“I’m not sure which arm of various empires the University of Toronto is at the moment, but don’t deceive yourselves, you are also part of the new forms of empire.”
Poet, playwright, novelist, memoirist, reluctant if ardent political activist—the focus of Wole Soyinka’s speech Monday night to a standing audience at Massey College was not the role of universities within growing spheres of influence, but that topic served as a touchstone.
Soyinka, who in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, spoke on “the re-affective empire-building and the need for African nations to be aware of this process and to make a decision of their own volition whether they want to continue to be satellites of the new empires.” The Nigerian writer addressed how artists and intellectuals can contest what many see as the homogenizing effects of globalization, while using more possitive aspects to their advantage.
He cited Nigeria’s film industry. Also known as “Nollywood,” it is currently the third largest in the world after the United States and India. Soyinka characterized the cultural output of the films for which Nigeria has become known as “garbage.” As artists, what we are obliged to do is move into this industry and raise the standards,” he said.
But Soyinka stressed that empire-building is not reserved for Western European, American, or Chinese business interests alone. The desire to have greater influence over people and entities that would otherwise be independent is widespread. In his opening remarks he described how “Endowments are not entirely neutral, but are loaded with the imperial impulse,” referencing late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who attempted to set up a chair in his name at Harvard, and had in fact begun paying that university before anyone stepped in. This was, said Soyinka, an attempt at “sanitizing Abacha by creating a little empire in the United States at a prestigious university.”
Soyinka’s creative, academic, and political lives have long been intertwined. In 1967, when he was 33 years old, he attempted to negotiate a ceasefire with the Biafran secessionists in the lead-up to the Nigerian Civil War. He was imprisoned without trial under the military rule of General Yakubu Gowan, and was held in solitary confinement for 22 months. After his release, he went into voluntary exile in 1971 until the Gowan military regime was overthrown in 1975. He was in exile once more in 1997 when Abacha placed Soyinka on trial for treason in absentia and declared him wanted, dead or alive. In 1999, with the return to civilian rule in Nigeria, Soyinka accepted the position of professor emeritus at Ife University in Nigeria on the condition that no chancellor of the university could be a military officer.
“There are too many Scholars at Risk here who have come from Africa,” said the Master of Massey College, John Fraser, in introducing Soyinka. Massey, home to U of T’s Scholars at Risk program, co-hosted the event with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at U of T, the Nigeria High Commission Ottawa, and Hart House, where a similar lecture had been held earlier that day. “One of the reasons I’m so proud that Dr. Wole’s come here is he is someone who has stood up for many years against the reasons that have brought academics, artists, and writers from Africa who have the courage to stand up and be caught out and who have sometimes barely managed to escape with the clothes on their back.”
Soyinka once remarked that “truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved.” Asked after his speech about whether universities can also be centres for resisting empire-building, he again emphasized that to want influence is human, but that people cannot be free unless they are given choice.
“First, the important thing about universities and youth is that they both be independent. So second, for resistance, what I would say to students is to create a space of their own where they can be independent and create an empire of their own, where they can be themselves.”
