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| Wole Soyinka: (Photo: chinadailyasia.com) |
Book: Climate of Fear
Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Random House (2005)
ISBN: 978-0-307-43082-3
Wole Soyinka’s creative thread is principally a duel between people and power.
The controversial dramatist has levelled his verbal facility, from both the cultural front and the civic sphere, against the abuse of power.
He has remained devoted to the deprived and vulnerable, even when he was hunted with a price on his head during the dark days of military dictatorship in Nigeria.
In “Climate of Fear: The Quest of Dignity in a Dehumanized World,” the Nobel laureate registers another feat in his crusade against banal power, only with a variation in target.
The 2005 book is an impassioned commentary on the destabilising trail of terrorism and totalitarianism.
Soyinka tracks the poisoned tributaries headstream to the tainted source of fanaticism.
Terrorism is running the tapestry of headlines from certified trouble spots to previous sanctuaries.
Soyinka reads between the headlines to confront the unsettling implications, for the world, of the spreading cancer.
The book is made up of five lectures “A Changing Mask of Fear,” “Of Power and Freedom,” “Rhetoric That Binds and Blinds,” “The Quest for Dignity” and “I Am Right; You Are Dead.”
There seems to be nothing fundamentally new, however, as to how the lethal behemoth of terrorism can be caged.
Rather, the point of interest is that the book captures a phenomenal writer’s response to his time, this amid successive jolts of history.
Hunger for power has set the world into turbulent orbit without either a moral centre or natural affection.
Soyinka trains his reprisal on perpetrators and accomplices, and pleads the case for dignity, that human quality which has become just another libation on the shrine of self-aggrandisement and power.
“Dignity is simply another face of freedom, and thus the obverse of power and domination, that axis of human relationship that is equally sustained by fear – its poles doomed to remain in permanent conflict, yet complement each other,” notes Soyinka.
“Climate of Fear” is prefaced by a chilling anecdote of the Beslan School Massacre in which Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev’s militants took a school hostage, killing close to 200 children.
Soyinka sets the tone of the book by spelling out the moral implications of the siege, where heavily armed terrorists stormed the sanctuary of children and subjected them to the most dehumanising conditions.
“Once again, in a most harrowing setting to which the world was summoned as audience, we saw enacted the rhetoric: There are no innocents,” Soyinka observes.
He demands that such rhetoric be expunged before it reconstitutes the moral compass of the world.
In the lapse of time since the writing of the book, the language of terror has been trained, with alarming frequency, on every last vestige of collective commitment for a secure and dignified world.
Students have increasingly found themselves in the bull’s eye of terrorist organisations, reinforcing the evil mantra that there are no innocents.
“When anticipation of, and salivation over, the trickle of power sinks to the level of cruelty to helpless children, one is tempted to accept that all that is left to say is – nothing. The rest is silence,” Soyinka processes the numbing weight of the monstrosity.
“It is an admission that humanity has finally touched the peak of apprehension and the nadir of impotence. In a grim irony, however, this may even spell the end of fear, since what many – across cultures – hold as a universal barrier to the unthinkable has surely, definitively, been breached, and there is nothing left to dread,” he observes.
He laments that while the totalitarian state can be readily made out and chanted down for the cause of human freedom, the quasi-state is an even more appalling menace in that it courses beyond immediate demographics.
The quasi-state is an invisible centre of hegemony whose virus infects religions and ideologies while it remains elusive in that it is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state.
Soyinka despairs at a formative stratagem of the quasi-state: the tendency to shroud its hideous intent with a democratic front to flare up public sympathy and civic alliances.
As such, when its atrocities reveal the quasi-state for the menace that is, the contagion would have significantly eaten into sections of society.
“As each assault on our localized or global sense of security is mounted or uncovered in the nick of time, the residual question is surely: What next? Where? How? Are limits or restraints any longer recognized?” Soyinka articulates the progressive toll of terror in “A Changing Mask of Fear.”
Any undertaking of this kind inevitably leads to an engagement with the role of religion in the changing climate of terror, seeing that many agents of violence are acting as religious automatons.
Whereas anti-faith crusaders have erroneously held religion responsible for terrorism, Soyinka desists from an indiscriminate approach and distinguishes faith from fanaticism.
Atrocities have been committed in both secular and clerical garb; violence comes down to man’s domination over man, traceable not to the essence of religion but to the quest of power.
“To apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders,” Soyinka observes.
“The Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union,” he points out.
It is manifestly intolerant to incriminate religion as a generic entity for atrocities committed by deluded fanatics just as it would be a logical fallacy to blame politics collectively for the crimes of an elitist cabal.
The wall of separation between church and state must, however, stand high and impregnable as religion is always bound to be desecrated when its leaders meddle in the corridors of power.
“Climate of Fear,” is a loosely structured discursive voyage so that it has neither the disclaimer of fiction nor the rigour of scholarship.
This is severe flaw in that Soyinka sometimes follows his eloquence where substance cannot sustain him and makes free with unattributed allegations, particularly the claim that recruits are “raped as a mandatory rite of induction” in Zimbabwe’s terror camps.
Such outrageous inventions weaken the merits of Soyinka’s civic undertaking, not least because Zimbabwe is possibly the principal example of peace and safety in a world that has gone mad.
In a timely note, however, Soyinka condemns the cowardice, lack of moral will and elitist conspiracy of African leaders who are failing protect citizens from genocidal warlords and despots.
The outcome of this shady coalescence is that “even in the supposedly egalitarian domain of death, some continue to die more equally than others.”
Soyinka laments victims of the Sudanese conflict whose fate might have been averted by “the moral outcry of a continent or a structure of relief from the global community.”
Ironically, the moral outcry of African leaders has been louder and clearer in their defense of implicated counterparts from the biased ICC.
The message between the headlines is that leaders are more entitled to justice than citizens are entitled to life, a systematic flaw that must be expunged from African institutions.
Soyinka observes that poverty and political injustice, both potent stimuli for the cancer of fanaticism, must be eradicated if the world is to be more habitable.
In “I am Right, You are Dead,” he emphasises dialogue and dissent as opposed to monologue and dissent as conditions for a mutually enriching co-existence.
“Has Marxism triumphed since the killing of Leon Trotsky? What nature of an environment enabled the stabbing of a creative mind, Naguib Mahfouz?
“What kind of morality of a liberation struggle deceives a fourteen-year-old child into becoming a walking bomb?” Soyinka queries.
