Prof.Wole Soyinka’s New Play -”Thus Spake Orunmila” based on a bible story

By Ijeoma Nwogwugwu
It is not for nothing Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, is one of the most remarkable writers and playwrights of his generation. In yet another literary treatise, Soyinka has demonstrated his capacity to profound, excite and provoke in a new theatre production that was given exclusively to THISDAY by the laureate in which he used the Book of Samuel in the Bible to illustrate misrule by African leaders.

Prof. Wole Soyinka

Soyinka’s journey on his new work was spurred when Josie Burke, director of the Bush Theatre in west London, and her team, commissioned Sixty-Six Books to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible and a new chapter for the theatre.

Sixty-six playwrights, novelists, poets and songwriters from a dozen countries and across five continents and differing religious backgrounds – with even Arch Bishop Rowan Williams of the Church of England thrown into the mix too – took the Bible away from the pulpit and thrust it into the spotlight. Some 130 actors, steered by 23 directors, were also screened to act in the theatre productions of Sixty-Six Books.

The sixty-six writers were commissioned to situate the sixty-six Books of the Bible, starting from the first Book Genesis to the Book of Revelation, to everyday life using contemporary prose, verse drama and poetry to similar situations the Bible.

Selecting Soyinka to rewrite, so to speak, the Book of Samuel was very apt. Who better than Soyinka to use theological events on kingship in Israel of yore to evaluate contemporary governance in Africa. Of particular note is his reference to the uprising in North Africa and the Middle East against dictatorship, and even uncannily predicting the gruesome death and end of Muammar Ghaddafi’s 42-year rule in Libya.

No dictator in Africa was left out of Soyinka’s searing play, neither were the Yoruba gods Ogun, Sango and Orunmila who were juxtaposed alongside the kings of Israel thousands of years ago and the immediacy of the metaphorical strumming of Jimmy Cliff’s guitar as the prophet of doom.

Thus Spake Orunmila… 2 Samuel by Soyinka is a telling play about everything wrong with Africa. It is a play best absorbed by watching it at the Bush Theatre, London. But for those who missed the performances when they featured a few weeks ago, THISDAY brings below the entire play for its readers to enjoy and ponder Orunmila’s soliloquy on how leaders that failed to heed the voice of reason all ultimately fell:

In the name of Olodumare, Deity Supreme, who sits not in judgment, but presides in ambidextrous equity, right and left, over the affairs of humanity, and to whom notions such as infidel, unbeliever or pagan are for ever anathema. A-a-ase.
Opening bars of ‘How are the Mighty Fallen’.
Fade out as Reading begins.

How are the mighty fallen!
Are there stars still glistening in the firmament of kings?
There is no tragedy in the overthrow of kings, be they consigned to dungeons, banished, garroted or guillotined, thrown over their royal parapets or impaled on their own palace spikes; the real tragedy of our time is lodged in the walking, strutting two-legged things that would be kings, tongues of cant that promise liberation but fashion new forms of enslavement, harbingers of an era of enlightenment, in truth tawdry, inglorious mimics even of the flawed majesties of nation builders and sometimes – wreckers.

Kingship has ever carried its own seeds of destruction, albeit slow in germination. Even language has taken its toll. ‘Scandal’ has displaced ‘royal dalliance’. Scions of ancient dynasties affect ‘the common touch’ but only as the lowest social mores. Bribery stains the family escutcheon, pollutes the founts of moral peerage, scorns service as pedigree. These are not even intermediaries of business interests seeking the ears of governments, but ermine dragged in seamy deals through royal corridors, bordellos, and racetracks. Where reduced in stature by the jackboots of the military, they grovel for contract leftovers, scramble to serve ‘the government of the day’.
Are these the monarchs whom the griots rhapsodised? Shaka of the amaZulu?
Asantehene of the Golden Stool? Richard Plantagenet and his chivalrous rival
Emperor Saladin? No, nothing but cruelties of today’s tinsel crowns endure.
Their ears are no longer tuned to the lyrical strings of Sundiata’s balafon, the love offerings of Suleiman or the limpid cadences of King David’s harp and psalms. Their portion is the raucous immediacy of Jimmy Cliff’s electric guitarand lyrics, fervid, turbid, and subversive.

Up: Jimmy Cliff’s ‘The Harder they Come’.
The harder they come
The harder they fall, one and all,

Fade out.

The crash of the mighty generates not a whiff of purifying lament. No bard wraps them in lyric shrouds, not even as one king in tribute to another. When they die, the people turn their heads away, spit or dance on their graves. For the poets – and all that is of redeeming grace – have been wasted, tortured, buried alive in prison cells or hounded into exile. The survivors are objects of public scorn for there is only one route their trade permits – turn court jesters, or forever hold their tongues.

We shall not glamorize the past. Let it therefore be acknowledged that, in the arena of cruelty and violence, the honours remain even, ancient and modern are evenly matched. Some, like the Magnificent Suleiman, much given to reflection, acknowledged their own entrapment…

What men call sovereignty is worldly strife and constant war
These ancient Kings, now cloaked in the soothing patina of antiquity
and elevated to epic magnitude, rode into history on steeds of violence, often steeped in superstition, prey to dreams and auguries but then, were they not just as fearful and cruel as the people over whom they reigned?
Put two thousand prisoners to the sword did King Richard Plantagenet, to the applause of his Christian followers! ‘Give us seven men from the House of Saul that we may hang them,’ thus bring an end to the cycle of blooddebt that had brought famine on the land. King David obliged, and hanged indeed were the offering. And it is told that the Lord of Hosts approved the act, for Nature was appeased, and the wind of famine dropped. How quaint they would have found the symbolic Rites of Restitution even of pre-literate times, or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the reign of that great Avatar of Peace, Nelson Mandela and his prophet, a man of great visionary valour, Desmond Tutu.
In truth now, how much has changed? In two thousand years and more, how far up the ladder of evolution has humanity clambered? Is the bloodlust withered in the veins of the species? Figures of myth only reflect human tendencies, sometimes histories, else visionary aspirations, often all inextricably tangled. Was Gilgamesh history or myth? He built cities, enacted laws, was not spared his share of brutalities. Or King Thor, at once god of fertility and destruction. His Yoruba sibling bears the name Sango, another handyman with the hammer of thunder, destroyer yet administrator of justice. All were kings and gods in the same body and essence. King David was Ogun in mortal visitation, Ogun, god of war, custodian of the sacred oath, Muse of the poets, breath at the blacksmith’s bellows, cultivator, pioneer of the sciences. And the mortal tendencies that bind both, and many more – a love of women, wine, and strife. Nation builders both but – inevitably – people destroyers. Nonetheless, theirs were realms where poetry wore the robes of grace, and catharsis…

Faintly in the background: ‘Dead March in Saul’.

How are the mighty fallen,
Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon…
Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew,
Neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offering…

That was – once upon a time. The prophet’s voice today is of Jimmy Cliff and it is not the voice of catharsis, but of pending anomie and just deserts, the voice of the new prophets, not tuned to patience, deaf to the sermonizers of self-denial, dismissive of divine apportionment, aroused to the primordial cry of instant equity.

So as sure as the sun will shine
I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine
And then the harder they come,
The harder they fall, one and all
O-oh the harder they come
The harder they fall, one and all

The warnings of the new poets were not heeded. The crash of the mighty narrates the history of mankind, though it takes its toll in human loss. It comes in waves, echoing upheavals of Nature and evoking notions of prophetic empathy, for has the season of convulsions not been felt in frequency and magnitude of floods, earthquakes, firestorms and Tsunamis, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific?
How have the mighty fallen? With a thunderous crash, like the statue of Saddam, and with pitiable inelegance. Tsunamis do not grow in deserts but castles built on sands heave and collapse just as surely as sand dunes lift and shift shapes between night and dawn, bury encampments of the complacent desert lords. They that play the king? Unasked, unsought, uninvited, one and all, they force wind filled heads into the royal diadem. It is decreed, he that plays at king ends as flies to wanton gods. Most shall prove merely fortunate to escape the fate of Saul – beheaded, dismembered and plastered to his palace walls, but not before that broken monarch had witnessed the deaths of his own sons, as has his modern progeny, pinned to the city walls of Tripoli.

Strains of ‘The Harder They Fall’ in the background.

The bell tolled first in Tunisia, the king was put to rout, still the warnings of Prophet Jimmy went unheeded. Tunisia’s commoner, at the bitter end of his tether, sets himself on fire, and the act consumes self-anointed kings across the Maghreb, its flames leap across seas and deserts into arena of ancient and yet unfinished conflicts where once King David, his tribes, armies and adversaries lived, strove, thrived, perished and regrouped. History continues its remorseless turn of the wheel but – without the poetry, no, the poetry has fled, and the language of power is at the mercy of jackdaws, crows, and vultures, augmenting the screech of torturers. And killers. Their lips are ever glued to the name of god. To him is greatness, his greatness extolled even as youth is hanged in the dank secrecy of the prisons of Iran for daring sanctimonious priest-kings, for humming refrains to the gospel of Jimmy Cliff.

Fallen indeed are the mighty civilizations of the race of Persia, of ancient Babylon, dried the fountains of the arts of literacy, collapsed the archways over the valleys of the Tigris, even as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon fore-echoed the gallows destiny of a tyrant, the counterfeiting Suleiman of his age, King Saddam Hussein.

What a stiff-necked breed these king players of modern times! Whatever gods King Qaddafi worshipped, he of the many splendored Bedouin tent with a harem to shield his body, those gods had taken leave of him, as he of his senses, beyond recovery even from the ministrations of King David’s harp, or the healing balafon of Sundiata. Once, so long ago, Muammar of the king’s palace guard overthrew a dynasty of parasites, but only that the janissary could himself set up a dynasty of one, to whom all bow in fear and homage. But the circle of karma closes on the dissolute rich as on the richly deserving. The arc of restitution distends, then draws ever tighter on thrones of the alienated.

Egypt followed swiftly upon Tunisia, and tremors were felt in Morocco, an earthquake of uncharted dimensions. The kings of Saudi heard, took heed, sent out town criers to spread news of great reform: the price of bread was lowered and other palliatives in tow to douse the flickering flames from Tunisia. But the chant of the populace continues – Too late, and too little. And Yemen followed suit, where the king’s men dispensed pellets of lead for pallets of bread, the Leaven of Life without which even Freedom is an empty word.

Syria, ancient Arma, buckled at first, then the heart of King al-Assad grew rigid as the Obelisk of Axum. His ears turned away from the warnings of the singing prophet of Jah, he came down ever harder on his people. Syria, a calloused finger of the secret fist of power named Ba’ath, drenched her streets with the blood of commoners. King Muammar, reviled in the Occident as the Madman of Libya took heart and followed suit, donned the iron gauntlet.
True, it was indeed madness as of Saul that plagued King Qaddafi but there was also a perpetual high, No one truly knew the substance of his addiction but it answers the same name – alienation. Helicopter gunships spewing fire on human waves, King Muammar no longer sees the teeming servants of Allah – to Muammar, all are vermin, and the nation overdue for cleansing.

Shall we hear the lamentation of a David chanted over their biers? No, their destiny was prefigured in the end of Master-Sergeant King Doe of Liberia, his mouth forced open to serve as a urinal for one of the multitude of children he had orphaned, often in a manner worthy of the ancients. And his ears that were fashioned after the saying ‘Ears have they but they hear not’ were sliced off by his captors, for he clearly had no use for them. Thus messily do the mighty fall in a once mighty continent!

Yet again and again, others before them have impaled themselves on the signpost of precedence, visible to all but the blind, deaf and incorrigible.
Among the parade of forerunners, let us recall Macías Ki’NGuema of Malabo who had long preceded Saddam to the hangman’s noose. To do him final honours, hangmen journeyed forth from distant Morocco, for Macías was a man much famed for his dark powers, more potent than the Witch of Endor, powers that many feared could reach beyond the grave and drag his judges down to his abode in hell.

And in the land of Zimbabwe, how are the mighty fallen? Like ruins of the ancient fort of Zimbabwe, landmark of a vanished civilization that multitudes flock to see from the ends of the earth. For Mugabe was a man much beloved of a continent in thrall, a hero of deliverance from marauding tribes, bleached skin and flaxen hair, who crossed the ocean, seeking land, plunder, and slaves. How shall such wreckage of reversals be remembered? No, not through the songs or lamentations of a king-poet. Behold now the false monarchs, who pulled down the edifice raised by multitudes, an edifice named Freedom, leaving nothing of themselves but the shards of fallen idols. Their deaths will leave no imprints but the panegyrics of beneficiaries, for, living, they proved mere shadows flitting past the murals of true kings. The harder they come, the harder they fall…

Well they tell me of a pie up in the sky
Waiting for me when I die…
So as sure as the sun will shine
I’m going to get my share now, what’s mine…

‘What’s mine,’ is the gospel beamed across the globe by the true owners of Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Congo, Libya, Morocco, fanning out from the western tip of North Africa to the furthermost ends of decadent, sanguinary Iran. ‘What’s mine?’ Only that born-with attribute called Freedom. It sustained the slaves from Africa in the Americas. Freedom untrammeled. Ineluctable.

Freedom as the unfolding mat of history, as the seizure of humanity in the here and now, freedom as the rotor and rails of vision, freedom in the material and in essence, freedom as the breath of air after rain, fresh and enlivening, as the food of sustenance and the wine of astonishment, intangible yet palpable, freedom as the quarry of the hunt since the time of the earliest human primogenitor, as the diamond-hard crystals settled in sediments of the seer’s divination bowl.

The line of Samuel is ended. The priesthood voice is broken, for far too many of the tribe of priests would play the king. The sages are tenured, their counsel cast aside except they fawn upon, and parrot their paymasters. Temple, church, synagogue, mosque and shrine offer less wisdom than will be found in the proverbial mouths of babes. The ancient prophets whose piety made them guarantors of equity are no more, their successors are not sought after but locked in frenzied contest for followers, in contests promoted on television’s market shows whose miracles would shame mountebanks, miracles that entrap the feeble-minded or the desperate, to whom no straw is too flimsy to clutch in hope of material salvation. Few, all too few remain of the anointed keepers of books of pieties that shed illumination, for many are rivals in the power stakes of mimic kings and emperors, trapped as flies in the web of recognition. They scream Submission! Submission! Yes, but submission to whom? Of whom are they intercessors? To whom do they carry the articles of human surrender, these leeches on human fear?

So where now is wisdom to be found?
Among the needful scavengers of the market after closing hours, the derelicts and touts of motor parks whose scriptures are encrypted on rickety conveyances, bearing goods and jostling humanity – there we find the unfiltered magma from which the lyrics of Prophet Jimmy take form, for indeed the haunts and habitations of the wretched of the earth yield more truths than the homilies of these upstarts, self-seeking rationalists of the status quo, dispensers of disempowering platitudes. The immediacy and permanence of truths are plain on the mastheads and panels of ramshackle, dust gathering chariots that trundle through the roads of Africa, bearing goods and resilient humanity. And what is written there?

No telephone line to heaven. Beware the pie-in-the-sky salesmen, beware the hypocrites who chant – Power (and all else) comes only from God. Ask them why they jostle and scramble, train, empower and grant the brainwashed advance absolution to kill and maim. The pie-in-the-sky gospelers gorge like famished crows on the rotting pie of power and domination on earth, yes, even though millions perish at their bequest. These are clerics who would be king, and claim first-name acquaintance with the almighty. Let us swap places, chants the Prophet – theirs the pie in the sky, mine the sustaining crust on this hard earth.

And it is also written there: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. It is this lament that scales the snowcaps of Ruwenzori mountain, cascades down Kabwelume Falls, skims surfaces of lakes of the Rift Valley and roil from steeple to minaret, peak to heartbreak peaks of Rwanda. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and the Mighty, despite the industry of the tailors of King Qaddafi and cohorts, of Mugabe patron of Bespoke House, remain as beautyful as the cartoon figures of Mickey Mouse. The fall of all is foretold, barring only the few that number no more than the fingers of one hand. Their monuments will not be found. Can they not read:
No condition is permanent? Even as a slingshot felled mighty Goliath, so today a flying ember from the bonfire of a self-immolator ignites fires across walls of separation and contempt.

The Fall of Man began with the rise of kings. Were not the people warned?
You want a king over you? So be it. And their Lord placed a king over them, even though – thus attests Prophet Samuel – he was mightily displeased. Yet, to the devil his due – those also reigned who, no less cruel, at least united peoples, established nations, enacted laws, patronized the arts. Kings are best remembered as myths, like Gilgamesh the Sumerian, like Thor of the Vikings or King Oduduwa, myth, king and deity. When they acquire flesh and sceptre, they tear the heart out of humanity and shape it to their heads for crown. Their inventiveness is without limit – tyrant, benevolent despot, emperor, monarch, sultan, dictator, maximum leader, fu¨hrer, living Guide, divine intercessor, shah, emir, oba, obi, priest-king and prelate, bearers of the Ultimate Word, secular or divine, called Ideology or Scriptures. We know their chequered lineage from ancient times, but how deep into antiquity shall we voyage…?

Strains from the chorale ‘How Are the Mighty Fallen’.

Shall we begin with Killer King Pharaoh who would not ‘let my people go’? No, let one who, from fear of a prophesied new age, plunged households into mourning with a rage of infanticide, serve as the enabling Progenitor. From the Herodian mould sprang the dynasties of King Hitler, and his twin brother, Joseph Stalin…

And Stalin begat many issues, among them Nicolae Ceausescu who, with his queen, ended at the stake, perforated through his granite heart. His soulmate was Enver Hoxha, known as the prince of darkness, for therein he kept his people, and forbade them even moderate enlightenment. Stalin scattered his seed far and wide across continents, but his truest heir was Pol Pot of Cambodia of whom it is said: Stalin slew his millions, but Pol Pot has slaughtered his tens of millions. Straining to trump the magnitude of Pol Pot in his swathe of land cleansing came King Mariam Mengistu of Ethiopia who truncated the line of Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings and Lion of Judah. Rivalry of the Stalinist and the Hitlerite remains the world’s legacy, unabaiting, as fierce as the internal rivalries within each House, each newly whelped striving to outdo siblings in deeds of horror and fidelity to the Holy Text, from which all blessings flow. Haile Selassie earned fame for mowing down unarmed students in their place of learning – they had demanded bread for the people, for Haile Selassie’s incontinence, year after year, oversaw the Great Famine Treks of Tigre, Wollo and Haraghe, trails marked to this day with signposts of bleached skeletons. Mariam Mengistu eradicated feudal dread, replaced it with radical terror.

Seven years of leanness proved prelude to seven more years of famine, for King Mengistu merely collectivised famine as mandated by his Book of Books, uprooted ancient tribes and corralled them in new settlements where they perished in their hundreds of thousands. King Mariam brought death home to urban dwellers, piled high as the lamps on lampposts, to instruct the citizens of a new Age of Reason that had come upon them, for he was the anointed Guardian to the Ultimate Word, inflexible.

The line of Adolf Hitler, though often mongrelized, rendered inseparable from the House of Stalin, since both are united at the tabernacle of Power, had its own illustrious descendants. Prominent of these was King Ayatollah Khomeini, only let this be added:

Khomeini was the implacable sword of God whose motto was, ‘my predecessor Shah Pahlavi flogged you with whips, I shall scourge you with scorpions’, a prelate who sought to extend his dominion all over the world of believers and non-believers alike with the pronouncement: ‘Kill the blaspheming poet wherever he may be found, and whatever the laws of his own nation’. Among others are numbered on the continent of Ham, Idi Amin Dada, self-crowned King of Scotland, caterer of human delicatessen to the crocodiles of the Nile. And Macías Nguema whose history we have narrated, in tandem with King Papa Doc Duvalier and his army of zombies and Ton-ton Macoutes, seasoned practitioners of the cult of resurrection.

Surpassing even the wealth of King Croesus was reckoned Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, whose irreverent rendition was ‘The All-Powerful Cockerel of Inflexible Will who goes from Conquest to Conquest leaving a trail of Cuckolds behind him’ – whispered behind his back by his loving subjects. Closely following in inordinate accumulation was Jean-Bédel Bokassa also of lowly sergeant stock. He crowned himself emperor in resplendent extravagance that beggared the coronation of King Selassie and Napoleon Bonaparte combined. Bokassa’s meat and drink was stamping school pupils to death in prison cells. On Robert Mugabe, the Lord continued to smile his inscrutable smile, for his dream of a state funeral comes ever closer. Let us not pass over Omar Bashir the Terror of the black race of Sudan, whose fanged locusts known as the Janjaweed have eaten up the land of the Fur in West Sudan.
Al-Assad of Syria, the macadam of whose streets is no longer black but red of the congealed blood of his citizens leads in the Guinness Book of Records in notches on the guns of state snipers in strategic placement. Muammar Qaddafi, he that would be philosopher-king, millions of copies of his Greenhorn Book of revolutionary precepts lie mouldering in warehouses of Tripoli…and so unto King Osama bin Laden the abstemious warrior who felled three thousand in one fell swoop and has spread his spores of hate around the globe, locked in ecstasy of a virtual empire to his deity, for which all humanity is a hindrance that must be pulverized. Playing God, Osama forgot his own mortality…one and all they compete in the stakes for the bizarre, the extreme reaches of solipsism, locked in the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, sleeping the deep sleep of Rip Van Winkle, for whom the time of awaking is over, the time departed when king-poets rhapsodized their enemies and made generations think kindly of them, look more benignly on their flaws, their foibles, their lecheries, and cruelties.

We do not fast, rend our clothes or pour ashes on our heads but are nonetheless touched by the very mortality of the few that redeem this breed of visionaries and reprobates, and can dirge with them, be they David the reluctant shepherd king, poet and lover, or Suleiman, lawgiver, builder, lover and poet, be they named Saladin who taught the arts of chivalry even in war, or Ptolemy the Second, lover of scholarship, designer and builder…all the way to their mythic figurations that foretell the tragic and triumphant passages of remarkable beings, memorialized in monuments, the Arts of poesy, the sublimity of architecture and symphonic grandeur…
Up: Chorale ‘How are the Mighty Fallen’ (Michael Wise).

Culled from thisdaylive.com

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