by Wole Soyinka
Through Nadia, the secretary to my Lumumba in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s play, I secured an apartment just off Boulevard St.-Michel, owned by the daughter of the proprietor of one of the huge brasseries in that arrondissement, Titi C. It was all appropriately cloak-and-dagger. The Irish belligerents slipped away from under the nervous eyes of British agents, traveled on a cross-Channel ferry. The address had been sent to them in Ireland. On landing, they were informed in which letter box—that of an untenanted apartment— the key was hidden. Their meeting lasted nearly all night. By morning, they had boarded the ferry, headed for the Irish seas.
As I complained to Mary Robinson, then the Irish prime minister, when we met in Davos, Switzerland, two decades later, the intrusion of W.S. into Irish contemporary history had sunk into the Irish seas without a ripple. I had looked forward to the outcome as others might the result of a World Cup final, and to the private celebration of my unsung triumph—together with Nadia and Titi C.—in the cause of peace. Fortunately I had no active consciousness, at the time, of the existence of a Nobel Peace Prize, or I would have felt very badly done by when, not long after, the peace effort succumbed to the superior lure of bombs and guns. Unable to fire a public salvo at those fratricidal letdowns, I moped around for some days afterward and boycotted Irish literature and music for some weeks longer. Fortunately, I never had taken to Irish whisky.
To concede genuine revulsion at the phenomenon of violence does not, however, contradict an acceptance of its sometime necessity—and even justice. There are those who relish violence; there is no other word for it. They are juiced up at the prospect of its eruption, and some even consciously seek it out. Others merely reconcile themselves to violence but, having done so, direct it in as practical, minimalist, and humane a way as is compatible with the objectives, propelling it toward that moment when one may look back with relief at the jettisoning of such a phase that violates one’s loftiest ideals, celebrate its termination, and hope— Never again?
I have recognized and accepted my membership in this latter group since I became conscious of injustice and the tendency to domination as ingrained aspects of the conduct of society and individuals. I have always found it abnormal that violence should be offered as a normal commodity of exchange between individuals or that nations should conduct their diplomacy through the pulverization of one another’s cities and the decimation of their populations. To gauge the greatness of nations—as my earliest history texts would have it—by their capacity and cunning for destruction and award the title of “Great” to successful warmongers in a confused context with nation building and social enhancement has always struck me—well, as far back as I can recollect—as a perversion of human values. To respond to terror with violence or attempt to defeat violence with its own instrumentality is, however, un-blameworthy. I admire the saints—the Gandhis, the Martin Luther Kings, the Dalai Lamas, the Aung San Suu Kyis, the Gautamas, and all—but I cannot aspire to companionship with them.
Many were the encounters I had with loving apologists of rabid power during the Abacha era, those who tried their best not to know of the violence that was meted out daily to their fellow citizens, often right before their eyes. The more daring made efforts to reassure me that the dictator was a much-misunderstood man who cared very deeply about the potholes in the roads— Prof, I am not saying he’s perfect, but you should see how he’s been rehabilitating the roads—or else lauded his commitment to sanitizing the banking system— Those mushroom banks, Prof, he’s really putting an end to their activities—and so on and so on and so on! Such encounters, often in airports or hotel lobbies during exile, never failed to call to mind one occasion in which I was physically caught up in the web of absurdity that is sometimes spun by violence. A common enough occurrence in domestic settings, this was acted out in the public arena. I have thought often of my interlocutors, the Abacha apologists while he lived, as actors in that street scene—they on the receiving end, our dictator as the natty young man who doled out that violence in the full confidence that he had a submissive partner, and a tolerant environment. That scene remains my favored morality tale, both as a moment of self-revelation—in addition to its cautionary lesson—and of my contempt for a tendency toward “reasoned” submissiveness or its partner, the psychologically induced, a probable masochistic streak.
AN EVENING—YES, I admit it—of egregious folly! New York, Upper Manhattan, 1970s. I was returning from some function or other in the company of my host, Joseph Okpaku, a trained engineer turned publisher, literary critic, and business adventurer from Benin, then domiciled in the United States. Joe was driving. A taxi overtook us, then swung sharply to the curb, screeching to a stop just a few yards from one of those apartment buildings with an awning and sidewalk carpet running from street to door, presided over by a stolid doorman in uniform, fully braided, at least an ex-boxer or -wrestler—in short, well able to take care of himself and any disturber of the peace. Before the taxi had rolled to a complete stop, the curbside door flew open and a woman leaped out, screaming at the top of her lungs and running—obviously—toward the protective presence of the doorman. After her leaped a man, who caught up with her in a couple of strides and pinned her against the wall. The taxi drove alongside the pair—perhaps, we thought, he still had his fare to collect. Joe had also pulled up, and together we watched.
“Get back in the car!” the man screamed at her. “No, no!” she screamed back. “Leave me alone! Help!”
The next sound we heard was the crunch of her head against the wall as the man took her face in his hands and bang, bang, bang against the wall. Over and over again went that head against that wall, as if the neck would snap. The man would stop briefly, step back, point, and order the woman once again to get back in the taxi. We watched in anticipation—that is, anticipation of help from the doorman. Nothing. He simply watched, stolidly.
The man grabbed her again, ready to resume his pounding, but the woman broke loose and fled screaming along the sidewalk, the man in pursuit. The taxi crawled alongside and we crawled behind it, still expecting the doorman to intervene. When her companion caught up with her again and resumed the same process, with such increased violence that I felt I could feel those bangs reverberate against the wall of my stomach, some unseen force must have lifted me out of the car and catapulted me forward, because the next thing I knew, I was standing over the man. I could only assume that I had knocked him down—from behind!
Well now, what next? Having knocked him down, what was I supposed to do? Had I gotten myself into a fight? Was Joe calling the police? Would the doorman at last act as a decent citizen and come to my aid? I dared not take my eyes off the fallen bully, dared not turn my back on him. I had no thought of doing anything to incapacitate him before he turned his fury on me, and I certainly could not leave him lying there while I regained the sanity and protection of Joe’s vehicle. In short, I felt stuck, and I now began to feel stupid in the bargain. Not for long, however, since matters were taken out of my hands by a staccato of blows on my shoulders from behind. Reinforcements? From within the taxi? But no, the ownership of those tiny fists was soon established when I heard that earlier screaming voice now whining, “Don’t you dare hurt him. I love him! I love him!”
My jaws began to lose their tautness. I felt my mouth distinctly slacken, opening slowly in silent questioning of my hearing. Now thoroughly scared, I hoped that the footsteps that I heard running up were Joe’s, which indeed they were. The tattooing persisted, accompanied by increasing protestations of love. I dared not turn around, dared not take my eyes off the prostrate figure. I simply wished that the wind would whisk me away from that spot and deposit me in my Isara village, where human beings still conduct themselves with some measure of normality.
Recovering some volition, I bent over the man, all red lights flashing as my mind resumed functioning in the mode of extreme caution. There were passersby, quickening their pace as they skirted our group, and I believe that it was at that
moment that I first became conscious that the surrounding humanity, including the three central figures—assailant, victim, and doorman spectator—were white. Solid pink-white upper-class Manhattanites. That is, I finally came down from the clouds of righteous and impulsive fellow feeling, landed plumb in the heart of habitual violence, the U.S.Alien land. Strange people! Until that moment, I had seen only three human beings, devoid of racial identity, one of whose head was about to be reduced to squashed melon. So I bent down, apologetic. My sole concern was now, very simply, self-preservation, and the instant question on my mind was—was Lover Boy carrying a knife? Or, worse yet, a gun?
I helped him up, tenderly, cooing contritely, my arms hooked under his armpits. Each hand took turns to dust him down so that he remained constantly half pinioned in a helpful manner. I felt no weapons. All the time, I uttered purring, conciliatory noises.
“My mistake, sir. You’re not hurt, are you? Obvious misunderstanding. We were far away, misjudged the situation, you understand? Very, very clumsy of me . . .”
Lover Boy—straight from a tailor’s fitting session, it seemed—ignored me, adjusted and smoothed down his jacket, and ordered his consort, “Get in the taxi!”
“That’s it!” I eagerly concurred, ushering them both toward the taxi. Once they were inside, the door slammed against them, I took a giant step backward. “Take her home, please, and sir, beat her shitless. I mean, beat her to a shitty pulp.”
The words sounded somewhat familiar, and I recalled that I had used similar lines in The Trial of Brother Jero. It only made me wax more creative. I retreated even farther, ever backward, keeping my eye on the taxi, whose occupants had fallen silent. Joe was now closer to me, and I grew more confident. “That’s right, sir, please love each other to death, but I implore you, first beat the living shit out of the lady. She needs it, she deserves it, and you’ll be fulfilling both a lover’s and a civic duty.”
As we passed the doorman, he now appeared to have woken up, ready to advertise his role as a concerned citizen and spectator. I could not believe my ears at his fatuous inquiry: “What happened there? What did he say to her?”
At which point, I did not care that he still struck me as a cross between Mike Power, the Nigerian wrestler, and Sonny Liston at the height of his reign of demolition. I stopped, fixed him with a glare full of naked Ijegba hatred, then ejected onto him a brief, semicoherent, but pithy summary of my assessment of him, his race, and his sick society. There was so much violence stored up in me that I think I secretly wished he would take a swing at me and connect, if only to remind me forcefully that there are societies where the norm is to remain uninvolved, even if murder is being committed right under one’s foreign nose.
Thank goodness, my compatriots who refused to “get in the taxi” far outnumbered those who were not only content to go for the ride but narrated to the outside world the idyllic vistas through which their purring limousine was being driven, and its utopian destination. The majority of Nigerians were being forced, not even into taxis but into Black Marias, straight from domestic haven or workplace and, sometimes, directly into hearses. Their screams for help did not come from them alone or reverberate against our gut linings as exiles but rose from within ourselves. The only question that was left to us was: What form should such self-help take? If we were compelled to embrace violence, we had to analyze the conditions of violence and mediate its unpredictable nature with a controlling, discriminating philosophy of violence.
ONE EVOLVES SPECIFIC rules of engagement simply from habit, even if only as a theoretical framework from within which one can endure, morally, a violent world. Combatants in war know the nature of the terrain into which they are thrust, an unambiguous arena of violence. However, even within the conceded space of violence, codes of restraint must exist. For instance, I have always considered the taking of innocents as hostages a despicable form of struggle, a pathetic mimicry of the renegade state that takes its entire people hostage. I always took my leave, thankfully and painlessly, of rhetoricians of sweeping, nondiscriminating violence, especially during those heady days of Marxist and Troskyite arrogation, now supplanted by a jihadist competitiveness of all religious colors. “There are no innocents.” Thus are the slaughter and kidnapping of innocents justified in the name of a Higher Cause—secular or religious. The right word is “megalomania,” a presumptuousness of a divine right of the random appropriation of lives. It has always struck me as merely blasphemous, no matter how just one may find the fundamental causes to which such catechisms attach themselves.
In the solitude of moral conscience, there is a genuine dilemma when one is confronted by the specter of actually generating violence. Such a dilemma is a natural product of reflection. It is a recollection of one’s humanity, bringing to the forefront of one’s thoughts the invisible future, the potential transformation—for the better—of the social entity that must pay the price of bloodshed and social disruption. When it is glaring that power has gone rabid in society and the reality of daily existence is that of ongoing terror, cruelty, and repression, there is really little room for hand-wringing or agonizing. The choice is made, and then the mind is set free to address the management of such an unwanted commodity, to set limits on its deployment in the cause of redress and restitution. The schooling of the individual participant is crucial: a keen and constant assessment of the ultimate goal and an awareness of the danger that such a goal can be corrupted by divergences from a code of conduct that must be set beforehand and subscribed to collectively.
After the first Persian Gulf War and the release of prisoners, I was riveted by a program of interviews with some of the former prisoners of war. A pair of infiltrators from the anti-Saddam coalition force, two Britishers from the Special Unit—those adepts of derring-do who precede an invasion and establish tactical vectors in the empty dunes behind enemy lines—had been surprised by a mere child of some six or seven years. He had wandered far from his home and stumbled on their hideout. For several moments, the invaders had stood staring at the seeming apparition, moments during which they could have shot, knifed, or smothered him.
Said the Special Unit man, “My training was really to have killed him, but I couldn’t do it.” The child was allowed to run off. He reported the presence of the intruders to his parents, who alerted their local army unit. The capture of the intruders and their imprisonment followed swiftly. I have often compared that moment to the “there are no innocents” combatants of Ireland, both the Ulster Defence Association psychopaths and their soul mates within the Irish Republican Army who think nothing of tossing a bomb into a pub or blowing up a crowded shopping mall. Nor do I find any enlightenment in suicide bombers, never mind the sobering thought that some do it out of total, terminal conviction, their entire consciousness consumed by the indignity of what to them is an existential negation—that is, life is not living when lived as such but may be validated, indeed purified, when sacrificed in avenging its indignity: “I die, therefore, I am”; or, better still, “I die, and thus—become.” Yet others immolate themselves in this manner out of the expectation of a reward: the guarantee of resurrection in the eternity of a sybaritic paradise. They believe in this recompense, and that is the true inducement to their surrender to self-immolation.
The accidental casualty that is inflicted on innocents in the course of a conflict—I detest the expression “collateral damage” when applied to human lives—occupies a different level of responsibility and censure, to be judged on the efforts made by participants in the conflict to avoid such violations of innocence or neutrality. But that disingenuous mantra “Violence is violence” requires repudiation as an abdication of all moral responsibility, an attempt to justify any level of criminality under the untenable, indeed obnoxious, argument that when the consequences are the same, the causes acquire a moral equivalence. The glorification of random violence in particular leaves no room for moral ambiguity, that conditioning of the mind that declares all of humanity culpable and
deserving of random punishment for being whole while others are mutilated or satiated while others are starving, for sleeping soundly while others are insomniacs—indeed, for being alive while others are dead!
ONE MORE INSTRUCTIVE encounter, this time with the thrill seeker, the vicarious collaborator in indiscriminate violence. Traveling between London and the United States in the summer of 1971, I found myself an object of attention by a young, eager face from Egypt, a member of a group on its way to attend some kind of youth event sponsored by the United Nations. I was working at my portable typewriter, and he could not resist coming over to ask me if I was a writer. I confessed to the crime. Where was I from? Nigeria, I said. He was clearly dying to engage me in conversation, perhaps because there were just the two black faces in the plane, those of my female companion and me. The youthful interloper—he could not have been more than nineteen—plunged straight into the politics of colonialism but did not really take too long to ask the question on his mind: How did we, in Nigeria, view the Palestinian problem?
“With support for the displaced Palestinians,” I responded. “They deserve their own homeland.”
We discussed the plight of the refugees, the ambiguous role of the United Nations, and the likelihood (or unlikelihood) of peace in the Middle East in our lifetime. He was then unaware that the Nigerian government—and most African nations—had broken off relations with Israel after the Six-Day War with Egypt: Israel had been warned not to advance into any portion of the African continent but had ignored the warning. So the Organization of African Unity had exhorted all its members to break off relations, and several had. When I revealed that Nigeria had indeed been one of the first to do so, it was all he could do to refrain from throwing his arms around me. Our love feast underwent a sudden hiccup, however, when, with a confident, even gloating smile on his face, he asked, “Ah, my friend, so what do you think of the blow struck by the liberation movement against Switzerland?”