THE MAN DIED
THE MAN DIED
The Man Died is the story of Wole Soyinka’s 27 months incarceration by the Nigerian government in 1967 at the cusp of the civil war.
He was famously seeking a truce between Biafra and the Federal Government to allow time for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. It is fundamentally a personal account. Essentially, the subject found refuge from the brutality inflicted upon him by retreating into and living within his own mind. At times, he drifted about the frontiers of madness, hanging on to his self by a thread. At other time, he pondered, listened, watched, like only the truly otherwise unoccupied can.Importantly, he managed to scrounge paper and a pencil from time to time and record his journey of ‘motionlessness.’Wole Soyinka, born July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta, Ogun State Nigeria to a clergy father and trader-activist mother, is a poet, playwright, memoirist, essayist and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.
“For me, Wole Soyinka’s Vision and life stand between these two statements, his own:
'A tiger doesn't have to proclaim his tigritude.'
'The man died.'
…The second statement came to Soyinka as he was looking for a title for his account of his imprisonment; came as a bald statement made in reply to an enquiry about the whereabouts of another prisoner. The man died: last word on the matter. The end. But for Soyinka it is the opening sentence. Neither for personal safety nor peace of mind has he ever been content to step over the body, let it lie. In his books and in his life he has gone after the death-dealers among us and in ourselves. His revelations live.”
~ Nadine Gordimer on The Man Died
(WS Life in Full, compiled and edited by Bankole Olayebi, 2004)
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