Book review: You must set forth at dawn

Written by Sam Mathe
Thursday, 07 July 2011 17:29

Like his mercurial and temperamental cousin Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Wole Soyinka, Africa’s foremost playwright and poet frequently crossed swords with authorities. A persecuted but defiant voice nevertheless, like Kuti, the celebrated wordsmith became his troubled country’s conscience. But unlike the iconoclastic artist who refused to opt for exile and risked his life in Lagos’s infamous prisons, Soyinka writes movingly of the pain of exile.
Partly autobiography, partly political history, this 600-word tome poignantly and candidly tells of his involvement in the politics of a nation largely defined by successive military dictatorships that often punished dissent through detentions, torture or worse. In this regard, he revisits the events relating to his incarceration during the 1967 Nigerian Civil War when he spent 27 months in prison after he was accused of helping Biafran secessionists to buy jet fighters.

He writes in trenchant prose of cherished friendships and the excitement of being a young writer and academic witnessing Nigeria’s march towards independence in 1960 and how the honeymoon of self-rule was eventually shattered by undemocratic regimes who forced him out of his beloved country.

As critic Merle Rubin of the Los Angeles Times eloquently puts it, “For students of post-colonial history, this book by a man who has not only witnessed but taken part in it is an indispensable document, with its detailed account and searching analysis. This is both a public book and an intensely personal one.”

AUTHOR: WOLE SOYINKA
PUBLISHERS: BOOKCRAFT