Monday 9 May 2016

Professor Wole Soyinka gives coded rebuke to Trumpism in Westminster commencement address

By Chris King Of The St. Louis American


FULTON, MO. – The graduating Class of 2016 at Westminster College was treated to a commencement address by Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, international freedom fighter and arguably the most important historic figure to speak on its quiet campus since Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech there in 1946.
Soyinka spoke at the small, independent liberal arts college in “serene” (his words) Fulton, Missouri, on Saturday, May 7 at the invitation of college President Benjamin Ola Akande, his countryman from Nigeria, West Africa and – much more intimately – his fellow Yoruba.
Soyinka told The American that he accepted the invitation, even with his crowded schedule as an 81-year-old intellectual nomad, out of “tribal chauvinism,” a jesting choice of words, given that he told the young Westminster graduates that they must reject chauvinism and all attempts to divide people and oppress any category of a divided people.
Without ever mentioning the name of Donald Trump, Soyinka offered a complex philosophical argument for why the graduates should reject the kind of rhetoric offered on the Republican primary trail by Trump. The billionaire real estate developer and political neophyte has described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and called for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, deporting all undocumented immigrants and barring all Muslims from entering the United States.
Soyinka cast his argument in terms of the “versus syndrome,” the dangerous habit of casting people in oppositional terms, as one kind of person “versus” another – “old habits,” he said, “that simplify the complexity of human interactions.”
The closest Soyinka came to pinning this syndrome on Trump was when he derided “glib demonizations,” perhaps the most succinct summary of Trump’s rhetoric that has all but won him the 2016 Republican nomination for U.S. president. Soyinka also cast his remarks in the context of “the choices that Americans are presently poised to make,” a clear reference to the November 8 general election when Americans will elect their next president.
In an interview with The American, Soyinka was much more blunt and explicit. When asked about the rise of Trump, Soyinka said that “it’s very revealing that someone who is, basically, a clown” could seriously contend for the U.S. presidency.
In his commencement speech, Soyinka cast the ascendancy of the “versus syndrome” – that is, the rise of Trump – as a backlash against America’s historic election of an African-American president in 2008. Soyinka did mention President Barack Obama by name, once, and wittily remarked that the present White House is “at least a 90 percent African-American household” where, from time to time, “soul food is served.”
Soyinka said that the election of Obama “triggered the height of these binary oppositions,” including the primary binary opposition of white versus black people, resulting in “the highest form of race denigration.” Again, Trump was never named, but anyone able to follow Soyinka’s dense eloquence understood that he was describing the emergence of the rabid Republican base that cheers on Trump.
Soyinka challenged the Westminster graduates to reject the logic of us versus them and reclaim, instead, the power of “we,” referencing one of Obama’s campaign slogans from 2008, when these graduates were too young to vote or even drive a motor vehicle.
“You already possess that armor of invincibility that reads, ‘Yes, we can,’” Soyinka said to conclude his commencement address.
Soyinka – who has published books in nearly every genre, including plays, novels, poems, memoirs and diatribes – has a philosophical cast of mind, though he tends to be more confrontational and less suggestive than he was at Westminster. He may have skirted a more blunt attack on Trump out of respect for his host, a Yoruba from Nigeria conducting his first commencement as the first black president of a college in a mid-Missouri town that is 81 percent white.
Fulton is the county seat of Callaway County. In 2008, voters in Callaway County chose John McCain – and Sarah Palin – over Obama and Joe Biden by a huge margin of 59 to 41 percent. In 2012, they close Mitt Romney over Obama by an almost 2:1 margin, 64 to 33 percent.
Soyinka was more biting – that is, more himself – in very brief remarks he made at a reception in his honor the evening before commencement. Westminster College is home to a Winston Churchill museum and reveres the memory of the former British prime minister (and, like Soyinka, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in his case in 1953) who put the college on the map with his “Iron Curtain” speech.
Yet Soyinka was anything but reverential about the former prime minister who fought colonial wars in Africa for the British kingdom that colonized Nigeria. To a small crowd of faculty from Westminster and the neighboring University of Missouri Columbia, Soyinka described Churchill as “an unapologetic colonialist and exploiter.”

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