The day Wole Soyinka held us all in a spell

Sophia Pedro of Mozambique had, like some of her compatriots, lived on treetops for four days, and she would have remained as anonymous as the rest who had fled the flooded earth were it not that, in spite of the hardships of balancing the wetness on the tree and all, she gave birth to daughter Rositha, further swelling the number of residents living in the tree home to nine.

They were all later rescued, but not before demonstrating that, as recently as 2000, trees do not just give life, they also save lives.

We were reminded of this life-saving utility of trees by Wole Soyinka, whose lecture at the StoryMoja Festival last week was on The Parables of Wangari Maathai’s Trees, delivered in honour of the Kenyan Nobel laureate and the Ghanaian intellectual, Kofi Awoonor.

Soyinka used the occasion not just to celebrate trees for reasons that Wangari Maathai did, but to examine, as it were, their portrayal in world literatures and other socio-cultural imaginaries.

SOYINKA'S TAKE
Drawing on Joyce Kilmer’s lines, ‘I think I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree’, to capture the ties that bind creative imagination to natural phenomena, Soyinka acknowledged the endless process of human conscientisation, about which virtually all human activities are, and how all these have been captured in literatures and other arts.

From Achebe’s favourite silk cotton and Iroko trees to the boulevards that now adorn the streets of many cities, Soyinka’s take was that trees occupy a unique space in apprehending human identities and fashioning our ethics and aesthetics.

Cross-generational ties of kith and kin are conceived in terms of family trees, while actual trees are reference points in literature and other humanities.

In pre-Christian, pre-colonial Africa, our ancestors conceived of and practised their spirituality with reference to specific trees within their geographical locales; capitalist modernity came to Africa under trees that were makeshift market places, just as pre-colonial African jurisprudence was deliberated under iconic trees.

In the past one year or so, we have known of a chief or two in Kenya with trees as their offices.

Further afield, African slaves and their descendants in the American South and the Caribbean Islands saw, in the forests, the only chance for escape from the dehumanising conditions of slavery, while in late colonial Kenya, Africans of the Mau Mau orientation hid in the trees of the Nyandarua escarpments to wage war, in their way, for the independence of the country from British colonialism.

Yet the trees and forests have, in historical facts and literary imagination across time and space, also been symbols of terror.

For the villagers in Achebe’s Umuofia, the evil forest was dreadful to conceive and fatal to inhabit.

It was the place of ultimate abandonment for those who culture had rejected then condemned, as were Okonkwo and his father, whose deaths by suicide and abominable disease, respectively, attracted expulsion from the physical, moral and spiritual spaces of the Igbo.

TERROR OF SLAVERY
For the slaves in the American South and the Caribbeans, trees symbolised the terror of slavery because of the numerous instances of lynching and quartering that many were subjected to, sometimes for such flimsy reasons as ogling white women, not to speak about the weals that mapped the slaves’ backs, courtesy of the white ‘owners.’

Trees, if we were to briefly endow them with agency for this purpose, were instrumental in the administration of corporal and capital punishment until more mechanical or scientific means of state-sanctioned murder were invented.

More recently and nearer home, trees have tended to lure opportunists; from NGO activists and politicians to scholars who reposition themselves appropriately for personal gain.

With all her commitment to afforestation, for instance, Wangari Maathai used her love for trees to advance her political career, just as ‘real estate’ speculators whose language of ‘leafy suburbs’ has a luring effect on would-be home buyers.

On the scales, however, trees and forests have played a positively important role in ensuring human sustenance, and inspired creative imagination that yields new knowledge especially in the arts.

ECO-CRITICISM

Isn’t this the logic of the increasing significance of eco-criticism in literature?

Soyinka’s lecture, touching on trees in their parabolic sense, also allowed him to engage in a human rights discourse with his long held view that secondary identities, secondary, that is, to the essential humanity that a homo sapien around the Niagara Falls shares with another one around Nyahururu’s Thompson Falls, are limited and limiting.

Accordingly religion, gender or race impose upon us blinkers that, if not checked, render community fragmented, myopic and vulnerable to the self-destruction that is usually preceded by exclusivist ideologies of patriarchy, racial or religious superiority.

Such nonsensical dogma of sectarian fundamentalism, nationalistic at its core, is the kind which would justify the violation of our sense of the humane seen, for instance, in the terrorism that has decimated thousands of people across the world in the last two decades.

Now, do writers get trapped in the moral dilemma of pursuing, actively or otherwise, such logic of sectarian interests?

Sure, they do, perhaps not deliberately, but they do. And this is why Soyinka called on writers to speak out against the seeming misrepresentation of their faith in the wake of the spiralling wave of ethnic and religious intolerance.

This would be a way of stalling the continuing dehumanisation that terrorism, that end product of fundamentalism, has visited upon the present generation.

Listen to Soyinka: “And perhaps it is about time that we adopted the languages of those very enemies of humanity but, this time, on behalf of humanity— fundamentalism … we should declare ourselves fundamentalists of human liberty.”

FUNDAMENTALISM
Is this not the poorly hidden trap in the fundamentalist-driven terrorism that we have all witnessed these past few years?

Is it possible that this call for anti-fundamentalist fundamentalism will precipitate an endless cycle of intolerance?

And how can groups of people who are not socialised into fundamentalism, either by versions of their faith or culture, fare once they are transformed thus and pitted against their dyed-in-the-wool counterparts?

Would Achebe, Soyinka’s contemporary and compatriot, have agreed with his antidote to the current wave of terrorism?

Or with the call on writers, of whatever faith, to address themselves to terrorism, in away asking them to repudiate versions of scriptural interpretations that wreak havoc on the very idea of our humanity?

Perhaps Achebe, even if he were to make such a call, would have used more tentative, therefore, accommodative tone and language.

HUMAN NATURE

It is probable that Achebe would concur with Soyinka that a better understanding of our global problems now can be achieved if we tried to “obtain a truthful picture of our pre-colonial, pre-Christian, pre-existent actualities, especially as reflected in the contemporaneous arts and literatures of that era”.

Such an approach would reveal human ethics that, lacking in the influences of contemporary Abrahamic faiths, capture the complete and complex picture of human nature, with deplorable weaknesses alright, but on far lower scales than we are witnessing today.

How can this be achieved if we all mutated into fundamentalists for whatever reason?