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Wole Soyinka on Yoruba Religion: A conversation with Ulli Beier (1997)


Isokan Yoruba Magazine
Summer 1997
Volume III No. III:


Wole Soyinka on Yoruba Religion

A conversation with Ulli Beier


Beier: I wanted to talk to you about Yoruba religion, because you seem
to be the only writer who has seriously tried to come to terms with
it. Even many of the Yoruba scholars, who do research into language,
literature, history of the Yoruba shy away from the subject - as if
they were embarrassed about it ...

Now in your own case, given the type of upbringing you had, I have
asked myself how you became interested in Yoruba religion. There is an
image "Ake", that has made a very strong impression on me. You were
living in the Christian school compound, that was surrounded by a high
wall and when the Egungun masqueraders were passing by outside, you
had to ask somebody to lift you onto the ladder, so that you could
watch the procession going on outside. Your upbringing was designed to
shield you from the realities of Yoruba life ... and later on your
education in the Grammar school, the University in England - they all
were designed to take you further away from the core of your culture.

How then did you find your way back into it? How did you manage to
break the wall that had been built up around you?

Soyinka: Curiosity mostly, and the annual visits to Isara - which was
a very different situation from Abeokuta! There is no question at all,
that there was something, an immediacy that was more attractive, more
intriguing about something from which you were obviously being
shielded. If you hear all the time "Oh, you mustn’t play with those
kids because their father is an Egungun man ..." you become curious:
and then you discover that there is nothing really "evil" about it ...
that it is not the way they preach about it. Even my great great
uncle, the Reverend J.J. Ransome Kuti, whom I never met, composed a
song whose refrain was: "Dead men can’t talk ... " One was surrounded
by such refutations of that other world, of that other part of one’s
heritage, so of course you asked questions about it. Yes, and even if
I realized quite early on, that there was a man in the Egungun mask,
that did not mean that a great act of evil was being committed - any
more than saying that Father Christmas was evil.

I had this rather comparative sense and I wrote in "Ake" that I used
to look at the images on the stained glass windows of the church:
Henry Townsend, the Rev. Hinderer and then the image that was supposed
to be St. Peter. In my very imaginative mind, it didn’t seem to me
that they were very different from the Egungun.

So one was surrounded by all these different images which easily
flowed into one another. I was never frightened of the Egungun. I was
fascinated by them. Of course, I talked to some of my colleagues, like
Osiki, who donned the masquerade himself, from time to time.

The Igbale1 was nothing sinister to me: it signified to me a mystery,
a place of transformation. You went into Igbale to put on your
masquerade. Then when the Egungun came out, it seemed that all they
did was blessing the community and beg a little bit for alms here and
there. Occasionally there were disciplinary outings: they terrorized
everybody and we ran away from them but then, some distance away you
stopped and regathered ... maybe my dramatic bent saw this right from
the beginning as part of the drama of life.

I never went through a phase, when I believed that traditional
religion or ceremonies were evil. I believed that there were witches -
I was convinced of that - but at the same time there were good
apparitions. And of course I found the songs and the drumming very
exciting.


Beier: You never really took to Christianity at any stage ...

  Soyinka: Never really - not even as a child. I remember distinctly
my first essay prize at secondary school - that was in my first year.
My essay was entitled: "Ideals of an Atheist." Yes, I went through all
these phases. I just felt I couldn’t believe in the Christian god and
for me that meant I was an atheist.

Beier: How old were you then?

Soyinka: I was eleven! But I also enjoyed being in the choir - I was a
chorister. I went regularly to rehearsals. I enjoyed the festive
occasion, the harvest festival, etc. Then we processed through the
congregation, rather than sneaking in through the side entrances. At
Christmas and New Year I enjoyed putting on the robes of a chorister.
On the way to church I went to see my friend Edun, who lived in
Ibarapa. And my Sunday was made even more interesting, when we met the
Egungun masquerades on the way - which was quite often.

Beier: Do you remember we went to a conference in Venice, it must have
been in 1960 or 1961 ...?

Soyinka: Oooooh yes ...

Beier: There was a writer from Northern Nigeria ... I think it was
Ibrahim Tahir. And he made a statement, the gist of which was that
Nigeria was, or was about to become, an Islamic country ...

Soyinka: I have actually forgotten that, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Beier: I am not quite certain what his real argument was or how it was
phrased. But I do remember your rather fierce reply! The gist of which
was that both Christianity and Islam were conservative forces that
actually retarded Nigeria’s ability to copy with the modern world,
whereas traditional religions - Yoruba religion at least - was
something much more open, and much capable of adaptation ...

Soyinka: Yes, and for the very reason liberating! I am glad you
brought up the issue of Islam, because that was also contributory to
my entire attitude to imposed foreign religions. You know all this
nonsense of religious intolerance which is eating into the country now
- it didn’t exist in my youth! During the Ileya we celebrated with our
Muslim friends, because they would send us meat from their ram; the
Oba would go to the mosque, even if he was a Christian, and vice
versa: during Christmas and Easter, our Muslim friends would come to
the house. There was always equality between the religions -
acceptance. And that in turn made it impossible for me to see one as
superior to the other. And of course, the more I learned about Yoruba
religion the more I realized that that was just another interpretation
of the world, another encapsulation of man’s conceiving of himself and
his position in the universe; and that all these religions are just
metaphors for the strategy of man coping with the vast unknown.

I became more and more intrigued and it is not surprising that, when I
went to study in England. I nearly took "Comparative Religion" as one
of my subjects; but then I decided that I would enjoy it more, if I
just read into it and visited all sorts of places ... I remember going
to this small Buddhist meeting; I visited the so-called fundamentalist
religions, the spiritualist churches ... I went to one or two seances.
I have always been interested in the spirituality of the human
individual. So when people like Tahir - and there have been many of
them - have made that kind of statement, I have always risen to
counter it very fiercely. Traditional religion is not only
accommodating, it is liberating, and this seems logical, because
whenever a new phenomenon impinged on the consciousness of the Yoruba
- whether a historical event, a technological or scientific encounter
- they do not bring down the barriers - close the doors. They say: Let
us look at this phenomenon and see what we have that corresponds to it
in our own tradition, that is a kind of analogue to this experience.
And sure enough, they go to Ifa and they examine the corpus of
proverbs and sayings; and they look even into their, let’s say,
agricultural practices or the observation of their calendar. Somewhere
within that religion they will find some kind of approximate
interpretation of that event. They do not consider it a hostile
experience. That’s why the corpus of Ifa is constantly reinforced and
augmented, even from the history of other religions with which Ifa
comes into contact. You have Ifa verses which deal with Islam, you
have Ifa verses which deal with Christianity. Yoruba religion attunes
itself and accommodates the unknown very readily; unlike Islam,
because they did not see this in the Koran - therefore it does not
exist. The last prophet was Mohammed, anybody who comes after this is
a fake. And Christianity! The Roman Catholics: until today they do not
cope with the experience and the reality of abortion! They just shut
the wall firmly against it. They fail to address the real problems of
it; they refuse to adjust any of their tenets.

Beier: The Yoruba people have always been willing to look at another
mythology and find equivalents in their own tradition. For example:
when I first met Aderemi, the late Oba of Ife - that was at Easter
1951 - he told me about the different shrines in his town and he said:
"You know, in Yoruba religion we know the story of Mary and Jesus" and
he told me the myth of Moremi (Mary) who sacrificed her only son in
order to save her town. And he said: "Really, Moremi is Mary." I was
impressed, because he could see that there was some basic metaphor
that remained valid across a variety of cultures: He knew that the
basic truth is the same - only the trappings are different ...

Soyinka: The Yoruba had no hostility to the piety of other people.

Beier: Yoruba religion, within itself, is based on this very
tolerance. Because in each town you have a variety of cults, all
coexisting peacefully: there may be Shango, Ogun, Obatala, Oshun and
many more ...

Soyinka: Even in the same compound!

Beier: Even within the same small family - because you are not
supposed to marry into the same Orisha!

But there is never any rivalry between different cult groups; they all
know they are interdependent. Because they are like specialists:
everybody understands specific aspects of the supernatural world.
Nobody can know everything. The Egunguns know how to deal with the
dead; the Ogun worshippers know how to handle the forces that are
symbolized by iron. But for the Ogun worshippers to function, it is
also necessary that Shango worshippers and Obatala worshippers and all
the other Olorisha perform their part. Only the concentrated effort of
all of them will bring peace and harmony to the town.

So naturally: when the Christians first appeared, the Olorishas could
hardly suspect ...

Soyinka: ... how hostile the new religion would be ...

Beier: I think that tolerance is one of the big qualities of Yoruba
culture. Even the treatment of handicapped or mentally disturbed
people - it all shows how much more tolerant Yoruba culture was than
Western cultures.

Soyinka: Yes. Europeans tend to hide such people, whereas Yoruba
religion actually accounts for them.2

Beier: You said before that Yoruba religion "liberates." Can you
expand on that?

Soyinka: I believe that the truly liberated mind is never aggressive
about his or her system of beliefs. Because it is founded on such
total self confidence, such acceptance of others, that there is no
need to march out and propagate one’s cause. That is why Yoruba
religion has never waged a religious war, like the Jihad or the
Crusades.

Beier: In fact they never make converts! It is the orisha himself who
chooses his devotees ...

Soyinka: The person who needs to convert others is a creature of total
insecurity.

Beier: There is this beautiful Yoruba proverb: "The effort one makes
of forcing another to be like oneself, makes one an unpleasant person!"

Soyinka: And even in practical terms, in day to day terms, take Shango
for instance. Shango becomes the demiurge of electricity, so that this
new phenomenon does not become an object of terror, it does not
alienate you, because Yoruba religion enables you to assimilate it.
The ease with which the Yoruba moves into that world and adapts to
phenomena that had not come into the purview of his religion until
recently - it means that he does not see the need to protect his
family or his town from the benefits of this new technological
experience. This is another evidence of this liberating attitude,
which becomes ingrained in one. It is not just a bag of tricks that
helps you to cope with the world: the mind is already prepared.

The same thing applies to human relationships. Social relationships.
The whole experimental nature of what the modern world should be. The
way other religions absolutely block your entry into new progressive
fronts - Yoruba religion just doesn’t do that!

Beier: It is significant that when a Yoruba says "Igbagbo" (a
believer) it means "Christian", because it is nonsensical to say "I
believe in Shango" or "I believe in "Ogun". One is too secure in one's
world view. I think I have mentioned to you once that remarkable reply
of an old olorisha, to whom is grandchild said: "The teacher said,
your Obatala doesn’t exist!" He simply answered. "Only that for which
we have no name does not exist." He could not be shaken.

Soyinka: That is a brilliant way of putting it. And you have been to
Brazil and Cuba. In that part of the world you find Europeans - not
just Mulattoes - but people of ‘pure’ European descent, who accept the
humanism of this religion and who recognize it as their own way of
truth. And they cannot conceive of any other way of looking at the
world. This proven ability of this religion is well documented.

Beier: A few days before I came to Nigeria, I received a letter from a
Portuguese student at the University of Munich. She came across a
small community of Olorishas in Lisbon and again she found this a more
realistic and intense way of looking at the world.

Soyinka: I know a number of people like that. On the other hand, what
you said earlier on about Yoruba scholars and their reluctance to come
terms with Yoruba religion ... it is a very curious phenomenon ...

Beier: So you agree with my estimation?

Soyinka: Oh yes, I agree with it absolutely. And the worst part of it
is that those fellows who speak about "false consciousness" - and I
don’t just mean the dying breed of Marxists - they are all totally
preconditioned. Even when they are trying to be objective about
African religion in general - or about their own traditional belief
system - they are totally incapable of relating to it. They say: "This
is a contemporary world. What use is our traditional religion
today ...", and I feel tempted to say to them: What use is a system of
beliefs like Islam and Christianity in the contemporary world? And
they cannot see that they have totally failed to make the leap: to
take Yoruba religion on the same level as any system of belief in the
world, that they are committing a serious scholarship lapse. In other
words they are totally brainwashed by what I call these "elaborate
structures superstition" - Islam and Christianity particularly. They
have accepted these as absolute facts of life which cannot be
questioned.

They lack the comparative sense of being able to see Yoruba religion
as just another system - whether you wan to call it superstition,
belief, world view, cosmogony or whatever - you have to do it on the
same level with any other system. Once you do that, many questions
which have been asked become totally redundant, because they have not
been asked about other religions. But when our scholars come up
against their own religion, their faculty of comparison completely
disappears.

Beier: There is a whole body of prejudices - which have their roots in
the ignorant or malicious misinterpretations of missionaries - and
which still persist in the minds of many Nigerians.

A typical one is the accusation that the Egungun try to "deceive"
women and children, by pretending that they are spirits. Whereas of
course every child knows that there is a man in the mask ...

Soyinka: Absolutely! I did.

Beier: Everybody knows that the mask is carried by a dancer who is
specially trained for that task - but at the height of the dance he
becomes the ancestor. That is a totally different matter. These
"wicked" man who allegedly try to intimidate women - can’t people see
that during the Egungun festival they are in fact blessing women and
that those who pray for children dance behind them?

Soyinka: And again, if you take the communion: here is a thing that
happens every Sunday, sometimes twice a week. In which the officiating
priest actually gives you a wafer and says "This is the flesh of
Christ" and he gives you a drop of wine and says "This is the blood of
Christ" ...

Beier: Another defamation of Yoruba religion is the notion that is a
form of exploitation of the people. But surely it is much less so than
Christianity! Take a babalawo, for instance: When you consult a
babalawo, you put down threepence. A token fee! There is no money
involved in divination. Have you ever seen a rich babalawo?

Soyinka: (laughs)

Beier: A traditional babalawo was a poor man. He was not even
interested in being rich. In fact the whole society did not even know
wealth in our modern sense. What kind of possessions could you own,
that others didn’t have? Another Agbada? Everybody had enough yams to
eat. Everybody lived in a spacious compound that would accommodate
him, his wives and his children. Everybody had enough clothes to
wear ... everybody had access to land. What else could you want? There
was nothing to buy.

The grand old Olorisha priests I knew in the fifties: the Ajagemo of
Ede, the Akodu of Ilobu ... they were poor people, in spite of their
influence. There was no such thing as a fat priest. Whereas now some
of these new Churches really do exploit their congregation. Only a
week ago one of these self styled "prophets" went to see a friend of
mine and told her: "I had a vision. The child you are going to give
birth to will be born dead, and you too will die in childbirth. The
only way you can survive is to fast for three days without water and
to give money to the Church!" Now here is not only exploitation but
also blackmail!

Soyinka: It is happening all the time. All the time. This whole spate
of prophesying, this competitive mortification of people is nothing
but an attempt to bring powerful and wealthy people under the control
of the priest. Even ordinary individuals are not exempted. They have
succeeded in some cases. Oh yes. They rush to them and say: You must
do this and that. And sometimes when people take no notice of them,
their relatives will! There was a relation of mine, he got so
frightened when one of these prophets predicted a likely death for me,
that he ran to him and asked him what to do. And I said to him: I will
curse you, if you go again to that church. I will follow you there and
break up that ceremony. So they do succeed on so many levels and it
has become competitive ...

Beier: Now let us talk about the way in which some of these
traditional Yoruba concepts have been used in your plays. If I am not
mistaken, it was in "A Dance of the Forest" that you have first used
some kind of Yoruba symbolism in a play.

Soyinka: Yes, of course by that time I had written the draft for The
Lion and the Jewel, but that was a very different thing. It was on a
different level ...

Beier: The striking thing about "A Dance of the Forest" is the
character of Ogun. This image of Ogun of your play is a rather
personal, "unorthodox" orisha - that you have, in fact, created a new
kind of Ogun.

Soyinka: Hmmm ... that is true.

Beier: But of course, even in purely traditional Yoruba terms, that is
quite a legitimate thing to do. Ogun has never been a rigid defined
being; the orisha can only live through people - by "mounting
somebody’s head" - you could go so far to say that when the Orisha
fails to manifest himself in this way through his priests and
worshippers, he ceases to exist. If the priest who personifies Ogun is
an unusually powerful Olorisha he can modify the image of Ogun. So
that even in Yoruba tradition Ogun consists of a variety of
interrelated personalities.

Any traditional priest would accord you the right to live Ogun your
own way, in fact they would think it the normal thing to do. You
recreate Ogun - or perhaps one could say you are sensitive to other
aspects of his being. Because Ogun is a very complex being ...

Soyinka: Yes, indeed.

Beier: It is again the typical Yoruba openness and tolerance that we
are talking about. It applies not only to the relationship between the
different orisha cults, it also applies to the variants of
interpretations within one and the same cult group.

Soyinka: And in the Diaspora of course - the same thing. the concept
of Orishala or Oshun are very different in Brazil or Cuba; and in turn
the manifestations of the orisha over there have affected the
interpretations of some of the scholars and they in turn have
transmitted some of these ideas to our most traditional priests. So
that when you speak to a Babalawo you may notice a new perception, a
slightly altered perception.

Beier: Actually Pierre Verger was instrumental in establishing
contacts between Brazilian olorisha and their families in Dahomey and
Nigeria. Messages were sent back and forth, which were ultimately
followed by exchange visits. Today there is quite a bit of movement
between the two countries. Look at Sangodare, for example: the young
Shango priest who grew up in Susanne Wenger’s house. He was invited to
Brazil four times by groups of olorisha.

Soyinka: Take Eshu for instance. The stature of Eshu has grown
considerably, so that the original myths of Eshu that I knew as a
child have grown even more colourful.

Beier: ... the "devil",

Soyinka: That’s right, and again Wande Abimbola admitted once that
these new aspects of Eshu are now found here in Nigeria as well. It is
this movement ...

Beier: And of course it shows that the whole thing is alive. But you
know what Melville Herskovitz thought about Verger’s travels between
Brazil and Nigeria? "Terrible man", he said to me "he is destroying
laboratory conditions."

Soyinka: Oh perfect! That’s perfect. That’s beautiful: it really sums
up the whole lame battle - scholarship faced with a living phenomenon.

Beier: Now the Ogun you created in "A Dance of the Forest" stresses
particularly the creative aspect. He is not merely the warrior, he is
also the creator!

Soyinka: This was for me very obvious, because the instrument of
sculpture belongs to Ogun; many sculptors are his followers and so is
the blacksmith, again a very creative person, not just an artisan. And
then of course there is the Ijala3 - he is therefore by implication
the father of poetry. All this made me delve more into the complexity
of Ogun and given my own creative bent, I explored that a lot more.
And also given my own acknowledged combative strain, I found a fine
partner in Ogun. It was a kind of liberation for me, having grown up
in a narrow form of Christianity.

Beier: Which is very simplistic.

Soyinka: Very simplistic, everything has to be black or white: you are
either a good child or a bad child. When I grew up and was given a
little bit to self-analysis and introspection, I wondered why I should
be inclined towards the creative - I really feel alive when I am
creating - while at the same time I would readily drop my pen or
typewriter without hesitation and pick up whatever combative
instrument necessary ...

Yoruba religion made me see that there was no contradiction - it was
the most normal thing in the world to have within the same person
these two or more aspects.

Beier: Each orisha contains and bridges contradictions, and human
beings are the same. To pretend otherwise is hypocrisy. People don’t
realize how unrealistic Christianity is. Yoruba religion portrays the
world as it is and makes you live with it, the way it is. It teaches
you how to turn a dangerous situation, how to diffuse tension, how to
turn a negative situation into something positive even.

But in "A Dance of the Forest" you created another character called
Esuoro. I find it hard to relate this figure to any Yoruba tradition -
I am tempted to say you simply invented him.

Soyinka: Oh, that was purely dramatic. That is something I have not
taken beyond the pages of the book. It’s purely dramatic. I created
him in the same way - I suppose - in which Puck was created by
Shakespeare, taking parts from various mythological beings. As you
know: Oro is one of the most intangible beings ... so I fleshed him
out, somehow.

Beier: By far the most important statement you have made about Yoruba
culture is your play "Death and the King’s Horsemen". I don’t know
whether you remember this, but it was Pierre Verger who found out
about this famous incident in Oyo. He was even able to verify it, by
writing to the District Officer, who was then living in Canada.

Soyinka: I do remember that you gave me a kind of summary of the
story ...

Beier: I thought that the material was crying out for a play. But for
several years, you didn’t do anything with it.

Soyinka: Well, I wasn’t ready for it.

Beier: I then gave the material to Duro Lapido who produced "Oba Waja"
in 1964. Then, maybe a decade later you wrote the "Horseman." What was
it then that prompted you to go back to this material finally? What
new insight had occurred? What new preoccupation with Yoruba religion,
maybe?

Soyinka: That’s a question that’s always very difficult to answer.
Because it has to do with the entire active creative process:
gestation, something that takes place on different levels of
consciousness or subconsciousness. But don’t forget, I wrote this play
in Cambridge, when I was there for a year as a fellow in Churchill
College.

And it could have been the resentment of the presumption! Because you
know in a Cambridge College named after a personality like Churchill,
you have encapsulated the entire history of the arrogance of your
colonizers; the supercilious attitude towards other cultures, the
narrowness, the mind closure - it could be all of that. It was not a
year which I enjoyed particularly. There were a few stimulating
intellectual contacts, which made it worth while; but I think there
was the basic underlying question "What the hell am I doing here? What
the hell are we doing here?"

I felt like a representative; a captured, creative individual having
to deal with another culture on its own terms, in its own locale. And
passing the bust of Churchill on the top of the stairs almost every
day - with all that Churchill meant. The big colonial man himself! It
could have been all of this that brought back the memory of this
tragic representation of the way their culture would always impinge on
ours. I suspect that is the way it must have been. I must have been
tempted to challenge this: How dare this smugness be! How dare it be
exported ...!

Beier: They came without the least attempt to come to terms with the
culture they ruled.

Soyinka: Hardly ever!

Beier: This was particularly so in Southern Nigeria. They referred to
Yorubas and Igbos as riff-raff, whereas Northerners, of course, were
gentlemen.

Soyinka: Of course, the North appealed to their sense of feudalism.

Beier: You have given a very plausible explanation for the immediate
stimulus that prompted you to write this play. But of course the far
more difficult question is: what actually happens in the poet’s mind?
What are the secrets and maybe subconscious processes that produce the
particular images and the particular kind of magic of a play like
"Death and the King’s Horseman"?

This is almost unanswerable, and many writers would simply refuse to
be drawn into any discussion about it. But you have in fact attempted
to find a metaphor for the creative process which you described at
length in "The Fourth Stage". I am fascinated by that essay because it
seems to me that you are giving a very Yoruba explanation and one that
seems to have some parallels in Yoruba religious thought. You speak
about the artist going on a kind of journey; a trip into another
dimension from where he returns with a kind of boon ... and
inspiration ... but maybe you better summarize it yourself.

Soyinka: I think what I was referring to was the mystery of creativity
itself. Which is almost like a dare, a challenge of nature secrecies.
One goes out almost in the same way in which Ogun cleared the jungle -
because he had forged the metallic instrument. He is very much the
explorer.

The artist is in many ways similar; each time, he discovers a proto
world in gestation; it’s almost like discovering another world in the
galaxy. The artist’s view of reality creates an entirely new world.
Into that world he leads a raid; he rifles its resources and returns
to normal existence. The tragic dimension of that is one of
disintegration of the self in a world which is being reborn always,
and from which the artists can only recover his being by an exercise
of sheer will power. He disintegrates in the passage into that world.
He loses himself and only the power of the will can bring him back.
And when he returns from the experience, he is imbued with new
wisdoms, new perspectives, a new way of looking at phenomena.

I was using Ogun very much as an analogue: what happens when one steps
out into the unknown? There is a myth about all the gods setting out,
wanting to explore and rediscover the world of mortals. But then the
primordial forest had grown so thick, no one could penetrate it. Then
Ogun forged the metallic tool and cut a way through the jungle. But
the material for the implement was extracted from the primordial
barrier.

This I took as a kind of model of the artist’s role, the artist as a
visionary explorer, a creature dissatisfied with the immediate reality
- so he has to cut through the obscuring growth, to enter a totally
new terrain of being; a new terrain of sensing, a new terrain of
relationships. And Ogun represented that kind of artist to me.

Beier: I can find parallels to Yoruba concepts here on several levels.
The artist as the "creature of dissatisfaction with the immediate
reality" is really very reminiscent of the orisha, who starts life as
a human being - a king or a warrior - but because of his
dissatisfaction with the immediate reality "leads a raid into that
other world", losing himself on the way: Shango hanging himself at
Koso, Ogun descending into the ground at Ire, Oshun turning into a
river at Otan Aiyegbaju - all these are examples of the creative human
being breaking through the limitations of ordinary human existence.

Of course, the orisha does not return - he undergoes a metamorphosis
and becomes a divine being. But he is there to remind us of the
existence of that other world, to remind us that we can dare to
penetrate, however briefly, that other sphere of existence.

Similarly the olorisha going into trance crosses the border, "rifles
the resources" of the divine world and returns with a new
understanding. His personality undergoes significant changes through
such repeated experiences. The maturity of the old orisha priests,
their wisdom and tolerance, their insight into the human mind are the
result of these raids into the divine sphere. Am I right in thinking,
that this is something very similar - almost identical to the
experience you are describing in the "Fourth Stage"?

Soyinka: Yes, definitely!

Beier: I think you can describe the act of the priest who goes into
trance also as creative act; because he has to personify the orisha,
recreate him through his performance, through song and dance. So in
that sense there may be some real hope left: for a while we must
helplessly watch the culture crumble in front of our eyes, there are
still some individuals, like yourself, left who can capture something
of the spirit of this culture through the very individual process you
have described and who can keep the orisha alive in some new form of
existence.

Soyinka: There is a lot of hope left. I’ll give you an example: when I
gave a lecture in Ibadan recently titled "The Credo of Being and
Nothingness", when I explained certain aspects of Yoruba beliefs, the
role of the orisha, the reaction, the forcefulness of response which I
could see on the faces of the young people was really very
encouraging. It was more than just an expression of their misgivings
towards the way in which they were brought up, more than just a
feeling of deprivation. These young people are really looking for new
directions in their lives. I believe there is real hope.

1 Igbale: The secret grove of transformation, where the mask is donned.

2 The Yoruba creation story relates that Obatala created human beings
out of clay and that one day he was drunk on palm wine and made
cripples, albinos and blind people. Since then, all handicapped people
are sacred to him.

3 Ijala: The poems of Yoruba hunters. The hunters are worshippers of
Ogun, because they use iron.



http://yoruba.org/Magazine/Summer97/File3.htmFor More Information
Contact:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wole-Soyinka/325190544177855

Datum: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 08:44:11 -0800
Von: Funmi Tofowomo Okelola <[log in to unmask]>
An: Funmi Tofowomo Okelola <[log in to unmask]>
Betreff: USA Africa Dialogue Series
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