Aké by Wole Soyinka

First published: 1981

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1934-1945

Locale: Abeokuta, Nigeria

Principal Personages:

• Wole Soyinka, an African boy, later a novelist, poet, and playwright
• S. A. (Essay), his father
• Eniola (Wild Christian), his mother
• Tinu, and
• Folasade, his sisters
• Dipo, his brother
• Daodu Kuti, his uncle
• Beere Kuti, his aunt

Form and Content

The winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, Wole Soyinka has maintained his prominence as an international man of letters since the 1950’s, when he began writing radio plays. Soyinka’s first autobiography, The Man Died (1972), relates his two years of political imprisonment, from 1967 to 1969, during the Biafran War. In Ake: The Years of Childhood Soyinka remembers his first eleven years, living at Abeokuta and visiting his grandparents at Isara. The work is important for its portrayal of a Yoruba Christian home before and during World War II, some generations after missionaries entered Yorubaland in the 1880’s.

Soyinka creates his own pattern of autobiography in Ake. Chronology is less apparent than epiphanies showing the author’s increasing awareness of space, of himself, of activities, and of people both educated and peculiar—family, visitors in the parsonage, clients in his mother’s shop, or schoolmates. The length of an episode usually corresponds to the importance of the subject, except in the case of the short chapter about the death of his father. Most chapters have observations recorded by the adult Soyinka during his return to Abeokuta.

The book has fifteen chapters; most have about a dozen pages, but the first, ninth, and fourteenth have twenty-two each. The first seven chapters (106 pages) describe memories dating from before 1939: Myriad details of the parsonage compound, then the streets beyond, the markets, and visits to Isara and Ijebu are given from the child’s point of view. Chronology is secondary to the child’s vivid memory of persons: the canon, the bookseller, Bukola, his sister Tinu (whom he follows to school at age three), his friend Osiki, his brother Dipo, his sister Folasade who dies, the chastened Mr. Odejimi, and the fascinating Mrs. Odufuwa. Throughout, Soyinka’s Yoruba heritage intertwines with his Christian upbringing by his catechist father, Essay (for his initials, S. A.), and his mother, known as “the Wild Christian.” The parsonage compound and the canon’s house serve as a bulwark against the spirit-filled woods not far from the walls of the compound.

Chapters 8 to 10 parallel the war in Europe. A new source of sound is the radiogram, with which Essay and his friends discuss the news. Characters as observed by the child Wole are portrayed: Paa Adatan the soldier challenging the Bote soldiers; You-Mean-Mayself making himself at home with Essay until he eats enough for Wild Christian to notice; the pregnant madwoman of Sorowanke, who is routed by people in the market; the magician entertainer who fails in his attempts to hypnotize; and Aunt Beere, with her passion for moin-moin. Soyinka describes significant activities. He and Edun walk to church through the markets, where there are so many aromatic foods that they cannot resist spending their offering. The headmaster’s children, exempt from prostrating themselves before the Odemo, are taught evasion tactics to avoid physical contact with non-Christian relatives at Isara. While hunting with Broda Pupa and Yemi, Wole helps flush out a snake to eat. During his initiation, his ankles and wrists are cut. He makes no dichotomy between traditional and Christian practices, for he feels comfortable with the identification of beliefs with times of festival, whether at his grandfather’s farm or on the occasions when his mother and her friends preached.

Chapter 11, the shortest in the book, portrays his father’s dying, though death is never mentioned. Essay spends more time in his beloved rose garden; he advises Wole to persist in his education and in resistance to anyone who would try to overcome him; a flurry of family photography takes place. The young Wole becomes feverish at the times of his father’s illness, as though invisible forces are passing between them.

At Abeokuta Grammar School, Wole observes his companions very carefully. The acting principal, poor at disciplining, is exhausted after he canes rather than dismisses a senior boy who gets a girl pregnant. In a highly amusing episode, returned principal Daodu hears Iku plead the case of the stolen cockerel.

The last chapters give the impressionable Wole’s observations of the Nigerian women’s movement from its development as the Group—wives of professionals who gather around Beere Kuti to discuss problems of home and community, such as sanitation, prices, shortages, anniversaries, infant deaths, postnatal clinics, and assistance to young wives. On the suggestion of her husband, Daodu, they bring aroso (wrapper wearers), who, as the Egba Women’s Union, set in motion the Great Upheaval. When tax wardens arrest the market women for not having the license the British require, they demand its abolition. Their organized efforts eventually convince the district officer, the Alake of Abeokuta, his council of chiefs, and the Lagos government. Wole describes the speeches, marches, delegations, sit-ins, and riots that eventually earn attention and respect.

During these historic activities, Wole passes exams for the Government College in Ibadan. Back home, Soyinka notes more progress toward Nigerian political independence: The school anthem no longer refers to the King of England; the atom bomb dropped on Japan gives Aunt Beere Kuti courage to charge a British official with racism; and dislike of British rule underlies Uncle Daodu’s criticism of the Government College, that it cannot impart the right character to a pupil, especially by having them say “Sir.”

Critical Context

From early in his career, Soyinka has insisted that the artist is inevitably engaged in society, and that everything he creates has political overtones. His awareness of the sociopolitical milieu of his own childhood is clear throughout Ake. In his home, history is localized in the wall photographs of bishops, including that of the first black bishop, Ajayi Crowther. World War II, the catalyst for the Nigerian movement to independence from British rule, is portrayed in memories of blackened windows, the explosion of an ammunition ship in Lagos Harbor, trips by Daodu and Beere to Great Britain through mined waters, and remembered family comments. References to “white men”—some peripheral, some central in his memories—are frequent, particularly in Soyinka’s accounts of events relating to ecclesiastical and secular politics. His affirmation of his Yoruba home life shows that as an artist he is politicized not by ideology but by human response. He recalls that in deciding to go to the Government College at Ibadan, he concluded that he must undertake certain mental shifts in order to survive in “another irrational world of adults and their discipline.”

Ake reveals the roots of Soyinka’s cosmopolitanism: Christian belief, introduced from Great Britain, and Yoruba life itself, for the Yoruba have long connections to the Western Hemisphere (Wole makes reference once to the “vague Brazilian side of some of our relations”). Repeatedly throughout his work, Christian and Yoruban images are juxtaposed and integrated. The rocks behind the parsonage to him were Jonah, a source of refuge. At the same time, rocks in the Abeokuta area have associations with the god Ogun, a subject taken up in Soyinka’s Idanre and Other Poems (1967); Ogun (god of iron, creator and destroyer) is integral also to The Road (1965). His grandfather at Isara remarks, “Ogun protects his own,” a saying which Wole immediately connects with Wild Christian’s “God moves in mysterious ways.” Soyinka’s lifelong fascination with Ogun is discussed in Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976). He holds that the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth can be a seamless continuum if the abyss between the visible and invisible worlds is bridged by action.

Like Ogun, the artist must become involved by the act of creation. Drama is the most powerful vehicle for action; thus, Soyinka wrote many plays. The reader of Ake learns of Wole’s early interest in drama—radio plays he heard, his acting in school plays, and his attraction to street dancers and bands.

Ake reveals the unity between Soyinka’s early years and his adult life as an artist. It is also valuable for supplying Western readers with a cultural context for African literature. Though each of Soyinka’s works can be appreciated in itself, familiarity with African culture and tradition will enhance understanding of them.

The African with whom Soyinka is usually compared is Chinua Achebe, also a Nigerian but a member of the Igbo people. Achebe’s novels chronicle traditional Igbo life, the arrival of the British, and postcolonial politics. In its rich sense of place and its depiction of life in a closely knit extended family, Ake might also be compared to the literature of the agrarian American South.

Sources for Further Study

The Atlantic. CCL, September, 1982, p. 95.

Coger, Greta M. K. Index of Subjects, Proverbs, and Themes in the Writings of Wole Soyinka, 1988.

Economist. CCLXXX, August 1, 1981, p. 74.

Gibbs, James. Review in Research in African Literatures. XIV (Spring, 1983), pp. 98-102.

Gibbs, James. “Wole Soyinka.” In Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Vol. 125 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 2d ser. New York: Gale Group, 1993. Provides an exhaustive overview of Soyinka’s activism and an analysis of his major works with their contemporary critical reception. Also available online.

Gordimer, Nadine. “The Child Is the Man.” Review of Aké. The New York Review of Books (October 21, 1982): 3, 6. A perceptive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Aké in the context of autobiographies written by African writers. While admiring Soyinka’s sensual evocation of the place where he grew up, Gordimer raises questions about the credibility of the total recall and the remarkable ripostes of a three-to four-year-old child.

Library Journal. CVII, August, 1982, p. 1454.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 31, 1982, p. 6.

Maduakor, Obi. “Autobiography as Literature: The Case of Wole Soyinka’s Childhood Memories, Ake,” in Presence Africaine. CXXXVII/CXXXVIII, nos. 1/2 (1986), pp. 227-240.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, October 10, 1982, p. 7.

Newsweek. C, November 1, 1982, p. 87.

Okri, Ben. “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Boy: Review of Ake,” in West Africa. November 16, 1981, pp. 2719-2722.

Olney, James. “Ake: Wole Soyinka as Autobiographer,” in The Yale Review. LXXIII (Autumn, 1983), pp. 72-93.

Olney, James. “Wole Soyinka’s Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man,” in The Southern Review. XXIII (Summer, 1987), pp. 527-540.

Times Literary Supplement. February 26, 1982, p. 228.

World Literature Today. LVI, Summer, 1982, p. 561.

Wright, Derek. “History and Fiction: The Autobiographies.” In Wole Soyinka Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. This chapter in Wright’s detailed study of Soyinka’s works discusses Aké in the context of his two other autobiographical works, “The Man Died”: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972) and Ìsarà: A Voyage Around “Essay” (1989). Wright’s analysis of Aké provides a valuable insight into Soyinka’s developing sense of self. Also useful is the “Glossary of Yoruba and Other African Terms and Names” for readers unfamiliar with the dialect.