Our Leaders Too Eager To Step Into Shoes Of Colonial Masters – Soyinka

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has stated that government representatives were eager to step into the colonisers’ shoes after Nigeria’s independence in 1960.

Speaking as a guest during “A Conversation with the Nobel Laureate” at the Yoruba Tennis Club, Onikan, Lagos, as part of programmes to mark the 100th anniversary of the socio-cultural club, Soyinka lamented that despite the joy that came with Nigeria’s independence in 1960, government representatives who took over became another set of colonial masters.

When quizzed on some of the plays he had written, including ‘A Dance of the Forests,’ and what revisiting the ideas behind the work would be like, Soyinka stressed the historical perspective behind the play, noting especially that it was inspired by events in the independence era.

The 91-year-old Nobel laureate told the gathering, composed of Yoruba Tennis Club members, secondary school students, and invited guests, that if he had to write the play again, it would be more “cruel” than the original

“As students abroad at the time of independence, we were very excited about the prospect of independence. We looked forward to it and wanted to rush out of our studies and come home. We considered ourselves as the Renaissance people, those who were going to show the colonisers that we knew their secret, and that we could improve on what they tried to teach us. So, we were excited.

“But we were also alarmed at the representatives of the liberation, what they said, how they carried themselves, how they conducted themselves during the period of seeming independence, how they related to the populace, and we came to one conclusion: that they were, in many cases, and in the majority, only too eager to step into the shoes of our colonisers.

“It was a case of the white man goes, the black man returns, and that was what ‘A Dance of the Forests’ was all about,” he said.

He added, “It was saying let’s not glamorise our past, lest we fall into the pitfall which had been dug for us by the departing colonisers. We rejoiced, we were excited, and we wanted to come home, but we should not be tempted to step into the shoes of our alienated conquerors.

“Today, if I had to rewrite that, I would stress that aspect even more , didn’t we warn you? But you saw the pit and still fell into it. So, it would be far more cruel than the original version.”

Soyinka, who has been a vocal critic of United States President Donald Trump, also warned the global audience against allowing tyranny to continue to fester in the name of rescue missions by global powers, condemning the US intervention in Venezuela and Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

“What we are encountering now is not new. It is a revelation of mammoth, not just theft, but robbery of other nations or coups by external powers, at the bottom of which is oil; you have the capacity to drain other people’s petroleum resources,” he said.

He noted that this did not mean he had sympathy for Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, captured by the US, “or other enemies of humanity, who get their common match sooner or later, whether by what we call positive forces or opportunistic forces.”

He, however, stressed that sooner or later, the people would get to decide their fate for themselves, advising people, especially young ones, to leverage democratised technology, communications, and other available means to organise themselves.