Wole Soyinka encourages the audience to struggle for freedom.
Photo credit: Duke University Photography.

Nobel Laureate Speaks ‘On Power and Freedom’
Soyinka says it is writers’ role to demystify power and to seek freedom

By Geoffrey Mock

Friday, September 17, 2004 | The aftermath of this month’s Beslan school massacre in Russia left Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka shaken, but not surprised.

In the long history of the struggle between power and freedom, the Beslan tragedy is the most recent reminder of how the seductive attractions of power combined with righteousness can lead to inhumane results, Soyinka said.

“I am left with the image of a cycle of vindictiveness, ending with only the last man standing totally devoid of human morality,” Soyinka said. “That is where Beslan leads us.”

A long-time activist who has won praise for his poetry, plays and essays as well as his work for freedom, the Nigerian writer spoke to a capacity audience in the Bryan Center’s Griffith Film Theater Friday as part of Duke’s week-long series of inaugural events.  Duke President Richard H. Brodhead was in attendance.

Soyinka’s speech, “On Power and Freedom,” focused on the nature of power. In his talk, the Nobel Laureate went back to the origination of taboos against gods and knowledge as primal examples of how power is accumulated and maintained through the imposition of censorships and limitations.

“My bewilderment is with the people I call the anti-minds, who are obsessed with placing limits on the human ability to interrogate the universe,” Soyinka said. “I wonder if it is the weaker mind that seeks power through such limits. They feel threatened by the interrogation and secure inside their limits. Power, I believe, loves boundaries. It manifests itself within boundaries.”

Soyinka’s activism has generally been focused on working against institutional power, and he spent two years in Nigerian jails for his opposition to the military government there. 

Soyinka called democracy the accumulation of human freedoms, including that of social responsibility, and true democracy represents the opposite of power. However, even normative democracies can be seduced by power, he said, and he listed the United States among those governments “working in that lethal zone where power is wrapped in god and country.”

“The most deadly partnership is that of power and theology,” he said. “They are really different sides of the same coin. This is the greatest threat of the human mind. These doctrines can be used to justify inequities that take away others’ freedom. All these doctrines should come with a surgeon general’s warning: ‘This doctrine could be hazardous to your freedom!’”

Activists can be seduced by the same temptations of power, Soyinka added. He remembered his days as a student activist feeling uncomfortable by claims of “revolutionary justice” that appeared to assume the cause was above considerations of human morality.

After the Beslan massacre, Soyinka found an old interview with the alleged Chechen leader of the attack. When asked who would benefit from the separatist effort, the leader said, “Allah will win more territory.”

“There you have it,” Soyinka commented. “It’s not that the children will benefit or the powerless. It is God. Anything can be justified, even taking children as hostages, even riddling their body with bullets, because it is for God. This was a cowardly, contemptible act, but it was done in the rarefied air of the righteous.”

Power’s opponent, he said, is freedom, and it is the role of the writer and of the activist to demystify power in the fight for freedom. He outlined the intellectual history of that effort, with an emphasis on the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the United Nations. His hope for the future is that the challenge to power will continue and that activists and intellectuals will continue to push against the limits that power puts on them.

“In this titanic struggle, we have seen transformations where old heresies can now be given the same time and space as the old orthodoxies. My hope is that someday we can exult when power no longer feels the urge to extinguish our human curiosity. This is the promise of democracy -- genuine democracy, not merely normative.”