Season of Anomy by Wole Soyinka

First published: 1973

Type of work: Social commentary

Time of work: After 1960

Locale: An African country

Principal Characters:

• Ofeyi, the protagonist, a publicity man for the National Cocoa Corporation, later a propagandist for political change
• Iriyise, formerly a courtesan, Ofeyi’s mistress and coworker
• Ahime, the chief minister of Aiyeru, leader of the rebel forces
• Isola Demakin “the Dentist”, an assassin for the rebel forces

The Novel

Aiyeru, a coastal African “farming and fishing community” whose main moneymaking industry is boat building, is isolated from the rest of the country by lagoons and is approachable only by boat. It has kept its traditional ways, while most of the country, notably the modern city of Ilosa, has yielded to foreign influences. It has only recently come to the attention of the public as a curiosity for tourists and sociologists. The National Cocoa Corporation sees it as a new region to be exploited and has sent its promotions group, headed by Ofeyi, the protagonist, to prepare the way. The meeting of Ofeyi and Aiyeru, however, is to have far different consequences. Uncomfortable in a Westernized Africa and dissatisfied with his role as a jingle-maker for the Corporation, Ofeyi brings to Aiyeru subversive ideas about farming and, later, revolutionary ideas for transforming the entire society, ideas that, Ofeyi is surprised to learn, are fundamental to Aiyeru’s way of life. Ofeyi complains to Ahime, the chief minister, that Aiyeru has neglected its social responsibility; it must pursue a more aggressive role in counteracting the alien influences that are corrupting the country. It is only Ofeyi’s naivete and ignorance that prevent him from recognizing that Ahime is far ahead of him in understanding his concerns and that Aiyeru is already, under the guise of a safe, peaceable village, engaged in spreading its ideas through those children of Aiyeru who live outside the community. Ahime does not immediately enlighten Ofeyi (the reader also remains uninformed), but he is pleased with Ofeyi’s plans and, in fact, has half expected such a messenger to appear. The chief elder, the Custodian of the Grain, even chooses Ofeyi, an outsider, to replace him—a startling and incredible proposal which Ofeyi rejects, for it entails being both the spiritual and the physical propagator of the species in Aiyeru. Yet Ofeyi does figuratively take on the job—Wole Soyinka describes a mystical merger of the two during the old man’s funeral—when Ofeyi asks Ahime for the right to use Aiyeru men in a two-year campaign to challenge the government Cartel and the Corporation. While such activities are already going on, Ahime welcomes Ofeyi’s role as organizer.

The remainder of the action in the novel is, it would seem, a consequence of Ofeyi’s efforts. The government reacts violently to the subversion, and military conflict results. With the exception of one or two incidents, however (notably the spectacle in chapter 3), Soyinka does not show Ofeyi engaged in his propaganda campaign. The populace responds to the government repression with violent outbursts over which neither Ofeyi nor anyone else seems to have any control. The country is in a state of chaos. As Ahime warns, one who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. Ofeyi wanders through the chaos observing the consequences of sowing the seed of rebellion. The section headings follow the progress of natural organic growth: “Seminal,” “Buds,” “Tentacles,” “Harvest,” and “Spores.” The central section ambiguously refers both to feelers on the growing plants and to feelers on the heads of insects (the Cartel) that try to destroy the plants. Ofeyi, as Custodian of the Grain, has discovered the difficulty and awesome responsibility of his role.

Ofeyi does not participate in the military conflict at all. The discontented people in the country, led by Ahime and the men of Aiyeru, do the actual fighting. Ofeyi meets one of those guerrillas during his journey abroad early in the novel: Demakin, “the Dentist,” whose special role is the selective assassination of the Cartel’s leaders. Ofeyi knows that Demakin and other Aiyeru men are engaged in the struggle, but he does not discover until the end that Ahime himself has been the general on the field of battle. Ofeyi remains, except on one occasion when he is forced to kill a man in self-defense, the intellectual behind the scenes, the voice of the people. As such, however, the Cartel recognizes him as a threat and tries to arrest him. Ofeyi spends most of the novel as a political criminal on the run.

Ofeyi’s primary role in the second half of the novel, as Custodian of the Grain, while it appears to be merely personal, is actually communal. When he first goes to Aiyeru, his mistress, Iriyise, accompanies him. Even before he recognizes the significance of the community, she becomes a part of it. As a sexual symbol, she is Aiyeru’s vital principle; her sexual essence had been perverted, and she has now found her rightful place. She is unable to rest there long, however, before one of the four members of the Cartel, Ahuri, the Cross-River chief, abducts her: A tentacle has reached out and stolen the life force in the seed. Much of the novel, from that point onward, is Ofeyi’s search for her. Risking his life, he travels north to Cross-River, into the center of the conflict, where he finally discovers her in a prison full of workgangs, lunatics, and lepers. With the help of Ahime and Demakin, he rescues her, but she is in a coma. The battle with the Cartel is temporarily lost, and the group returns to Aiyeru for the dormant season. As Ahime describes it at the beginning, Aiyeru is a resting place. The novel ends with hope that Iriyise will awaken, and that new seeds will sprout in the spring.

The Characters

Ofeyi, as the center of consciousness, is the novel’s protagonist. Soyinka clearly distinguishes him from the other characters, not so much by giving him distinctive personality traits but by making him a representative Everyman. He is both a hero and an antihero. While engaging in the political struggle and committing himself to the serious and dangerous confrontations, he never actually becomes one of the guerrillas; the battle is over before he arrives in Cross-River, and his only violent act is forced upon him. His primary act in the novel’s main structure is rescuing Iriyise, yet even in this he seems to move confusedly through events that work themselves out independently of him. He is an observer of the action, maintaining his moral integrity through his intelligent, creative responses. Yet he is blind to the things that go on around him. He does not, for example, fully appreciate the controlling authority of Ahime until the end. The actual events in Ofeyi’s life are deadly serious, yet he moves through them at times with an almost comic, Chaplinesque air. His philosophical idealism, making him constantly aware of the moral nature of his choices, is both necessary and debilitating. He spends as much time reflecting, debating, and hesitating as he does acting out his decisions in the practical world of affairs. The confusion that pervades the scene at large is present also inside Ofeyi’s own consciousness. Because the reader sees what Ofeyi sees, he, too, must live through the experiences before he understands. Ofeyi begins the action fantasizing that he will be the Shelleyian propagator of revolutionary seeds. He fulfills his role but comes to realize, as the reader does, that he is only one member of a larger community and that events are being controlled by others, or by no one. Heroic behavior may be possible and effective but always takes place within a chaotic environment that seems unyielding and that humbles the actor.

Soyinka clearly defines the classic confrontation between man and his environment within an African context. As well as being Everyman, Ofeyi is the Yoruba god Ogun, the most important, and certainly the most dynamic and complex god in the pantheon, who at the beginning of time traversed the chaotic abyss to link human beings and their gods. Ogun’s act symbolizes the central human experience, the building of bridges out of chaos. Yet the mythical experience teaches that the chaos almost overwhelms the god and that only an act of the will can save him. Numerous times during the novel, Ofeyi almost gives up and is tempted to choose the path of Taiila, the representative of Eastern mysticism; at the end, the forces of chaos have literally knocked him unconscious. Yet he fulfills the role of Ogun when he recovers and one final time asserts his individual identity. His survival is not only physical but also psychological and moral.

Other characters function more as representatives than as particularized individuals. Ahime is the father figure; he feels profoundly the moral and psychological realities that Ofeyi as a young man is being initiated into, but he has detached himself from the chaotic buffetings and rides smoothly above the turbulence. He lives consistently according to his principles, the operative one for him in the novel being freedom of choice. Soyinka defines Ahime in relation to Ofeyi: He wants Ofeyi to join in the fight against the government, but he never says anything or creates any situation that will put pressure on him. At the same time, Soyinka defines him in relation to his community: As the repository of traditional African values, Ahime carries out his role as the ritual priest. Ahime represents the relatively passive god Obatala, who remains in the realm of the gods while Ogun makes his journey across the abyss. Even outside Aiyeru, on the field of battle, he retains his philosophical composure. Other characters that fit the mythological scheme are Demakin and Iriyise. Demakin has already made a moral decision about his function in the public world. He represents the warrior aspect of Ogun. Iriyise is a typically African conception of womanhood; without any Puritan or otherwise Western inhibitions about sexuality, she unites sensual and spiritual ideals. For this reason, she merges easily into the culture of Aiyeru, where nature and man live in harmonious balance. By the time of her journey north and her abduction, Soyinka has transformed her into a Yoruba symbol of the original oneness, the goddess Orisa-nla.

The characters, then, operate according to a moral and philosophical set of assumptions that Soyinka derives from his native Yoruba mythology. Their actions have meaning in the world of the living because they repeat ritualistically the actions of the gods.

Critical Context

Soyinka is known primarily as a playwright. He is also a poet and a literary critic as well as a novelist. Season of Anomy is only his second novel; his first, The Interpreters (1965), examines the lives of intellectuals in Nigeria immediately after independence. Their newly acquired independence has left them in a state of limbo, still unsure of themselves and their roles in the new society but on the verge of commitment. Season of Anomy creates a set of characters who have made a commitment to transform society. Soyinka’s characters no doubt reflect his own struggle for social justice, for which he was imprisoned during the Biafran War, from 1967 to 1969. Violence became a fact of life for him. As he records in the journal of his prison experience, The Man Died (1972), he went through the kind of initiation that he attributes to Ofeyi in Season of Anomy.

As with other African writers since 1960, Soyinka’s themes never get far from the conflict between African and Western values. Novelists, especially, have taken on the responsibility of recording and interpreting the impact of colonialism on the African continent. Soyinka’s particular version of that historical occurrence is colored by his cultural bias, the Yoruba mythology of his ancestors. Soyinka has insisted that Africa has its own cultural past that gives meaning to contemporary life.

Some readers complain that Soyinka’s obscurantism interferes with his avowed role as interpreter for his people. While conceding the difficulty of his style, others point to his undisputed mastery of the language and of literary structures. The complexity of his novels may result from the enjoyment Soyinka takes in exploiting his natural talents as well as the complexity of the people, the society, and the African experience that he is interpreting. Soyinka’s accomplishments as dramatist, novelist, poet, critic, and spokesman for African culture were officially acknowledged in 1986, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Bibliography

Gibbs, James, ed. Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, 1980.

Moore, Gerald. Twelve African Writers, 1980.

Moore, Gerald. Wole Soyinka, 1971, 1978.

Palmer, Eustace. The Growth of the African Novel, 1980.