In 1965, at the height of the political crisis in the then Western Region of Nigeria, Wole Soyinka entered the state-controlled radio station and forced the bewildered broadcasters—at gun-point—to play a pre-recorded tape announcing the true results of the recent elections, then in the process of being rigged by the government of the day. Whatever else, the future Nobel laureate could hardly be accused of lacking physical courage. He was subsequently charged with armed robbery, and was lucky to be freed on a technicality, but those were the days when Nigerian High Court judges were still able to resist the machinations of a political class determined, in Soyinka's words, “to wallow in the abandoned privileges of the departing colonial masters”. Unfortunately, his gesture proved futile. “Who needs the people to vote for us?” declared one of the leading members of the ruling party, whereupon chaos ensued and the Western Region, together with the rest of the country, was plunged into a three-year civil war.

In the foreword to [Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946-65], his second volume of autobiography, Soyinka explains that he had previously resisted the temptation to write a sequel to Aké: The Years of Childhood (1982), on the grounds that any “testament after the age of innocence is a lie, or half-truth”, but that his eventual change of mind “came from the politics, the unfinished business, of that political entity … into which I happen to have been born, its sociology and political pathology”, and with it “the agonising, truly lamentable brief memory span that appears to bedevil my society”. The immediate reason behind his volte-face was the annulled elections of June 1993, in which the military, after a decade of uninterrupted power, behaved with the same “contempt” and “hubris” as their civilian predecessors thirty years earlier; the fire this time, Soyinka believes, will not only be civil war but the dismemberment of the Nigerian nation.

The seeds of the continuing crisis were already apparent even before the country attained independence from British rule in 1960. As a student in London in the late 1950s, Soyinka had been eager to make contact with members of the various Nigerian official delegations who had come to negotiate the transfer of power from Britain. In each case, as he met the different delegates, he realized that all was not well:

Flamboyant, egotistical and extravagant, they turned up with or without reason, with baggage and entourage far in excess of their mission, cultivated students who would bring them girls to sleep with, whom they would reward extravagantly. … Those politicians wooed student leaders with material gifts and promises, exhorted them to return, not so much for service as to ensure that they were the first in line for the vacated positions of colonial officers. …

Shortly after returning home, on the eve of Independence, Soyinka watched a scenario (one he had already anticipated in his early play, A Dance of the Forests) played out within the University of Ibadan, which he had joined as a research fellow. A new Chairman of the Governing Council was to be appointed, and a physician with a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Toronto (the first Nigerian to have reached such exalted heights) was chosen. But quite by chance, a professor from the medical department of that university, on a visit to Nigeria, revealed that the new appointee's DSC was falsely obtained through a secretary in the faculty. An outcry followed, and the man was dismissed, but two years later he was reappointed by the University Visitor, himself a politician of otherwise good standing. As Soyinka wryly comments, “the Visitor and his medical sidekick clearly knew their nationals better than most”:

Anieke's arrival on campus signalled the commencement of defections … for the Chairman of the Governing Council had much to offer. He began to receive, first clandestine visits, usually at night, and then, confident visits in broad daylight. As Convocation Day approached, congratulatory telegrams began to arrive at his Lodge, to appear on the pages of newspapers. Petitions on preferments, promotions, pleas for appointments even to political offices. …

Elsewhere, Soyinka has characterized the problem of Nigerian society as “the betrayal of vocation for the attractions of power in one form or another”, and it is rare indeed to find anyone in public life who occupies their position on merit, or who, having attained their position, evinces even the slightest notion of public service—if only out of a kind of self-interest, including the need to protect their standard of living. More than three decades after Independence, nothing works because nothing is intended to work, and those who do understand the exigencies of the modern state are hounded into prison, exile or an early death. That Soyinka has survived thus far is due in part to the courage that led him to hold up a radio station in a futile attempt to alter the course of Nigerian history; that he still refuses to accept the “denigration of the popular will” by a self-justifying cabal intent only on its own pleasures ought to give hope to those who might otherwise despair that the country will ever reform. Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (“peculiar mess”) is an act of faith in the possibilities of the future, written with the authority of one who has experienced the worst of those years.