The potentialities of the road for both progress and destruction in Wole Soyinka’s Play The Road
Soyinka’s first work The way it offers him a mirror through which he looks at, critically examines, and laughs at the feeble failings and pretensions of emerging African societies. This is, of course, a very familiar concern in all genres of African literature. Wole Soyinka, therefore, is not out of place to concern himself and his readers or audiences with his work. The way
The way brings together a ragtag gang of thugs, wannabe truckers, and slackers building a slum near a used engine parts store. Presiding over this shop and influencing, if not leading, this motley crew is a former lay Anglican reader and Sunday school teacher who has assumed the title of Professor. As he wanders the roads he apparently teaches, he searches for car parts in the wreckage that emanates from accidents.
Although this play lacks a linear narrative flow, it engages the audience well in the myriad of problems that plague emerging modern African societies: poor urban planning, rural-urban migration, unemployment, poverty, vagrancy, crime, and corruption. Soyinka thus combines social commentary, bawdy comedy, and poetic philosophical investigation with a caustic satirization of a pretentious and ruthless materialistic society.
The prevalence of coercion and repression in the workings of modern African societies is suggested through the Chief-In-Town and his recruitment of thugs to serve as bodyguards at political meetings. In this way, we get a glimpse of the violent political methods with which African political parties strive to perpetually stay in power, a phenomenon that seems to have persisted in Nigeria even until recently.
Corruption, another characteristic of contemporary African societies, is portrayed. Corruption is embodied in the person of the policeman, Particulars Joe, who takes bribes from drivers who break the law, looks for more bribes in other unexpected places. He shares hemp with political thugs even when he’s still in uniform. Ironically, the one who should be in charge of maintaining law and order is the one who initiates their violation. The society presented in the play gives the impression of turning towards anarchy without anyone trying to uphold the law. Drivers, for example, break the law by buying counterfeit licenses and driving without going through the necessary education and training. As a consequence, deaths frequently occur on the roads. Corruption is pervasive and runs through all areas, including through the so-called crème de la crème, whose moral depravity Samson lampoons here:
Now I want you to take the car – the long one – and
Drive along the Marina at two o’clock. all the good girls
Just coming out of the offices, the young and tender faces
Fresh out of school – take them to my house. Ancient
Bones like me must put cool tonic in your blood.
Samson, parodying the rich whom he mocks with envy, blames them for the growing moral degeneracy of the young. Since it seems normal for him, as a rich man, to behave in such a way, he would send his elegant car for a spin around the marina at two o’clock, when all the young girls would be out of school, so that he could collect all the beautiful among them. and bring them to his house to satisfy his lustful desires. One could imagine the incalculable social problems such reckless activities create. But when we find out later about the criteria for upward mobility, we must expect the worst results. There is the case of the messenger who became a senator after earning ‘thirteen thousand’ with which he bought half the houses in Apapa.
Religion itself is of an equally degraded and superficial nature, if not more so. Little spirituality is evident in their procedures. The professor’s display of vanity in his past life in the church indicates what drives people to fight for important positions there. Saluki puts it aptly this way: ‘Dat one no to church, na high society’. The professor had been an ostentatious man in his church life, putting more emphasis on his speech and his claim to saintliness, to the point of bowing at every mention of Jesus and wiping his forehead with an air of moral superiority. His theft of church funds is another indication of his corruption and insincerity with God. The professor typifies an entire group of pretentious and corrupt church officials who are drawn to the calling not by spiritual devotion but by a cunning desire to increase their wealth. The church has thus lost almost all its glory, thus becoming just another social club. The Professor therefore enters with a particularly pompous gait thus capturing the attention of the congregation and holding it until he reaches his pew. [p162] His vanity is further exposed by the fact that he habitually reserves a pew for himself, so much so that even if “a stranger came and sat on it, the church warden wasted no time in kicking him out”. [p162] Thus, the whole Church is constantly immersed in goals from which not even the bishop is excluded. He is clearly envious of the increased attention gained by the congregation for the professor whose lectures topple his sermon leaving half the church asleep. The other half manage to stay awake as the bishop continues to preach, oblivious to what was going on as they watch the professor take notes. The materialism, exhibitionism, and falsehood that motivate people to be active in the church are thus exposed:
In the absence of spirituality to redeem such a society from the depths of materialism and corruption, decline is more imminent. This society is governed by a special kind of ruthless materialism in which people prosper by trading in the misfortunes of others. The professor, for example, creates accidents through which he trades in the victims’ possessions. So dehumanized have they become that they are bereft of all forms of human compassion. The ties of kinship or friendship do not obstruct the course of this callous business. When Sergeant Burma realized that the driver of the wrecked vehicle he was dismounting from was an old comrade from the front, it was then that he showed Christian charity well but not without helping himself as usual. Sergeant Burma only took the body of his friend to the morgue after stopping to remove all the tires from the vehicle. The social problems that emanate from there are myriad, including juvenile delinquency, crime, bullying, and violence, as evidenced by the reckless activities of the Tokyo Kid and his gang of hemp smokers. This also manifests itself in the thieving professor and many others turning themselves in.
The Kongi government and the road share destructive potentials. Kongi could be seen as representing the modern day paranoid dictator. Instead of being a procreative force, he breeds and spreads destruction, decapitating his opponents and showing no genuine interest in fertility rites of the soil and flesh. Thus, in Hemlock he is seen as a monster that should have been scorched before it reached its full destructive proportions. This destructive potential is also reversed in the way that normally brings progress and development to hitherto remote and inaccessible areas. El Camino presents itself as a cunning and well-timed monster waiting patiently and silently to pounce on an unsuspecting victim and gobble them up ravenously. The road users – the drivers, their touts, their passengers and parasites in general are perpetually exposed to death on the tracks because, as it is suggested: “The track and the spider lie rejoicing, then the fly buzzes like a fool happy”. [p178] The happy fool who zooms along unaware of the fact that he is happily meeting a ghastly end aptly depicts the ghastly fate that awaits hapless road users. The precariousness of their existence is further amplified through Kotonou’s rhetorical yet bleak catalog of deceased heroes whose passing heroism is ironic because their deaths have no noble cause.
Where is the Fox that never came back from the North?
Without a basket of guinea fowl eggs? Where is
Akanni the lizard? I have not seen any other
Anyone who climbed on the roof of the truck and
He plays the samba at sixty miles an hour.
Where is Sigidi Ope? Where is Sapele Joe?
Who faced six police officers at the intersection?
And he threw them all into the river?
Samson:
He overshot the pontoon, fell with
your truck [p 157]
All these devotees of the path after a lifetime of living from it and worshiping it have been consumed by it and thus transformed into ironic but legendary heroes. One such scene is vividly captured by the professor with all the horrors of it: ‘Come on, I’ve got a new wonder to show you…a car-driven-tree-crazy: Gbram! And crystal rains flying on broken souls.’ Then, moving on an even darker note, he emphasizes “the rapid onset of physical decay after death.” Which he is quick to admit ‘is a market for stale meat, noisy with flies and quarrelsome with old women’. [p.158-9]
Much later in piquant language, Say Tokyo Kid recalls the scene of an accident:
You know, last week I had an accident in
The way. There was a dead lady and you know
What was her pretty head smeared with? sweet potato
studying Do you see what I mean? A great lady will
Kin stains his head in yam porrage. [p 172-3]
The teacher also exploits the dangers along the way for his own personal gratification, regardless of the resulting suffering. It cares less about whether or not those to whom it licenses are qualified to drive, which is another contributing factor to the growing dangers on the road.
The destructiveness of the road, which devours human lives in large numbers, is in fact a reflection of the destruction and greed that we see in all the characters. And again, they could be seen as a reflection of a cruel and corrupt society that leaves no room for creation or development. Through biting satire, Soyinka records his distaste for such unpleasant aspects of modern African societies.
The end of the play leaves us with no hope of purging such societies. The Professor’s perennial search for a perverted version of the Word is a clear indication of the inverted values of modern African society. In the end he reaches the path: death. This suggests that the way of modern society, just like the physical way, can only lead to destruction. Thus, before dying, the professor transmits the vision of him:
Be even like the road itself. Flatten your
bellies with the hunger of an unfavorable day, to be able
your hands with the knowledge of death…. Breathe
as the way Be the way. roll up in dreams,
lay in betrayal and deceit and in the moment
With a confident step, raise your head and hit the
traveler in your confidence, swallow it whole, or break
him on earth. He spreads a wide sheet for death with
the longitude and time of the sun between you to the
one face is multiplied and the shadow is cast by all
the condemned:
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http://www.nathanielturner.com/wolesoyinakongisharvest.htm
SOURCES:
Jones Elder Durosimi, The writings of WOLE SOYINKA Heinemann
1983
gerald moore WOLE SOYINKA Holmes and Meier Pub. 1971
Soyinka Wole The way in COLLECTED GAMES2 Oxford University
Press 1983