Something fascinating happens around the third part of Kola Tubosun’s documentary, Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory.
The attentive viewer will notice a sea change from when it was occupied by dramatist, academic, polemicist, activist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka in the late 60s to early 70s to the present day as the current occupant of the house, Professor Nelson Olabanji Fashina, takes the camera crew around his abode.
In Wole Soyinka’s time, the house was a “shrine” of sorts, filled with carvings of ibejis and sundry figurines. His daughters, Barrister Moremi Soyinka Onilaja and Professor Peyibomi Soyinka-Airewele remember it so while Professor Femi Euba proudly recounts purloining one piece while Soyinka was away on one of his many absences.
The present occupant is a Christian and where figurines and wooden images once predominated; the house is now filled with Christian iconography. Soyinka’s “shrine” has become an “altar” to the Christian God and that is the nature of places, they evolve much like people or old friends and it is fitting that Wole Soyinka refused to travel to Ibadan to reconnect with this “old friend” during the making of the documentary.
His quick retort was “not the ghost of a chance.”
Wole Soyinka’s literary oeuvre can sometimes read like a paean to Ogun and anyone who has read The Road will remember the scene where Samson entreats Kotonu to “Kill us a dog, kill us a dog. Kill us a dog before the hungry god lies in wait and makes a substitute of me.”
He has never been shy about his creative connection to Ogun the Yoruba God of iron and war; patron saints of hunters, black smiths and creatives; the one whose delicacy is dog meat. More on Ogun in due course.
The documentary film is helmed by Kola Tubosun; the multi-hyphenate who prefers the term polymath. With this crisp and evocative film, Mr. Tubosun has added director, producer and screenwriter to his already long string of titles stretching from linguist and translator to poet and publisher.
The film begins with an animation of the opening pages of Wole Soyinka’s memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn and opens on the night of his arrest. On his way to his university accommodation, a policeman stops him and shining his torch into the cabin of the car realises that it is Wole Soyinka who has been declared wanted and whom he must turn in.
Bound by duty and yet empathetic, the policeman offers to take the popular lecturer to his house to tidy up before heading to jail – “In case there are urgent things you need to take care of; sensitive documents and things like dat!”
Soyinka returns to his house, puts his things in order, eats a hearty meal and is then escorted to jail where he spends almost two years. Used to his peripatetic lifestyle and absences the children did not fully realise that their father was in detention or what it meant but his sister, Professor Emerita Omofolabo Ajayi Soyinka who lived with him and who was much older than the children, understood what had happened.
Photo credit: Victor EhikhamenorThe narrator is Femi Elufowoju jr OBE who brings the story to life as a cast of characters provide their own perspectives and history in connection to the house on No. 8 Ebrohimie Road inside the University of Ibadan campus. The talking heads include ex-students, fans, a sibling, an in-law, children and an ex-wife, Olaide née Idowu.
The documentary’s biggest achievement lies in the way it humanises Wole Soyinka by shining a bright light on the Nobel laureate’s private life away from his books. As the film unspools, we meet his very accomplished daughters, sons, sister and ex-wife, who had always taken a back seat to his prodigious literary achievements and larger than life stature.
His daughters describe him as a loving father who pretended to sleep while they plaited his hair and beard and share with us how they often wondered why their mum married the mercurial and unpredictable dramatist.
“Didn’t you see all the quiet doctors and professors?” the daughters would ask their mother who would reply with “he was exciting.”
In listening to his sister, we discover the Wole Soyinka who was a big brother to his sibling.
But through it all, a question insists on an answer; why make a film about a house where Wole Soyinka lived while a lecturer at the University of Ibadan? Is it just a nostalgia project to mark a major milestone at 90 or a work of advocacy?
To buttress the point that the house deserves to be memorialised, the documentary references the homes of Toni Morrison, Ursula K le Guin, Charles Dickens, Maya Angelo and even Soyinka’s friend and contemporary, the late Christopher Okigbo.
While many of those interviewed from Professors Niyi Osundare to Remi Raji, Sola Osofisan to Dan Izebaiye and even Soyinka’s former neighbour, Prince Kitibi Oyawoye, make the case for why the house deserves to be converted into some sort of Heritage Home, a “Soyinkean legacy”, “an archive” and “place of the arts” because of “the weight of history it bears” as a “museum of memory” the question persists because the house was not owned by Wole Soyinka even though after he left the University of Ibadan his wife, who had become a librarian, took it over and lived there until their children went off to university.
It was the house where his second marriage appears to have unravelled and also the house where Soyinka seems to have produced the least as a writer when you consider his prodigous literary output.
Imagine if say The Strong Breed (1964) or Before the Black Out (1964) or Kongi’s Harvest (1965) or the not-so-well-known play, The Detainee (1965) which uncannily foreshadowed the fate that was to befall him and the famous The Road (1965) were written in his garage or at his desk while living at Ebrohimie Road.
The next book after The Road was Madmen and Specialists (1971) which was clearly conceived as was The Man Died, in detention.
So what is the significance of the house besides being a place of domicile for a university lecturer and from where he was carted away to gaol and to which he returned?
If Ebrohimie Road is memorialised through what Professor Remi Raji calls “a programmatic plan to acquire that place and turn it into a proper museum of sorts… as an extended and physical representation of Wole Soyinka’s presence in Ibadan” a place where visitors to Ibadan “want to see not just the zoo” as his former neighbor Prince Kitibi Oyawoye puts it then what of the house he occupied first in Molete or Ife or in Yaba while he lectured at the University of Ife (now OAU) and then University of Lagos?
Why is Ebrohimie of greater significance and relevance than the other two? Whatever the answer, it veers closer to nostalgia than as the place where his genius caught fire in the sixties before becoming incandescent with the Nobel in the late 80s?
Kola Tubosun, writer, producer and director has provided some explanation regarding the soil on which the seed of the idea for the documentary germinated. In his essay he explains that it all began with a photograph on the cover of a book.
To understand the imperative for insisting on understanding the significance of Ebrohimie Road besides as a nostalgic place of abode for a future Nobel laureate, the question should be understood as being framed in the context of the fact that many years after Soyinka left the employ of the university in a huff after being denied a professorship, no senior member of the university administration is featured in the documentary which almost renders moot the agitation for memorializing the house because such an attempt must require the imprimatur of the university authorities and past “hostile” attempts which have resulted in encroachments on the property ( a bank, a shopping mall and a car park) indicate that there might still be ill will towards their most famous lecturer ever.
Soyinka’s departure from the University of Ibadan is interesting and should be paid attention to as a means of interrogating his recent comments about vocal young people on social media whom he has described as “fascists”.
Soyinka’s slow burn letter to the Appointments and Promotions sub-committee if written today would achieve a level of virality that could lead the hoary-haired members of that committee to, maybe, describe the young and headstrong lecturer who felt he deserved the professorship a “fascist”.
In his letter of resignation (which actually went “viral” because he had asked, as Professor Niyi Osundare recalls, that the letter be mass produced and distributed across the campus) Soyinka refers to his senior colleagues as people “whom I profoundly despise” before describing them as “lightweights of intellect”, “political professors” and “professional committee-men.” It is a blistering take down of men some of whom were already professors when Soyinka was a student. Soyinka was 36 while many of them were in their 60s.
While his indignation at being denied is contextualised and explained by Professors Raji and Osundare as maybe borne out of intellectual envy and “academic illogic”, his daughter Professor Peyibomi Soyinka-Airewele takes a different tact.
Reading from a University report on the Soyinka professorship imbroglio, Remi Raji quotes the committee as writing that “there is uneasiness about the academic content of his work as one member of the sub-committee has put it, ‘I would expect to see a mixture of creativity with a more thorough critical research into the traditional, modern and other art forms as the work of an academic in theatre arts.’”
His daughter explains that the committee members may have been stymied by their inability to fully understand why a world renowned dramatist deserved a professorial chair since their term of reference was merely academic.
“I speak as someone who is a tenured professor in the US, how a lot has changed in understanding the range and spectrum of what it means to do work that is creative… I did the same thing when I had to evaluate the work of my colleagues who work in theatre. How do you deal with their creative works – professor of sound, professor of light – that takes a lot of transforming mindsets? I think, at that time, there was a very rigid approach to thinking what academia is all about.”
Watching this documentary and its portrait of Soyinka as a rebel with a cause; a younger audience might struggle to reconcile the fact that the undergraduate who brooked no nonsense from the establishment, the stormy petrel who put successive administrations through the wringer, the young man who held up a radio station at gun point, the iconoclast who held no truck with outdated and colonial academic tradition is the same man who has become dismissive of dissenting opinions on social media.
Age, perhaps.
To conclude, we return again to Ogun whom many regard as Soyinka’s “deity and protector.”
Towards the end of the film (in the preview version I watched), Dr. Olaokun Soyinka, his first son shares an anecdote about his father’s car running over his dog. It is a sad recollection that must have had a traumatic effect on the young boy but viewed in the context of his father’s relationship with Ogun, the future Nobel laureate had merely made a sacrifice “before the hungry god lies in wait and makes a substitute” of the living.
Happy 90th birthday, Prof and kudos to Kola Tubosun and crew.
