Truth, falsehood, justice, dystopia, By Biodun Jeyifo

Professor Wole Soyinka.

Justice is the first condition of humanity. – Wole Soyinka, The Man Died

All protocols duly observed, I must thank the organizers of this symposium to mark the 90^th birthday of WS, our own WS, for inviting me to give the keynote address. Presently, I shall speak about the celebrant but for now, permit me to make some opening remarks about the theme of our symposium.

The death of truth? No, the unending war between truth and falsehood, with justice between them as a sort of umpire or intercessor. Ordinarily, people don’t talk much about truth itself, talk less about the death of truth. They talk about their children, their siblings, their neighbours and their jobs – if they have jobs. They give thanks or give curses for small and large acts of grace or misfortune. Anything and everything but truth or the death of truth.

Also, people lie a lot, they are profuse in producing falsehoods, casually or seriously, sometimes for good reasons. They lie about their age, their weight, their wealth or poverty, their triumphs and failures. As with people in general, so it is with governments and rulers. Indeed, the line of demarcation is not between governments which lie and which don’t, it is between governments which discretely lie to prevent their populations or foreign governments from knowing the true state of affairs and governments for whom falsehoods are the foundations of their power and authority.

Finally, we must consider the fact that in social life, sometimes facts and lies, truth and falsehoods are so intertwined that it is all but impossible to tell which one is the truth and which is the lie. And as if this is not enough of a conundrum, sometimes truth is opposed, not by a lie, but by another truth! Indeed, institutions such as Law and Literature owe their existence to their ability to milk to the utmost this occasional but endlessly repeated ambiguity between truth and falsehood.

Bearing all this in mind, we can see that when people begin to talk about truth and its disappearance, it means that there is something terribly wrong in a family or an entire community. To move from that point to talk about the death of truth is to believe that a dystopian apocalypse has taken place, not in the pages of a science-fiction novel but in the real world itself. That is what George Orwell felt when he wrote Nineteen-Eighty-four, perhaps the most powerful novelistic allegory about the “death of truth” in world literature in modern times. In writing the book, Orwell felt that at least in some parts of Europe and Asia in the immediate post-Second World War period, a dystopia in which Truth had succumbed completely was the only reality that people knew. I shall have a few things to say about this novel later in this talk.

And now to move more directly, more centrally to the things I really wish to explore in this talk, I must agree with the deep worry indicated in the theme of our symposium the world, our world, is sinking deeper and deeper into this real-life dystopia of the “death of truth”. Among the innumerable signs some stand out for their lack of any precedence. There are the toxic social media with their ubiquitous and endless streams of conspiracy theories that seem to pose the greatest danger. But there are other equally frightening signs and acts. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who has wealth that is perhaps greater than any plutocrat the world has ever seen, is an avid and rabid purveyor and spreader of falsehoods. A former president of the United States, Donald Trump – who seems poised to be re-elected for a second term – is perhaps the greatest liar, the most unashamed producer of falsehoods among rulers now and in the past. Moreover, many governments and states, on all the continents but principally in Europe and Asia, use disinformation as an invasive weapon to intervene in the politics and economies of other nations and in their own states and among their own populations. In addition to all these, there is the unique danger and portent in AI which, more than cloning, more than genetically modified crops, seems also poised to erase any distinctions that remain between Truth and Falsehood. So are we seeing the slow death twitches of Truth? Is the ultimate triumph of Falsehood about to happen?

Before I give my response to this question – which shall be a “No” – I wish to draw your attention to the fact the war between truth and falsehood is one of the most ubiquitous themes of proverbs, tales, myths and scriptural texts in all the world’s communities, languages and literatures. And in all cases and instances, justice and injustice are the instigators, the litigants in this timeless and unending war. I think we should draw lessons, wisdom and inspiration from this vast and global treasure trove. At any rate, since this is a symposium to celebrate Soyinka’s long life and equally long list of achievements, I suggest that we are not gathered for a funeral, a wake; we are gathered for a celebration of life! And I draw the obvious inference that the organizers of the symposium perhaps chose this theme because, among the world’s most prominent writers – and definitely among all living Nobel laureates – Soyinka has no equal in taking on the toxic social media particularly in his own country, Nigeria. What accounts for this exceptionalism? Is Soyinka mistaken in taking on this particular battle? One aspect of my response to this question may surprise or perhaps even baffle you precisely because it arises from one of his greatest talents and accomplishments that is lodged between Speech and Writing. Let me explain.

Master of the Word but also its servant, Soyinka has not stopped writing for nearly seventy years since his first serious writings were published in the 50s of the last century. He seems to have experienced no “drought” for any lengthy period of time, or any hiatus as, over the decades, he moved from one genre to another and across and around revisions of his relationships with his readers and audiences in Africa and the rest of the world. Among all writers in all literary periods, this is outstanding. It is especially unique among Nobel literary laureates, most of whom tend to publish few works after the award of the Nobel precisely because that most prestigious of awards is made for works already published, not for the promise of works still to come. Indeed, consequent to his Nobel award at the age of 52 in 1986, Soyinka switched from drama to fictional and nonfictional prose works as his preferred genre of expression. And then he went on to produce a string of more than twenty works of memoirs, faction, reflective essays and polemics, all totaling thousands upon thousands of pages. I am 12 years younger than Soyinka and I do have the reputation of being one of the preeminent scholars of his writings, but even I have felt greatly, greatly challenged to keep up with the sheer energy and constancy of his productivity, his post-Nobel productivity. Ladies and gentlemen, compatriots and audiences in other regions of the world, if you are wondering where I am taking this blessing of a long life and productivity, wait until you hear this: I hereby predict that at 100 years, WS will still be writing! On this prophetic note, I now pause in my lecture as I ask you all to shout or declaim 90 “gbosa” with me in honor of WS, our own WS!

To continue, I must add that at the center of any assessment of Soyinka’s achievements must be the combination of the joy and instruction that many of his works have brought to his readers and audiences in Africa and around the world. With a unique combination of “highbrow” and “midbrow” aesthetics and content, the early to middle years of his career both delighted and confounded many readers with poems and plays that were widely popular and other poems and novels that were thought “difficult” and challenging. His antimilitarist and anti-war plays and prose works placed him in the front ranks of the most revolutionary playwrights and writers of the mid-20^th century. These days when students of modern African literature talk of the “revolutionary writers of that period, they think primarily, if not exclusively of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ousmane Sembene, leaving out Chinua Achebe and Soyinka, both of whom led the way in revolutionizing the reception and perception of modern African literature on our continent and in the world at large.

Here, on a personal note, I must register a testimony that is based on a unique experience that can perhaps not be duplicated. If I were to name a work of Soyinka’s that first “hooked” me and got me addicted to his writings, it was “Abiku”, with its poetic beauty and metaphysical enigma. As soon as I encountered the poem, I felt that this was a writer whose every work I would and in whose intellectual company I would spend a huge part of my scholarship. Now, as I had never discussed this experience with my son, Lekan, consider my surprise akin to wonderment when he was also so captivated by the same poem so much so that he made it the basis of the concept-metaphor for the master’s thesis in architecture that he wrote and defended at Cornell University.

To clarify what I said earlier about an aspect of Soyinka’s accomplishment that is so baffling as to lead to wonderment, I now propose that we must see Soyinka as both Master and Servant of the Word. This is partly because he is supremely gifted in his use of language, partly because he cannot and will not stop writing, but primarily because among the most prominent writers in the world – and definitely among living Nobel laureates – Soyinka has no equal in polemics and polemicizing. Right from the earliest period of his career to the present day, he has never allowed restraint or decorum or Nobel laureate coyness prevent him from joining a literary or verbal duel when he has felt provoked. In vain have some of us, “awon omo Soyinka” pleaded with our mentor to hold back from discursive fisticuffs that we thought either needless or unworthy of him. I think it was as I began to think about what to say in this keynote that I stumbled on the “explanation” for this passion for polemics that stands as an exceptionalism among all living Nobel laureates. What is it? It is this: Soyinka writes from qualities and predispositions in language that predate Writing when Speech had not yet encountered Writing as a nemesis. That is why in his most accomplished works of drama and prose, the thing that stands out the most is speech and spellbinding speechifying. For this reason, it can be claimed that in some of the best works of Soyinka, Speech and Writing come together in passages after passages of great aesthetic quality and thematic depth.

Writing historically came to shove Speech aside in the authority and agency to shape the world and fight for one’s rights. In the cognomen of “illiterates”, those who have very little or no Writing at all, were marginalized to the endzone of participatory sociality. Even newspaper tabloids could not and would not accommodate the “illiterates”. That is until the arrival of the late modern social media. There are no standards and most purveyors and consumers are unafraid to make complete fools and idiots of themselves. Speech regains its agency, even if it is not exactly Speech in its full flowering of sophistication and beauty in the world’s oral cultures and traditions. It is enough that in a world in which most of them are despised, oppressed and marginalized, the masses of its unbound millions can use the wide open public spaces of the social media to fight back and demand for justice. I think that Soyinka perceives them as barbarians, especially since he has been brutally and vengefully targeted by many of them, particularly after the Nigerian presidential elections of 2023.

It is not my purpose in this lecture to bring about a reconciliation between Soyinka and his social media antagonists; this would be nothing less than extreme naïveté on my part. The antagonism is rooted in social, economic and political contradictions that only a revolutionary upsurge can address and we seem to be in a pre-revolutionary historical moment. But then who knows?

Before I move away from this particular issue and turn to the concluding sections of my lecture, I would like to point out that WS and his social media antagonists do share at least one thing in common and that is – justice, the demand for justice. The most resonant and unforgettable sentence in all of Soyinka’s writings is that quote from The Man Died that stands as the epigraph for this lecture: Justice is the first condition of humanity. Also, and to bring this section of my talk to an end on a lighter note, I would like to propose that based on his location in both Speech and Writing and his appetite for polemics and polemicizing, that henceforth, Soyinka be known as the “Grand Jenwitemi (Let Me Have My Say) of World Literature”! For those who might miss the allusion to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti – Soyinka’s cousin – in the ludic yet activist playfulness of this honorific chieftaincy title, let me remind you of the revolutionary maestro’s popular hit song, “Jenwitemi, o le panu mi mo!”

On this note, I now move directly to the concluding section of this talk. Earlier in the talk, I promised to end with some reflections which I will base on the treasure trove of proverbs, tales, myths, allegories and scriptural texts that can be found in virtually of the world’s languages and cultural traditions. I repeat here what I said earlier about most of these discursive and symbolic materials surrounding Truth and Falsehood: there is an eternal war between them around the centrality of injustice and exploitation in human existence. There is also this in most of these materials: the cost of not paying attention to this endless war between Truth and Falsehood is great, often incalculable violence and misery to common humanity in its millions, hundreds of millions. Permit me to retell two of such allegories.

[A] The Tale of Naked Truth

In a period of truce from war between Truth and Falsehood when there was even hope that there could be an armistice between them and each could live in and with the ambiguity that clothes them both most of the time, Falsehood invited Truth to take a dip in a shallow well with him. She accepted and they both jumped naked into the well. But no sooner had Truth settled down into what she thought would be a pleasant swim did Falsehood run away with the dress of Truth in which he then clothed himself. In vain did Truth plead and plead for her dress to be returned, thinking that Falsehood was playing a prank that he would soon tire of. But when it finally dawned on her that this was no prank and Falsehood would never return her dress, she came out of the well in her nakedness. What she experienced that day has persisted to this day: as soon as people saw her and her nakedness, people ran away from her either in fear or disgust, taking her for a potentially dangerous lunatic or a fool. And indeed, how many people care to be confronted with naked Truth?

[2] The Body of Truth and the Head of Falsehood

In the beginning, Olofin created the heavens and the earth. He created humans, animals and plants. Then S/He created Truth and Falsehood, leaving them to roam freely among humans, animals and plants. S/He made Truth very big and powerful but made Falsehood skinny and weak. To compensate for this disadvantage, s/he made Falsehood cunning and armed him with a machete. One day, the two came across each other and one thing led to another and a fight ensued between them. Because he was so big and strong, Truth felt overconfident and also rather careless since he did not know that Falsehood had a machete hidden under his clothes. This was why at a moment in the struggle Falsehood brought out his machete and quickly cut off the head of Truth, with the thought that that would be the end of Truth. But he miscalculated because the strength was still in the headless body of Truth. And with this strength he grabbed the skinny and weak body of Falsehood. With one superhuman pull, he yanked off the head of Falsehood and placed it on his own body. And that is why from that day, we have had that grotesque mismatch: the body of Truth and the head of Falsehood.

These two allegories deserve extended and inspired exegesis. Clearly time does not leave me with enough space in which to execute such an exegesis on this occasion. For our purposes in this lecture, I will point to one single “lesson” in both tales. Permit me to use big English to say what this lesson is: the disambiguation of the real-life ambiguities and indeterminacies between Truth and Falsehood. In simple, honest language, disambiguation means stripping life and existence of all their complexities and uncertainties. Just imagine when Truth has been killed off, we will no longer be bothered with not having ever to tell the truth and we can then tell all the lies we want – as both Elon Musk and Donald Trump want all life on our planet to be – of course with they and the millions and potential billions of their supporters purveying and circulating the ruling falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

I mention Musk and Trump here to underscore crucial differences between the lies that the respective richest and most powerful men in the world produce in comparison with the falsehoods produced and consumed in the social media in a country like Nigeria in which, for the most part, it is the weak, the jobless, the despised and hungry that depend on the social media for their resistance, their quest for justice, most of them very young people unlike Musk and Trump and their followers. As a matter of fact, it is a curious but odious fact that for the rulers in Nigeria, they do not like or practice disambiguation of falsehood and truth because if, for a telling example, if their lies are stripped from truth, how else can they simultaneously claim that oil subsidy exists but doesn’t exist? Food is there but is not there for the teeming millions, tens of millions. How else can there be so much hunger where famine and drought have not (yet) become scourges in the land? Do Nigeria and the US exist on the same plane in the worlds of the social media? They do and they don’t. Like the rest of the world, Nigerians consume a lot of the lies and conspiracy theories produced and circulated by and from America and other high-income countries and economies of the global North. We know that Nigeria’s rulers wish the country and its national economy to become one of the most rigorously neoliberal disciples in the world. But is Nigeria even a capitalist country in the first place? How can rulers who persistently and messianically consume and or export capital be called a real capitalist country? What is capitalism without capital? This, surely, is another instance of the disambiguation of truth and falsehood.

If these speculations seem to have strayed far from our purpose in gathering here today in honor of WS, perish the thought! His life and career have been touchstones for the most crucial issues for the survival of all, all of our peoples, especially where those issues center on or around justice, the first condition of humanity. Indeed, I thank the organizers of the symposium for their perspicacity in choosing the theme of the symposium, not in an ex-cathedra manner but in an interrogative register. Truth is not dead. For if truth is dead, we are dead, too. And I mean that in near literal terms, not as a metaphor or allegory.

I thank you for your patience!

Biodun Jeyifo is professor emeritus and research professor in Comparative Literature in Harvard University, USA. He is a radical critic, scholar and public intellectual. He has also taught at Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Nigeria.

This is the text of the Keynote Lecture delivered at a symposium to mark the 90^th Birthday of Wole Soyinka in Lagos on 11 July .