right from childhood is –
anathema. Indeed, they call it blasphemy. To them the book is – haram. Forbidden.
They proliferate the world but I believe that, in these parts, they are
known as - Boko Haram.
The
propagators of such enclaves are beating at our gates, and new boundaries are
springing up – not even virtual, but physical. We have one next door to the
North - you know it as Sambisa Forest, its unwilling residents, school children
from a town called Chibok. And hundreds of others, in a condition of virtual
slavery. From within that mined enclave, they make bloody sorties in efforts to
extend such boundaries and swallow up institutions such as this, where we are
gathered at this very moment.
They
proscribe this very gathering – it is haram. We would
be guilty of the most pitiable crime of complacency if we believe that they
will be content to stay behind their present bounds. No. Their vision is truly
limitless, it is global, and knowledge is their primal enemy – that much, but
not much else, they can and do articulate. And so they shut down sanctuaries of
knowledge, violently and brutally, set fire to them, snuff out the lives of the
dedicated servitors of knowledge and creativity and enslave their hapless
pupils. For them, age is no barrier to inflicting sudden death, which, to
summarize, is their only discernable credo. Victims and vectors of a yet
undiagnosed twenty-first century morbidity, they kill, not merely children, but
childhood. They smash the kaleidoscope of the mind, even in its most
rudimentary development.
Even
if we, right here in this nation, were not undergoing the same affliction as
the humanity across the Euphrates, across the Straits of Bosphorus, we should
know that humanity everywhere is engaged today - deny it whoever pleases - in
the perennial struggle between Dogma and Exploration, between openness and closure,
between Power and Freedom, between the kaleidoscope – which is the true Magic
Lantern, and the usurping magic lantern, magical principally by name, seductive
in its presentations, but foreclosing the collaborative mission of the
imagination – which is the acknowledged foraging ground of both writer and
scientist. You are familiar with the former, generally a breed that tends to be
more notorious in public perception, the writer to be found at the forefront,
seemingly the arrow-head of the mission of enlightenment. However, I take pains
always to remind us that we do have ‘partners in crime’ outside what are
generally known as the Arts, or the Humanities – hence my tendency towards such
expressions as ‘creative mission’ and allied evocations. Maybe this is out of a
desire to spread the risk factor around, to emphasize the fact that the mission
of creative humanity extends beyond the purlieu of only writers, since the
essence of progress has always been – to break down barriers.
Now
here is an often neglected danger that such censors pose to the rest of us:
those infidels of creativity, the anti-minds of the world, are invariably the
obsessed aspirants to, or custodians of - Power - and their apologists!
Sometimes I attempt to understand the reactionary contrariness of Power by
proposing that perhaps so much has been achieved by human ingenuity, and so
rapidly, that the sluggish anti-minds – anti-minds as in anti-matter - of
society feel threatened. Thus, they view creativity itself is an affront, since
creativity is dedicated to the constant opening up of territory, and thus
constitutes an incessant challenge to the sense of security (or complacency)
that comes with the invocation of boundaries.
The
essence of discovery is that it is the antithesis of boundary imposition. Power
loves boundaries. Power manifests itself within boundaries, is exercised
within some form of territorial delimitation. Obsessed with spatial control -
and by this we do not refer only to the physical territory but equally to the
non-material terrain, such as imagination - Power fulfills its reality in
the conviction that it possesses and dominates the infinite space of all
potential discovery or apprehension. Its gospel of fixity is lodged in the
manipulation of an invisible slide projector from which it dispenses its own
limited storage of antiquated, and selective slides. Often, such slides are no
more than pages and chapters from doctrinal texts, among them religious
Scriptures, upon which their extreme, purblind proselytizers confer the
totality of all possible knowledge.
But
let us beware - for indeed, Power also lays claim to a form of magic, since it
projects a yet unattained destination. In the secular world, this is called
Utopia. In the theocratic, it is known as Paradise – other names being
Valhalla, Nirvana and so on. For any of these, the here and now does not exist
except as a mere passage – or indeed an obstacle that stands in the way of
attaining Utopia/Paradise. Scriptures and Ideological Tracts superimpose on the
present the sublimity of that Ultimate Destination, even encroach on the
province of the kaleidoscope by brainwashing the susceptible into seeing a
fantasy land through the seductive tints of stained-glass windows.
That vista
is however the creation of the privileged receivers of Revelation, the Chosen,
who insist that they must never be contradicted or questioned. Beneath all such
projections however, allying the secular to the theocratic, is one craving, one
coveted, uncompromising objective, especially among the more intolerant
versions of such proponents, and that is - Power. And to whom does such power
belong? To the Chosen. But who chose them? Whatever they claim, they are
self-chosen. Self-appointed. They may evoke as their original sponsor one
Super-Being, or Supreme Being by whatever name they choose, an invisible
Authority with whom, presumably, they are constantly on a mystic hot-line. Our
response, the response of the liberated mind must be simply this: whip out our
Mobile phone and say, give me her – or his number. I want to send him - or her
- a text.
How
did that ancient facilitator of Power - the taboo – come to
be constructed in social evolution? Since, very
often, there is no rational explanation of what is forbidden – unless those who
interdict right and left openly admit that their goal is simply to contain
challenges to authority and institute absolute obedience - they proceed to
invent the taboo -
the undoable and the unspeakable. And - going all the way back to whatever serves
as equivalents of the medieval phase of such afflicted societies – even the
unthinkable!
It is difficult for us to believe it today, but at that time when
the recently deceased space pioneer and universal protagonist Neil Armstrong
was proclaiming his ‘giant step for mankind’, there were dedicated nay-sayers
who raved and ranted that the act of stepping on the moon at all was trampling
on the sacred precincts of divinity, and that the world would be punished for
its impiety. The envelope of knowledge and enlightenment was being pushed,
threatening the ‘forbiddens’ of superstition, and such human ambition was – taboo! Consider,
by contrast, the message of Stephen Hawkings to the Paralympics which took
place in London two years ago:
“The
Paralympic Games is about transforming our perception of the world. We are all different,
there is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share
the same human spirit. What is important is that we have the ability to create.
This creativity can take many forms, from physical achievement to theoretical
physics.”
Missing
from that exhortation would be, for many in my jealous field of occupation -
literature, but we can forgive the man who is often referred to as the greatest
scientific mind of this era. In any case, Stephen Hawkings probably has
literature tucked in somewhere between physical achievement and theoretical
physics, so there are really no grounds to complain. Were I the one composing a
message for the Paralympics, I would probably have substituted Poetry for
quantum Physics, rhapsodized over the poetry discernable in the coordination of
human limbs straining against Nature’s gravitational dominion.
These
are mere occupational rivalries – neither is exclusive of the other. What we
are obviously agreed on - to quote Hawkings directly` - is “the
transformation of our perception of the world” and “the ability to create”. For
the jealous guardians of the magic lantern – small letters - that human
instinct to transform, to re-create, is – taboo – unless of course along
narrow, pre-set and inflexible lines. The parameters of transformation are
rigidly located in their own pre-set scriptural slides – of which, by the way,
lest we forget its own crimes, Secular Doctrinal Ideology under whatever name
has proved an equally pernicious supplier - deadly, stultifying and absolutist.
Despite its ‘scientific’ claims, that so-called materialist opponent has
operated under no less a superstitious spirit than the theocratic, evoking the
domineering territory of the ‘taboo’ in the realms of creativity.
Of
course the taboo has a long history – perhaps it is as old as humanity itself.
One is compelled to recall that the instinct to dominate, to restrict, to
control - this mysterious, unpredictable and infinitely resourceful impulse to
counter the human need for ‘venturing’ - through imposition of the taboo goes
back to those known or guessed-at rudimentary beginnings of society, and
culture. In constant opposition is that liberating human propensity known as - Curiosity.
Curiosity? Does that ring a bell? Something very current, restlessly and
compellingly active?
How
obvious, yet summative and appropriate for the restlessness of the human mind
it must be deemed, that the most recent – and now so dramatically supplanted! -
instrument for the triumphant exploration of the universe should have been
named, with a literalness that paradoxically evokes a sense of sublimity –
Curiosity! I refer to that dazzling, eloquent, meticulous successor to the
first mechanical probe of the lunar landscape. I assume of course that like me,
you do follow the space launches no matter where - indeed, that you plan to
send up your own rocket one of these days? Awka, after all, is famous for
propulsion technology – guns, Egbunikwe etc - so why not an Anambra
rocket – but now dedicated to research and human advance? Keep that in
sight – but first you must get rid of the taboos and debilitating
superstitions. Clean out the Okija shrines and all symbols of morbidity and
then, watch the flowering of the creative technologies.
In
evoking the restrictive device known as the taboo, I do not
speak here of the ancient taboo that was an economic device, a means of
conserving scarce resources – land, food etc – whatever was essential to the
rudimentary community for its very survival. Mythology in the service of
restriction – a paradoxical occupation of the imagination, since mythology
itself, the art of divine story-telling is itself a creative act – this branch
of the literary craftiness comes into play as stories are spun that make the
eating of this or that kind of food, the cutting down of some tree, shrub or
the other, an act of impiety. No, of course it is not that kind of taboo
that was invented for community preservation that bothers the world even today,
where even crops are routinely altered genetically for higher and higher
yields, as well as to enhance resistance to diseases.
We
are concerned here with the taboo whose prohibitive inspiration is largely captured
in that interdiction of the judeo-christian faith – thou shalt have no
other gods but me, or even that more infamous command: this is the tree of
knowledge, therefore eat not of its fruits! There was at least a
charming honesty about those scriptural commandments. Here is a god who says
bluntly to his two mortal creations, Adam and Eve – listen here, there is only
one cock of the walk, so don’t even think of competition! And the second verboten similarly
declares the intention of that power to keep a firm hand on enlightenment.
Alas, from ‘thou shalt have no other gods but me’ has emerged, over time, the
injunction – ‘thou shalt read no other books but mine’, ‘thou shalt write no
other books but mine’ all circling around the ultimate interdiction: ‘thou
shalt think no other thoughts but
mine.’
The
taboo, prohibition….evolving into the tradition of the Index of banned books,
from medieval times, through the Roman Catholic Inquisition, to be adopted and
enforced with unprecedented brutality by the Taliban and their
misbegotten species in today’s Boko Haram, Isis and others -- simply
censorship by any other name - often strikes me as the continuation of this
extra-terrestrial - but, paradoxically earth-bound - project, pursued by
those who constitute themselves ‘The Chosen’, the custodians of Revelation
among other self-designated beings, self-positioned class monitors or thought
police of society. Ask no questions. Do not attempt to unveil what is declared
hidden. Suppress your demons of curiosity, do not interrogate what lies beneath
the surface. Long before Rene Descartes’ arrival on earth, this narrow elite
had already anticipated, and mobilized against that philosopher’s heretical
challenge to orthodoxy, whose ramifications go far, far beyond the original
shorthand formulation – I think, therefore
I am. Think? That
was the first heresy from which all later heresies emerge. If such a notion –
independent, unregimented thought, the domain of ideas as the dwelling place of
humanity - was sufficient to put the wind up Authority – be it of the religious
or the secular kind - imagine the terror of the even wider, far more primordial
challenge of the transformative mind: I create,
therefore I am!
Create!
There, in
my view, we have the critical word. Our physicist, Stephen Hawkings, would be
doused in kerosene and burnt alive, still strapped to his magical wheel-chair
device from which, despite a physically cruel affliction, the words trickle out
through ingenious contraptions, inspiring and validating the existence of
others like him. We need examples like his – athlete, astronaut or physicist,
geneticist, researchers in every field, to take the heat off the writer, poet,
novelist, dramatist, the custodian of the verbal kaleidoscope, our true Magic
Lantern, that creature who re-arranges the basic material of fragmented glass –
the Word – to “transform our perception of the world”, create a new order of
existence and inspire visions in unsuspected places. This is why placing the
writer’s mission in the context of routine human creativity – which implicates
the making or re-making of things, enables us to expose the self-contradictory
and futile motions of censorship, that constrictive instrumentality of Power.
Today,
technology has reduced the rampages of the exclusionist policies of closed
societies, forcefully challenged the phenomenon of ideological prohibitions –
again, of both the secular or theocratic kind. In those stubborn bastions of
creative closure, the mind – just like the body in the Olympics - is being
increasingly liberated from the control of the presumptions of others or of
their arbitrary will. With every new invention, it roams further and
further in virtual reality and pursues hidden truths. Virtual reality is the
virtuous Nemesis that hovers over stubbornly restrictive cultures such as the
theocratic - especially their fundamentalist spores, which increasingly leap
centre stage across the world with their violent censorship of knowledge and
fear of creativity, their pathetic twitches that lead to restrictions on
satellite dishes, make bonfires of radio and video cassettes, films but – most
prominently and from time immemorial - books. It was predictable: the
first act of the Taliban on overrunning Afghanistan years ago was: destroy the
images. Next, the turn of the books: Ban or Burn! The neo-Talibans who recently
overran Northern Mali did their best to outdo the Taliban. The world was
helpless, held its breath prayerfully on the fate of the famous ancient
libraries of Timbuktoo – having reduced the monuments to rubble in the first
frenzied wave. We knew that the priceless manuscript manuscripts of
Timbuktoo were next.
And
after Timbuktoo? Or indeed, before Mali? The force that has been
rampaging over the past three or four years in parts of our own nation,
Nigeria, makes no bones about its mission, proudly defining that mission by its
very choice of a name – Boko Haram. or – the Book is Taboo. True, these
throwbacks try to cover up their true mission - as has become fashionable in
other notorious solipsistic worlds - with the rambling, grandiloquent
title of ‘Defenders of the Faith and Warriors of the one God through Jihad’
etc. etc ad
nauseum, especially on video pronouncements, but the name by which
our own mimic but deadly fatalists are known, and in which they glory through
their acts is quite straight to the point: Boko Haram – The book is Taboo. All
books, except – needless to say – one, theirs, the Koran, but - to be very
specific, their own privileged, selective and distorted reading of the Koran.
Some of the spokesmen of the movement have even expanded their strictures to
embrace all forms of education or culture that may be deemed western, oblivious
to the irony that they themselves assiduously turn to the technology of the
West for the dissemination of their propaganda – television and video
especially. But perhaps they are aware of, but relish the contradiction,
since their methodology approves of using the enemy’s strengths against itself
– including its philosophy of an open, multi-textured society, a kaleidoscope
of infinite discourse.
Let
us address these local Talibans directly or, more accurately, address
ourselves, just so that we know – physically, symbolically, and potentially -
what is at stake, just so we understand why learning and imagination – of
any sort – is the primary enemy of these atavists. I urge you to
understand that we are not speaking of Islam, or Christianity, not addressing
Hinduism or Zoroastrianism when we use expressions such as “fundamentalism” -
and interchangeably with “fanaticism”, “zealotry” and intolerance. The
inability to tolerate an alternative view – this is what assails our very
present existence. We are speaking to all fundamentalists and nurturers
of intolerance, all those who believe that there is only one book in the world
– their Scriptures. They know the truth. They know that when you hold a
book in your hands, you indeed hold in your own hands the power – and the duty
– of redirecting your destiny. Beyond the actual contents between the covers, a
book speaks in a voice of intellectual admonishment to each and every
model of intolerance.
It
speaks to the Christian Talibans in this very part of the nation who
glory in demolishing the sculptures of Mbari in the land, claiming that
they are heathen manifestations and have no place in the modern world. It
says quite simply: you may demolish these material manifestations of a people’s
antecedent spiritual intuitions, but how many books that celebrate the spirit
of Mbari can
you destroy? How many bonfires can you raise and how often, to match the pace
at which works emerge that celebrate Ala. Or Ikenga. Or Amadiora? Now,
understand this – we are not speaking of the modern corruption of these precedent
spiritualities which have mutated into money making cults and filthy cultic
practices like Okija – no! We are speaking of mythological constructs that have
sustained humanity while it groped for the scientific explanations for
mystifying phenomena. We are not speaking of money making delusions that need
human eyes, livers, lungs and genitals in an illusion that these will turn
followers into multi-millionaires overnight, or power hungry perverts in any
field!
No!
We address those who are so intellectually challenged that they cannot even
discriminate but move to destroy what they have never taken the trouble to
study or understand. And we say to them, you are engaged in a futile contest.
The genie of creativity is out of the bottle and cannot be stuffed back again.
How fast can your puny, bigoted hands and misdirected zeal compete with the
will that reproduces and regenerates the world-view of the Igbo people? To
these rampaging Christians, I direct this simple question: could Chinua Achebe’s
world famous Things
Fall Apart, have emerged without the heritage of the so-called primitives
of Umuofia? If the early Christian missionaries had succeeded in doing what
many of you – the so-called born-again Christians have chosen to undertake –
destroy the manifestations of that Igbo culture by pulverizing such a central
cultural precipitate as the Mbari sculptures, would you not feel deprived today
of a heritage upon which you can draw to fashion out symbols and images that
reach out across language and history to other cultures? Cultural criticism,
comparative assessment are of course also part of human discourse, and proof of
the human capability for self-interrogation and thus – Change! But what has
this to do with the physical destruction of extant evidence of human creativity?
On behalf of this and other threatened heritage, we call on communities to
stand up against the plague of philistinism that is ripping through these
borders before our entire history and inspirational sources are swamped by the
noxious tides of fanaticism.
And
guess what, the fanatics of two major rival theologies - Christian and Moslem
– even join forces to pulverize the designated “infidel” spiritual products of
their forebears, smashing statues, attacking their seasonal processions and
festivals in Ile-Ife, Ibadan and other cities. The very sight of such
manifestations they claimed, was an offence to their own righteous existence,
an impediment to modern progress and aN abomination in the sight of their
deities, When you surged out again and again to destroy the shrine built to the
Yoruba heroine Moremi – in Offa, Ilorin, Oyo, among other notorious
instances – how could you fail to see yourselves as mere petulant agents
of discredited aliens whose monumental ignorance of your own historical and
spiritual antecedence you thus slavishly attempt to rehabilitate?. We say
‘discredited’ because history states clearly that the assault of these aliens
was not impelled by any real spiritual inspiration but by that diabolical dualism
of Power and Profit. This duo has shaped the misfortunes of much of the
continent we call ours. What then does that make you but forerunners of
Boko Haram and allied tendencies?
You
cannot however escape that history, a history of which Moremi was the
protagonist of her time. It is the narrative of protagonist recovery for the
various Moremi of the world – including today’s Malala, the heroine of
Pakistan! It is that by which our present is measured and our future inspired.
You may destroy the statues and the shrines of Moremi, but you cannot wipe out
her history, you cannot eliminate the songs to which she has given inspiration
nor the drama of her existence that is given new life by dramatists like the
late Duro Ladipo. The avatars, the demiurges, the mythological paradigms and
the philosophies of a people that these sculptural victims embody in their
simple materiality – cannot be eradicated.
On the contrary, they remain the
shards of rotating coloured glasses from which new images are glimpsed, from
which new designs – both physical and symbolic – are inspired. Those who still,
even today, indulge in this kind of mindless iconoclasm should look around
today and recognize that they merely anticipated the mission of Boko Haram.
They should understand indeed that their spiritual relations softened the
ground for the eventual advent of the Taliban in Afghanistan. And they should
pause and ask themselves – did the so-called ISIS of today’s diabolical infamy
simply drop from the clouds, or could it be that even here, on this soil, we
joined others in willing their global infestation, in preparing the welcome mat
that cushioned their descent?
Intolerance,
did I mention earlier as the root of current predicament? Yes, but tolerance
also, tolerance of the intolerable. Intolerance on one side – yes indeed – but,
on the other, also tolerance, accommodation, rationalization, complacency and
even indulgence – all amounting to passive collaboration and complicity.
If a multi-religious political entity called Nigeria, a struggling kaleidoscope
of faiths, cultures and histories, had not tolerated the sectarian
retrogression of one shard that led it to consolidate itself as a theocratic
state – and I refer here to the first renegade Zamfara! - if the dog had stood
firm on all four legs and growled to the tail, no, you cannot wag me, would we
have come to this pass? I am speaking of a situation where our children,
sent to school in pursuit of knowledge, for the nurturing of their gift of
imagination, are blown to pieces, openly beheaded, their teachers butchered,
their parents executed for their ‘accessory role’ of being parents to such
pupils.
I am speaking of this very present where it turns out that our
children, routinely assembled in an examination centre, have merely been
corralled like sheep for ease of capture, to be brutally displaced, compelled
to undergo unspeakable indignities and violations. Just take a look at their
drab, cowed presence in the video propaganda of Boko Haram! Is this their
ultimate deserving? Does anyone glimpse in their hands even the prospect
of any modern equivalent of the rudimentaryt kaleidoscope – perhaps an ipad?
The
magic lantern of childhood opens up a world of marvels, enchantment, and
imagination. As reality encroaches, the maturing mind discovers that beneath
the glitter lies a world of disenchantment, of banality, even disgust. But the
mind continues to turn that tubular contraption, filled with shards of
multi-coloured glass, even though they not only dazzle, but wound, and that
some of the colours are the colours of bile and blood, also that the hues that
run into one another are not simply gradations of the rainbow, but colours of
humanity that exist on raw earth, not as idyllic beings suspended in the sky.
And, for open minds, curiosity takes over and exploration begins. Mistrust of
the settled projector, the stamp of orthodoxy, imposed and inflexible reality –
even while temporarily enticing and cosseting - encroaches, and then humanity
asks questions. The troubled answers lead to transformation. Today, aided by
its precocious product – technology - the process is unstoppable.
How
many of you here are space nuts, I do not know. I am, as confessed, unabashedly
one. I follow all rocket launches wherever – China, Europe, Soviet Union, the
United States and all, sometimes setting an alarm clock to ensure that I am up
for the ones that lift off at an unearthly hour in the time-zone I happen to
be. I mourn with any launch that goes wrong, celebrate with the successes –
fortunately in the majority these days. I even tuned it to NASA, recently, when
it sent up some music to her latest – again, please note, now superseded –
satellite, so that it could be beamed back to earth and downloaded by any
one on a private receptor – most likely a computer. Naturally I was somewhat
envious that a product from my own field – let us say, poetry - had been beaten
to the galaxy by a sister art – Music. Still, I tuned in to NASA’s recording studio
to share the moment and – hmm, well, I must confess that I found neither the
lyrics nor the music particularly exciting, pausing only to admit that my
tastes in music are somewhat conservative. In any case, I consoled myself by
recollecting that the spheres, according to the ancients, have always been the
abode of music, though I must add that I have yet to hear such celestial music
nor met anyone who has.
This
one however, I did hear clearly and distinctly, this music that was a product
of human creativity. Heard it loud and clear, a manifestation of man’s artistic
and technical feat – literally a marriage made in heaven. The title of the
solemnizing music for that marriage was appropriate enough - Reach for the Stars - and what a
moving sight it was to see all those dedicated scientific minds humming and
swaying to the tune! The studio atmosphere was infectious, for they were
celebrating yet another first in human history, the moment when a work of art
was beamed up to a man-made object in outer space, from where it was beamed
back again for those of us, the technologically challenged, who can only
admire, but not aspire.
And
here is the point, the heart of our entire discourse this morning: that our
neo-barbarians can smash all the “ungodly” studios on earth, destroy the
statues of the mythological beings known and unknown, shut down cinemas,
television, reduce to rubble even the monuments erected to their own sages,
burn down the ancient libraries of Timbuktoo, the product of the exploring minds
of their own religious predecessors in all disciplines – mathematics,
philosophy, pharmacology, medicine, ecology and so on – the entire gamut of
man’s intellectual striving. Yes, they can pursue knowledge wherever they find
it, incinerate its roots and poison its sources: one thing they cannot do is -
they cannot ‘reach
for the stars’.
They cannot reach those scintillating orbs and destroy
them, not one! They cannot, ultimately, destroy the kaleidoscope whose shards
of infinite variations illuminate the orbit of human creativity. This is
one rendition that is totally out of reach of any earthly interventionist
censor. It will be followed by others. That music will invade our earth and
penetrate our senses - which is one feat that the imagined ‘music of the
spheres’ has failed to do throughout millennia of the promulgation of its
existence.
The
majority of us here, in company with even the ground support team of scientists
at NASA - or Darmstadt - will visit Mars in our lifetime only in imagination. I
watched the – now earlier - Mars landing, like millions, only vicariously, an
earth bound creature, reveling in the sublime moment of a feat of human
ingenuity that has broken barriers of time and motion. The name that those
pioneers gave to that creation, gently probing the surface of Mars at this
moment and penetrating through its crust, sniffing, tasting, collecting,
analyzing and transmitting images and insights back to others - just like the
average writer – remains a most befitting name for the existential imperative
of mankind at any moment of its history – Curiosity. Nnyocha!
I like that name. If there had to be an alternative choice however, I would
have proposed, and in capital letters – The MAGIC LANTERN!
Wole
Soyinka
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