You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka
"You Must Set Forth at Dawn" is Wole Soyinka's fifth memoir, exploring over fifty years of his experiences in theater, academia, and politics, while notably omitting personal family narratives. The memoir begins with Soyinka on a plane returning to Nigeria, prompting reflections on loss—both of friends and the natural landscape in his native country. Soyinka employs a non-linear storytelling style, intertwining anecdotes, reflections, poetry, and dialogues across various episodes that make the narrative rich yet challenging for non-Nigerian readers.
The book features vivid portraits of significant figures in Nigerian and African history, including interactions with leaders like Nelson Mandela and Julius Nyerere, as well as connections with prominent writers such as Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer. The memoir reflects Soyinka's ongoing engagement in political discourse, even as he expresses a yearning for solitude. Ultimately, it encapsulates his journey and the complexities of his relationships against the backdrop of Nigeria's tumultuous history, concluding with his emotional return amid jubilant supporters. This work offers insight into Soyinka's life as a prominent intellectual and political figure in contemporary Africa.
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You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 2006
Type of work: Nonfiction
The Work
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is Soyinka’s fifth book of memoirs, but unlike the previous four it does not limit itself to a relatively confined span of time. This long and dense volume, instead, looks back as far as Soyinka’s earliest days as a university student in London, covering more than fifty years in the theater, in the academy, and in the political world, while avoiding mention of his family life.
The first section of You Must Set Forth at Dawn, placed before the chapters Soyinka labels as “Part I,” is “IBA—For Those Who Went Before,” and it establishes the approach Soyinka takes to the material in this memoir. It opens abruptly, in medias res, as Soyinka is on a plane heading toward Nigeria, remembering past plane trips: his return from exile and his trip to bring back the body of another political exile, his friend Femi Johnson. From here he moves on to an anticipation of and reflection on the loss of cactus in the bush landscape near his home in Abeokuta, and then on to a consideration of the human landscape and its loss of another friend, the late former vice chancellor at the University of Ife, Ojetuni Aboyade. Soyinka moves freely from anecdote to anecdote, from reflection to narrative to dialogue to poetry; the section’s twenty-eight pages are broken up into nine separate episodes. While the body of the book is roughly chronological, the frequent digressions and the references to an African history that the author knows far better than many of his readers makes this a challenging memoir for his non-Nigerian audience.
One of the most interesting features of this volume is Soyinka’s vivid and insightful portraits of several of the national leaders with whom he has interacted, including French president François Mitterrand, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, and others. As the memoir unfolds, Soyinka describes personal relationships with nearly all of the important figures in the history of Nigeria over the past fifty years. He tells, for example, of his admiration for and friendship with African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela; he relates his secret attempts in 1991 to arrange diplomatic meetings between Mandela and his rival for political power in South Africa, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, with the aid of another African Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, and of Ibrahim Babangida, then president of Nigeria. Soyinka also describes his relationships with internationally important writers, including Gordimer, the British poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Ken Saro-Wiwa, as well as curators at the British Museum, media executives and personalities, business leaders and military officials.
As the book moves into the twenty-first century and into Soyinka’s late sixties and seventies, he remains a central political figure. While frequently throughout the memoir Soyinka yearns for solitude, for time to fish and read, he never is given—or never chooses—a solitary life. The memoir concludes where it began, at the airport when Soyinka arrives back in Nigeria after years away, surrounded by a cheering, out-of-control throng of well-wishers welcoming him home.
Review Sources
Booklist 102, no. 14 (March 15, 2006): 4.
Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 5 (March 1, 2006): 223.
Library Journal 131, no. 8 (May 1, 2006): 88.
Mother Jones 31, no. 4 (July/August, 2006): 74-75.
The Nation 282, no. 21 (May 29, 2006): 46-50.
The New York Review of Books 53, no. 11 (June 22, 2006): 20-23.
The New York Times Book Review 155 (April 23, 2006): 12-13.
The New Yorker 82, no. 14 (May 22, 2006): 83.
Publishers Weekly 253, no. 9 (February 27, 2006): 47.
The Wilson Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Spring, 2006): 112-113.