[In the following interview, Soyinka discusses multiculturalism, his literary and political interests, and the future of Nigeria.]

[Ojewuyi and Garrett]: The opening lines of the title song on the album Ethical Revo-Wetin go like this: “I love my country, I no go lie, na inside am I go live and die, when e turn me so I twist am so. E push me, I push am. I no go go.” How would you write those lines today?

[Soyinka]: The word “love” is used, I hope you realize, in a dynamic way. In other words, I don't have any, and never have had any, sentimental feelings towards Nigeria as such. I'm not a diehard patriot. I don't wave the flag. So when I say I love my country, I love the earth, I love the soil, I love the people, but it's a strongly conditional love. In other words, you push me, I push you. I believe that nation owes me at least six feet and I'm entitled to that. Preferably, I believe it owes me shelter as well. And by “me,” I'm talking about the ordinary citizen. And every individual, every collective, every group interest must ensure that they are not cheated out of anything by that nation. That is the first condition of love.

If a nation is not living up to those expectations, it must expect, as has happened, that its citizens will begin to redefine just what constitutes the object of love, loyalty, identification. Whether they have to die to absolutely belong, to claim those six feet … Remember, though, I also give examples of nations which do not, in my view, represent nations, which indulge in grandiose projects at the expense of the citizens. So it's a dynamic relation, a constant questioning.

How do you differentiate between culture and nationhood?

Culture is much, much easier to define than nationhood, even though it is, of course, even more fluid. But for me, culture is the totality of man's productivity, the totality of productive systems—manners, morals, ethics, artifacts, and so on—and each one of these is interwoven, interlinked, with the next. For me, there's no separation, or very little, between the politics of a nation—in other words, the way authority perceives its citizens—and the citizens' expressions through their works, their art, their sense of identity with the totality that makes up a nation. That means culture can also inform, and in fact direct, a nation's political priorities.

In this country, there's a lot of discussion about multiculturalism. Yet frequently the term doesn't seem to live up to the promise of its name. Do you see a way in which theater could play a role in bringing about a true multiculturalism?

First of all, multiculturalism is a fact that cannot be washed away. But the question I think you're asking is this: Is multiculturalism an academic identification, something which sociologists or social anthropologists identify, and does it fail to go beyond that? In other words, is it reflected in the policies of government? Is it reflected in the apportionment of resources? That kind of basic recognition? Well, I'm going to leave you to answer that.

But as for how theater can bring about a genuine multiculturalism, I think it can be effective among the people themselves by bringing to one culture or another a dynamic awareness of the multiple existence of various cultures. This means moving towards not merely tolerance, but towards a real creative/recreative enjoyment of the fact of the multicultural reality. In turn, this may affect the policies of the Ministry of Arts and Culture, or whatever the equivalent is in this country. Certainly it affects the priorities and the awareness of foundations for the arts. But whether theater itself, whether anything, in fact, can bring any government, any political organ, to fruitful relations with the fact of multiple cultures, I do not really know. But definitely among people themselves: those who go to the theater, those to whom theater is taken—in their homes, in their offices, in their ghettos, in their eating places, in the parks—I believe the theater can, not weld together, but at least link together, the consciousness of peoples.

Take a play like A Dance in the Forest, which I directed in Nigeria. For me, it was an opportunity to send a very strong message. I used the opportunity to introduce, almost in an eclectic manner—but the play lends itself to that—the various cultural groups of the country. I used Ati Logwu dancers, I used acrobats from parts of the north, from the Tiv area. We used Agbor dancers from the midwest. There is also a European element in the play. Now whether, when we look at Nigeria today, that particular approach to that play—or any number of other plays, not just by me but by others—whether this has led to a cultural bonding, well, I'll leave you to take a look at the reality today and decide for yourselves.

Yet once a play—and this is what I think is so marvelous about plays—leaves its original mooring, once it moves out of its cultural background, it becomes something else. You can try and make it as authentic as you like, but there is a kind of symbiotic influence which takes place once you move a play out of its original grounding. I don't care what play it is. Whether it's Shakespeare, Chekhov, J. P. Clark, or Bougando … Even Duro Ladipo's strong, almost pure Yoruba theater: I saw Oba Koso in Germany and in the United States, and of course the atmosphere is immediately different. You still enjoy the authentic thing. You know you're being transported to its homeland. But the metteur en scène—not necessarily even the director but the person who stages it, who places it on foreign boards—is obliged to do some tinkering which tailors it for its new home. It's unavoidable. So I tend to give outside directors a kind of resigned leeway. When they're directing my plays, all I ask is that they don't trivialize it, or turn it into a piece of exotica.

That's the danger. How can it be avoided?

First of all, a recognition, a really deep recognition, of the universality of art, and art forms, and of the human experience. Understanding that what is on the boards can have correlations within the society in which it is being presented. And artistic integrity, as well as a lack of condescension. When my plays were first done in English-speaking countries, the critical response was not exactly patronizing, not condescending—but nevertheless, it was an ignorant motion towards the grass skirt. If you wanted to present an African subject, there was always a thatched hut and a grass skirt, it was as simplistic as that. But a lot of that has been abandoned now. And the rediscovery of ritual by European and American theaters, particularly in the 60s, has tended to act as leavening between various forms of cultural theater. But ritual can also be trivialized. I've seen some horrendous productions of Jean Genet, whom I insist on calling a ritualist par excellence. Often, those who approach his theater don't realize that they are in the provenance of a master ritualist.

What have you observed about European and North American theaters in your recent years of exile?

What happens when a society is sated with prosperity? What happens to a society which believes that all its major conflicts are either resolved or on their way to being resolved? What happens to a society which eventually terminated a devastating and immoral war? I'm talking about the Vietnam War and the defeat of the Americans. That period was very, very political in the theater. And in the period before it, the period of the Black liberation struggle, the theater was filled with highly political plays.

But afterwards? I suppose there is something you might call “war weariness.” It settles on people, and they exaggerate the resolutions they believe they have made of various conflicts, and settle down to, shall we say, promoting the good things of life—entertainment, fantasy, and escapism. The audiences turn away with impatience at theater which provokes them towards a new consideration of existing contradictions in society: “Enough whining, enough agitprop. Let's settle down and enjoy the middle-class prosperity towards which everybody is aspiring.” In other words, my observation of American society—and this cuts across most classes, academia especially and the intelligentsia in general—is that your society is moving on towards an even keel, and therefore more general issues are being addressed rather than harsh political issues. As for the underclass, I regret to say that they take refuge in other forms of escape, drugs and so on, rather than provocative arts. This is the observation of an outsider.

What about the role of the mass media in all of this?

The mass media is horrendously guilty of propagating myths in the United States. The mass media has become a victim of its own success, and therefore a kind of social tyrant in the brainwashing of society. And theater is being more and more marginalized. Look at what's happened: the mass media has extended into a kind of contradiction, a kind of personalized, “democratized” media. I know people who've been weaned away from television—I don't imagine this is in large numbers—weaned away from their obsession, their hypnotism by the box, only to transfer their love and loyalty to a different kind of screen. I know of individuals who spend hours—hours!—into the night “surfing,” as I believe they call it. And then the individuals we are talking about also fancy themselves as publishers. They feel they are in control now of the information. They can intervene. They can libel to their hearts content. We've been enduring this in our political struggle of recent times. Everybody now is an instant writer, an instant publisher, an instant editor. And so there is a kind of fragmented empowerment, which detracts from the collected social, authentically social, forms of art. People are beginning to live in a virtual reality which attenuates the relevance of theater for many of them.

Having said that, I believe the theater is such a powerful medium, such a human, a humanized, medium, that it cannot really be eliminated. No.

In 1984, during the celebration of your 50th birthday, you described yourself as belonging to a “wasted generation.” Again in 1994, at the world premiere of Iku Olokun Esin Akinwumi Isola (Death and the King's Horseman) to celebrate your 60th birthday, you declared, “For nearly all of the adult existence of my generation, I have joined hands with others in attempts to disperse the stubborn agents of a depressing eclipse of our future. … In these circumstances, I do not find the least cause to celebrate anything, least of all a birthday that represents for me years of frustration and waste.” Who are these stubborn agents? Are they limited to the Nigerian landscape, or do you find them in other places, too?

They're mostly within the Nigerian landscape, simply because that's where I've operated most. The agents, well … you know who they are. You find them in the political class. You find them very much these days in the military class. You find them among the collaborators who allow both groups to succeed. You find them among the religious fundamentalists who want to destroy the secular vitality of the nation, who sap its secular, its very healthy, ethos of cohabitation. And who have also destroyed our university system. Those who've enthroned the principle of mediocrity, of bootlicking. Those who've sold autonomous institutions to power. We are a very stupid and open sore of a continent.

You see, when we were students, we couldn't wait to get home. We were the renaissance people who were going to build something which no other people or nation in Africa would be able to boast about. We were eager to demonstrate to the European, the external world, that had held us down, that had colonized us, that they had nothing to show us. Really. That they had nothing. We believed that very passionately. This feeling was very much among those of us who had actually spent some time studying in Europe. We looked at their society: what was it exactly? I found Great Britain filthy. It's only been cleaned up in the last couple of decades. It was filthy! It was all slums. Oh, horrendous food! All soggy. They didn't know how to eat, they didn't know how to live. There was no sense of community, the way we understand community at home.

So I studied in England. I appreciated my education. I appreciated the friendships I made. My professors were exemplary. I learned a great deal from them. Libraries were always open, and so on and so forth. But when you talk about life, life in the most profound sense, I found that there was no soul in that place. And many of us felt the same way. So, there we were: eager young people. We just wanted to return home and build, using the cultural confidence we had inherited, which was in us. We had our scientists. We used to meet periodically, those studying physics, or those studying chemistry, engineers and bankers … we were the future. And our space was the future space of the world.

Well, you see how it's all turned out. Do you wonder that I feel wasted? I feel wasted simply because I never accepted the status quo, simply because I had a projection, together with others, and I've just seen that projection constantly thwarted.

So you would locate these years of frustration and waste in the totality of your experience as “Ogun-Kongi” Soyinka?

Ogun, I'm afraid, has retreated to Ire Hills. I don't think that the creative hand which is stretched to our people in all directions has been grasped. People do not allow themselves to be pulled up that hill, that mountain. I think many of us, like Martin Luther King, Jr., have been, in our minds, to the mountain top. But what's the use, giving thought to what could have been, without any sense of fulfillment?

If Ogun has retreated to Ire Hills, what's he doing there?

He's contemplating the world with amusement and pity.

Does he have anything in common with the character of the Professor in The Road?

You ask me now to interpret my own play, which I'm not very fond of doing. Let's just say that the Professor's search for the word is symbolic of both the spiritual and psychic dissatisfaction of many sensitive people with material reality, with the palpable reality of existence. There is always the sense of something hidden, something being withheld. Either you interpret it as the existence of a superior intelligence, which limits what is accessible to humanity, or it can take the form of the peeling away of a veil with which Nature covers herself. And the absolute conviction that life cannot be just what is experienced as it is tasted, smelled. That there is something beyond. It's another form of religion, I suppose. In a way, that's what Professor in his confused and half-mad, half-sane and logical state is about, and what he is constantly groping towards.

With regard to this problem of returning to Nigeria, having been educated in England, what do you think about the discourse of populism versus elitism? Who do you see your theater and your politics speaking to?

I'm very glad you mentioned this so-called elite, because who are the elite? Look at academia: I can point to very, very few people who, by their actions, consciously, have separated themselves from the masses of the people. Intellectuals and artists are some of the most mass-oriented people in the world. This includes painters, sculptors—people who continue in the tradition of the former, the traditional, the indigenous artists in our society. The singers, the theater people. The elite really are the power people. They are the ones who separate themselves, who turn themselves into masters and lord it over the rest. And it is this intense consciousness of the deprivation, of the expropriation of the people, that makes us see intellectuals and artists as allied against the status quo of power.

Very often when people talk of elitism they're talking about stylistics—in literature, for instance. They say, “Oh, who do you expect to understand this? Who are you writing for?” Well, my answer to that always is this: art and creativity is a socialized activity. In other words, you don't pick out just one work of art and say, “Oh, 90 million people can't understand this, therefore it's elitist.” This is inaccurate. This is a kind of flagellation, either self-flagellation, or external flagellation. You look instead to the entirety of the corpus of artists, and you find that even what appears to be erudite or esoteric is carried forward, reflected in other forms of expression. There is a continuum in artistic processes. And it is a continuum both within the genre and also between the various genres. So I don't get too worried about the elitist tag attached even to some of my own work. I ask people to understand that, as I said, no work exists in isolation.

As another example, I translated a Yoruba classic into English [The Forest of a Thousand Demons]. And I know how many aspirins I had to take just to get through my own language. And at the end of that one novel, well, have you seen me dare to tackle another one? The language was Yoruba at its very deepest, and this is the way I believe language should be used from time to time, depending upon the burden of the material it's meant to carry.

You told an audience at Wellesley College recently to beware of “fictioning” Africa. What did you mean exactly?

The fictioning of Africa has a long, disreputable history. I've written about the earlier fictioning, the fictioning by the early explores, the missionaries, and throughout antiquity. Herodotus, for example, told some tall tales about the tails he was supposed to have encountered in Africa. But, we haven't encountered them yet and none of their bones have been exhumed. It was also convenient for the would-be slavers to demonize Africa. Even before that, during the European Renaissance, the carry-over of bestiaries from Medieval thinking to the conceptualization of the African continent lingered into the Renaissance period. And, of course, it was eagerly embraced when it became necessary to justify the slave trade. Modern fictioning, however, is unfortunately being carried out by the apologists for dictatorships on the African continent. The reality of the dictators, the exploiters, creates a totally new genre of fiction, in which we cannot recognize the countries from which some of us have fled. That is the burden of the second round of fictioning.

Do you mean to say that this contemporary “fictioning” is being done by the Africans themselves?

The African-Americans especially. Go back to the time of Idi Amin: who were the greatest fictioners of Idi Amin's reality? People like Roy Innes, ironically chairman of CORE. He's continued his game with new collaborators. At that time, if you remember, Idi Amin was the savior of Africa. He was a genial, radical, revolutionary, benevolent uncle, you know, good-humored. Meanwhile, Idi Amin was butchering his people and eating their livers and throwing the rest of their bodies into the Nile. This deliberate attempt to obscure the hideous actualities of Africa by some of our own kinfolk here is the most painful. I can expect nothing less than fictioning from people who affect a racial superiority towards Africa, who feel that Africans deserve no better than monsters to rule over them—new black monsters in place of the old white monsters. I can understand them. But I find it very, very painful when this tradition is carried on virtually into the new millennium. It's race treachery.

You have predicted that Abacha will be the last dictator Nigeria will ever know. Yet the end of your most recent play, The Beatification of Area Boy, mingles hope and despair in equal measure. What do you see in the future of your theater and Nigeria?

I am convinced that Abacha is going to be the last dictator. I believe it as passionately as I believed in the 1980s—and this is a belief that I stated in a lecture at the Polytechnic School of London—that apartheid would be wiped out in this very decade. Look at the dynamics of the world today, and look at the dynamics of the African continent. Look at what has just happened recently with the OAU coming out, for a change, to condemn unanimously the takeover in Sierra Leone, to say, “We will not accept this.” Who would have predicted that even a year ago? Look now at Abacha in the ridiculous position of having to send troops to restore democracy in Sierra Leone. What is he up to? What does this portend? Is it the “writing on the wall”? Is he procuring favor? Is he trying to buy himself more time? Whatever it is, add it all up together, and you'll see that Abacha is going to be the last dictator of my country.

Now, this doesn't mean that there won't be other attempts—there are enough lunatics in the Nigerian army to think that they can get away with something that is already passé. But believe me, they will last as long as this Sierra Leone dictator is going to last. You can hold a country for ransom for some time, but that's not really governing or ruling over the country. And it's in that sense that I'm totally convinced that Abacha is going to be the last. The internal dynamics of the nation dictate it. The very process, the very methodology, of the resistance against his regime absolutely guarantee it.

What role does theater have to play in it? We'll continue to stage The Beatification of Area Boy with or without Abacha. We do hope to make people question their own self-worth by demonstrating the results of their acquiescence. All over the country, playwrights are being locked up, or prevented from putting their plays on in the national theater—and yet there are still plays being staged.

Israel Eboh was recently arrested and tortured for putting on The Trials of Brother Jero.

The German expression for it, I believe, is Sippenhaft, or “guilt by association.” The net goes wider and wider from immediate associates or family, to extended family to extended associates to imagined associates. The number of people who've been interrogated, who've been stopped from leaving, whose passports have been seized at the airport, and sometimes later returned—the paranoia is incredible. That's the nature of the insecurity of dictatorships, the insecurity of power.

But I really hold to this general mobilization of the artistic power that we do have, and believe that theater will play a small, tiny, but significant role in assuring the arrival of this “utopia.”

Nadine Gordimer recently criticized Americans and her own country's government for not doing enough to stop the violent suppression of human rights in Nigeria. What can we do?

Ask what you did to bring down apartheid in South Africa, then look at the situation in Nigeria. Look at the existence of 90-day detention laws, infinitely renewable. Look at the reality of minority rule. As grotesque as this proceeding may appear, add up the people shot down in cold blood in Sharpville, in Soweto, quantify this and compare it with the number of people who have been killed in a much shorter period under “Idi Amin” Abacha. Study the reports of Amnesty International, the Human Rights Commission of the Commonwealth, the UN Raporteur, authenticated reports of torture, and of the methods of torture. Ask yourselves: Is the situation there really any different from what was happening in apartheid South Africa? Winnie Mandela survived. She was never gunned down by the apartheid regime. By contrast, Kudirat Abiola, the wife of an imprisoned President-Elect, was gunned down. Something so inhuman, so obscene. A violation of the most generous form of decency, of the relationship between power and the government. See if you can determine if the situation in Nigeria today is comparable to that of South Africa under apartheid. If the answer is yes, then obviously the same actions that were taken to bring down apartheid in South Africa must be taken to bring down the regime of “Idi Amin” Abacha.