Through stories, visuals, and historical records, we unearth what makes Ebrohimie Road more than just a campus street or physical location, but a place of history and a museum of memory
THURSDAY. NOVEMBER 14; 8pm: FILM SCREENING @ Foodcourt
WRITTEN and directed by Nigerian linguist Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and directed by veteran filmmaker Tunde Kelani
Synopsis: Before he became Africa’s first Nobel Prizewinner in Literature, a small campus bungalow at the University of Ibadan played an outsized role in the life of a man, Wole Soyinka, his family, his university, and the nation. Here’s the story. How do we preserve not just what we remember but the physical markers of such transient memory? In Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory, we examine how the personal became the national, through the recollection of central and peripheral characters; how a small campus residence became witness to some of the most significant issues in Nigerian social, political, and literary history, many of which remain unresolved. And how ecological changes contribute to the erosion of history and a sense of place. Through stories, visuals, and historical records, we unearth what makes Ebrohimie Road more than just a campus street or physical location, but a place of history and a museum of memory.”
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The future the people in Ebrohimie Road envisage for Soyinka’s University of Ibadan house seems closer in conception to a shrine, where carvings are displayed to invite engagement by those who would pay obeisance to the memorialized. This desire, and a lack of an active Ṣóyínká in Ebrohimie Road, results in a film that reflects less of the man, and more of the legacy, related to but apart from his essence, or “aura” to use Iduma’s word
WỌLÉ Ṣóyínká closes his foreword to Ibàdàn: The Penkelemes Years with a defense of ‘faction,’ his preferred mode of writing stories about his life, which involves a “deliberate dislocation of some actual names and events from their physical moorings and, occasionally, actual time.” He makes a cheeky appeal to readers who may be inclined to fact-check his claims:
And please don’t write to correct me about the episode of the lightning bolt, which I have hoisted from its place of occurrence—the uncompleted building near the school farm, where three of us had taken refuge during a thunderstorm—and transposed it onto the occasion when a snake decided to take shelter from the rain in the prep room, selecting the space beneath my feet—perhaps because they didn’t touch the ground… It will be obvious that I had to save up the appearance of the snake for its more interesting cohabitation in Agodi. No reader would believe the actual persistence of snakes in their recurring, strange and dramatic attachment to this now fictionalised person of Maren, continuing all the way from Aké. Even to me, it sometimes appears abnormal.
Ṣóyínká is the most prolific profiler of his own life and perhaps Nigeria’s most comprehensive autobiographer—or auto-mythographer depending on your mileage; that his life feels scripted by a god with a dramatic flair is both historical happenstance and artistic achievement.
In memoirs like Ibàdàn, Ṣóyínká claims the status of a Forrest-Grumpian hero, one that fits neatly into a narrative about a communal striving for progressive nationalism that was typical of mid-twentieth century Nigerian elites—at least in public posture—reflecting their desire to build a political life around progressive ideals that surpassed personal enrichment. (Such halcyon days!) Yet, as Biodun Jeyifo has argued in Wọlé Ṣóyínká: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism, Ṣóyínká is perhaps at his best when his immense gifts of language are deployed ironically to divine and skewer the ideological narratives of his time. In Ṣóyínká’s grand memoir project, Ibàdàn continues from Aké: The Years of Childhood, its narrative covering the years the playwright spent in the titular city before he was imprisoned by the military government for 26 months during the Biafra war. The Man Died: Prison Notes was the first of the memoirs to be published, and it is the events that precede and succeed that imprisonment, all occurring in Ibadan, that linguist, poet, and travel writer Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún covers in the documentary Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory.
In 2018, Túbọ̀sún was awarded the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship for a “nonfiction book [that] takes the enchanting life of Wọlé Ṣóyínká (traveller, forest dweller, and hunter) as a starting point in the creative interrogation of the Nigerian megafauna, literary and cultural history, landscape, travel, conservation, and many other dimensions of the human experience — from the viewpoint of a travel writer—through histories, travelogues, language and cultural inquiry, and the Nigerian drama of existence.” In the prize-winning announcement, the book was more concretely described as “‘Ṣóyínká in the Bush,’ a genre-bending biography of the Nigerian Nobel laureate that will focus on Ṣóyínká’s love of nature and his work in restoring natural habitats, all while paying tribute to the great body of work Ṣóyínká has gifted the world.”
Perhaps this slant approach to the life of Ṣóyínká implicitly acknowledges the difficulty of writing about someone who has exhaustively and with unmatchable dexterity documented his own life. Since 2018, Túbọ̀sún has publicly produced an essay and a documentary that take Ṣóyínká’s homes as their primary subject. The essay, titled A House for Mr Ṣóyínká, which introduces readers to Ṣóyínká in his current home in Abeokuta, was published in Popula in 2018, a few months before the announcement of the Miles Morland scholarship. And Ebrohimie Road, which takes Ṣóyínká’s residence at the University of Ibadan as its primary subject, is the documentary. There is a peculiar irony in the fact that Túbọ̀sún, a travel writer, is primarily concerned with the homes of Ṣóyínká, a writer he describes as “our most prominent travel writer, [whose] memoirs have always been in motion….” Túbọ̀sún is invested in celebrating Ṣóyínká and the concern with the houses in which he has lived follows that investment. Roads, compared to homes, are often sites of ephemeral activity, and as anyone who has walked past an ojúbọ knows: when you place an offering by the road in the morning, it is with the understanding that it might be gone by the time the sun knocks on the crown of your head. That Túbọ̀sún attempts to offer views of Ṣóyínká’s life from places of rest rather than liminal spaces of movement may be justified by the fact that solitude is central to the formation of Soyinka as an artist, but it presents a logistical and philosophical conundrum for a project that attempts to pay tribute to his work. Unless Soyinka is ready to offer a glimpse into his seclusions, what we know of him and his work is best understood on the road.
“Ijọ́ abá kú làá d’ère, ènìyàn kan ò sunwọ̀n láàyè,” say the Yorùbá. That it is in death we become sculpture, for no one is without blemish while alive is not a declaration of the impossibility to celebrate the living. Rather, the saying underscores the aesthetic limits of making sculptures of bodies whose souls are still in the process of perfecting their expression. That Ebrohimie Road tries to negate this Yoruba disposition is both its strength and weakness. All the primary agents responsible for making Ebrohimie Road take personal, creative, and philosophical cues from Yorùbá language and culture: Ṣóyínká’s lifelong adoption of Ogun as muse and personal deity is central to his literary production; Túbọ̀sún’s work as a linguist is invested in championing the digital adoption of Yorùbá language; and perhaps no other contemporary Nigerian filmmaker has privileged Yoruba culture in their career as much as Tunde Kelani, the documentary’s cinematographer, whose corpus philosopher Adeshina Afolayan describes as defined and delimited by fidelity to Yorùbá traditionalism.
The rich memorial traditions of the Yorùbá offer a valuable lens with which to view the documentary Ebrohimie Road. Memorials in Yorùbá arts and culture are either enacted through poetry (oríkì) or sculpture (ère) and both modes often come together in dramatic forms such as Egúngún, where elements of the literary and plastic arts combine to form spectacles in honor of the ancestors. Art historian Babatunde Lawal has argued in his essay “The Living Dead: Art and Immortality among the Yoruba of Nigeria” that, in the context of a Yorùbá memorial, the poem and the sculpture are mere signifiers for the temporal human body. Their aesthetic appraisal relies less on their naturalistic representation (àyàjọra) and more on their capacity to evoke the essence of those they depict. A conceptual representation (àròyà) is therefore just as valid a memorial as one that aims for verisimilitude. Linguist Olabiyi Yai has long argued that all Yorùbá art should be viewed as oríkì because that poetic form evinces the dialectics of Yorùbá art-making as it divines between tradition and innovation, ephemerality and immortality. This understanding of Yorùbá art offers one way to appraise Ṣóyínká’s factional representations, and it also allows us to contextualize Túbọ̀sún’s documentary.
Ebrohimie Road is one of many celebrations honoring Ṣóyínká’s 90th birthday. A biopic directed by Awam Amkpa and titled The Man Died, taking its cue from the memoir title, is also set to be released in July 2024. As one begins to survey these programmed celebrations, Ben Okri’s description of Ṣóyínká’s novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People comes to mind: it is a “novel written at the end of an artist’s tether. It has gone beyond satire. It is a last dance macabre.” Despite his recent skirmishes with young Nigerians on the internet over his criticism of some nascent political movements—and there is enough material, spanning decades, for a biography of Ṣóyínká’s life titled The Man Fights with Young People on the Internet—Ṣóyínká is now more celebrated than reviled. A poorly read generation of Nigerians may not readily associate his works with his name (as a video of a young person referring to him as ‘Sole Woyinka’ recently revealed), yet hardly a Nigerian adult exists who will not see his grey mane and recognize that encased beneath it is the mind of one of the most important Nigerians living or dead.
The man is being memorialized while still alive, defined more by the praise of his admirers than the criticism of his detractors. And, as part of these celebrations of his 90th birthday, more memorials have been raised in his honor. President Ahmed Bola Tinubu renamed the perpetually mismanaged and perennially endangered National Theatre in his name. Tinubu’s gift feels like a pharmakon: Ṣóyínká’s name is either going to protect the monument from ruin (such wishful thought) or soon the Nobel laureate’s name will adorn a Nigerian-style ultra-modern shopping mall. The government of Ogun state named a road after him at a reception held at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta. A road bearing Ṣóyínká’s name is perhaps more fitting for this poet of transitions, but one wonders if an altar for Ògún was raised at all during these celebrations, and what ironic pleasures Ṣóyínká took in the fact that the reception occurred in the monument Obasanjo—one of his arch enemies—built.
Túbọ̀sún’s work in Ebrohimie Road should not be viewed with the cynical eyes with which I am bound by good sense to appraise the acts of Tinubu or his acolytes. The documentary seems genuinely invested in introducing viewers to the house at 8, Ebrohimie Road, University of Ibadan, one of the locations central to the artist’s formation. Perhaps Túbọ̀sún hopes some young person will someday enter the University of Ibadan and discover the house where ‘Sole Woyinka’ lived, and be inspired to read his books. In this way, the documentary itself functions as a museum, a repository of otherwise ephemeral words and images. At the same time, the film advocates for the transformation of the house on Ebrohimie Road into a physical museum, comparable to that of other celebrated writers around the world. The documentary is the oríkì and the building is the ère, both memorials intended to immortalize the living Ṣóyínká.
The first chapter of the three-chapter documentary introduces a photograph of Ṣóyínká taken in October 1969, right after the then 35-year-old writer was released from his prison. In the image, Ṣóyínká sits on the steps of his home at the University. He is dressed in a field jacket rolled at the sleeves, black slacks, and flat toe-loop sandals. Surrounding him are three carvings, part of his well-regarded collection of Yorùbá artworks. In the essay “Memory of Things Unseen,” Teju Cole writes: “Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.” Ebrohimie Road begins with such a photographic memorial in an attempt to recover that which has fallen away. Because the photograph’s inherent indexicality preserves what the poet may have otherwise forgotten, Túbọ̀sún can retrieve a video that shows when the photograph was taken; track down Ṣọlá Ọdúnfá, the journalist interviewing Ṣóyínká in the photograph’s original context who is restrained from participating in the documentary by family; and we can further peer into Ṣóyínká’s home as it existed in the past, to investigate the facts of life that made the man wear a face that avoids the camera and is fixed, instead, in sad but stony resolve at a horizon beyond our gaze.
In an essay published earlier this month in World Literature Today, Túbọ̀sún introduces the photograph and the coming documentary, and lays out the stakes of Ebrohimie Road:
So the details of his productive presence at the university were always a matter of conjecture. How long did he stay after his return from prison? What was it like when he was gone? Why did he resign, beyond the issue of the war? As a student of this university, I had heard stories, none of which were conclusive. Some said he was pushed out because of his involvement with politics. Some said it was his temperament. Others said it was his personal decision, which he himself had written about. But in each of these writings, there were different reasons. In one, his marriage had been strained and he wanted distance. In another, his collection of carvings, which beautified and decorated his house—and that famous photo—had been stolen one after the other while he was gone, so he no longer felt welcome. In another narrative, the political situation on campus after his return made it hard to remain there. And in yet another, corroborated by some of his colleagues, the decision of the university to not officially confirm him as a full professor upset him and led to his resignation.
To clarify the theories gleaned in the research of the image, Túbọ̀sún reaches out to Ṣóyínká, who initially misidentifies the photograph. This error is perhaps, as Túbọ̀sún suggests, because the photograph is included in Ibadan, where Ṣóyínká stops the narrative two years before 1967 when he became employed as the first indigenous director of the University of Ibadan’s School of Drama and therefore a resident of the house on Ebrohimie Road. After he is corrected by Túbọ̀sún through evidence such as cracks on the steps and a video of Ṣóyínká being interviewed by the news reporter the same day the photograph was taken, Ṣóyínká accepts his error but refuses to accede to Túbọ̀sún’s dream of revisiting that building. “You’ll have to research that yourself, I can’t guarantee precision,” Ṣóyínká writes in response, setting the biographer along on his quest for archival recovery.
In place of Ṣóyínká’s physical presence on Ebrohimie Road, the documentary offers a sketch of the house and the man who made it relevant through archival footage, drone shots, and talking head interviews. The interview subjects can be divided into two categories. The first consists of those who can speak to the history of Ṣóyínká’s time on Ebrohimie Road itself and includes family who lived with him, such as his ex-wife, four of his children, his sister, and friends such as Femi Euba who passed through the residence. The other half consists of personalities who contribute to the attempt to reveal the truth of his time in and departure from the University of Ibadan. It is to this latter group that Professors Remi Raji, Niyi Osundare, and Dan Izevbaye belong. Professor Nelson Fashina, the most recent in a long line of English- and Theatre Arts-affiliated faculty who have resided in the Ṣóyínká House, should belong to this latter group, but his status as the current steward of 8 Ebrohimie Road connects him to the past the former group of commentators reflect upon.
If Túbọ̀sún has critically probed the origin of Ṣóyínká’s “stone cold” refusal to revisit his University of Ibadan home, we are not made privy to such investigations. The choice could be artistic, an artist choosing to let his already-published truth stand uncontested, yet the documentary proceeds like the answer relies solely on the personal, a refusal to revisit the site of turmoil. Ebrohimie Road does not pry into the man and myth that is Ṣóyínká, rather it is invested in shoring up his legacy. Yet, there are opportunities to offer the viewer the former without negating the latter. His dissatisfaction with his ex-wife Olaide Idowu is well documented, but when the documentary sits with Idowu, who spent more time in charge of the Ebrohimie residence than Ṣóyínká and whom Ṣóyínká subjects to derision in Ibàdàn, we hear neither her side of the story, nor a response to Ṣóyínká’s telling. She punts the difficult questions back to an absent Ṣóyínká, an act consistent across her various engagements with the press. The conclusion we can leave with is no different from the questions with which Túbọ̀sún begins: that is, Ṣóyínká left Ebrohimie Road due to a combination of his discomfort upon his return from prison and the treatment of his peers, his estrangement from his wife, and the refusal of the University of Ibadan to promote him to the position of a professor.
The only part of this documentary that may be revelatory to avid readers of Ṣóyínká’s memoirs is the evidence produced by academics such as Raji to discern the “real” reason Ṣóyínká left the University. The revelation here is not that of unearthing unknown proofs of his departure; rather, it is the attempt to turn speculation about his departure into a definitive narrative of estrangement and persecution by the hands of careerist committeemen and the “illogic”—to echo Osundare—of university bureaucracy. If this documentary has a villain, it is in the institution of the university, both in its past inability to recognize the value of Ṣóyínká’s work and in its present neglect of his residence as a valuable memorial that must be preserved. The documentary’s focus on events surrounding his departure from the university affirms the notion that Ṣóyínká’s refusal to revisit the house on Ebrohimie Road is due to his acrimonious departure. Yet the school’s theatre building is named in his honor, and in 2014, after a long boycott, Ṣóyínká made a triumphant reentry to the university to accept an honorary doctorate. Even today, on Barth Road, a thoroughfare in the university from which Ebrohimie branches, there is a giant billboard with Ṣóyínká’s face on it. If Ṣóyínká’s home in the University of Ibadan is at risk of being mown down to make way for another lawn, that failure is perhaps simply due to academic institutions like the University of Ibadan being run by people who are concerned with values other than genius; Hanlon’s razor explains the neglect of 8 Ebrohimie as memorial and museum, not the backstabbing knife of academic jealousy. Ṣóyínká has outlived those who could be credibly envious of him. If the actions of present administrators coincidentally mirror those of their predecessors, it is only because power in Nigerian academia, like every other facet of life in the country, is wielded by the worst of the lot, already of lesser quality than their predecessors.
Because Ṣóyínká refused to participate in Túbọ̀sún’s proposal for rememory, his appearance in the documentary is limited to talking-head sound bites lacking the wit and irony that characterizes the man at his best. We know what is possible when Ṣóyínká is freely commenting as recorded in his memoirs. I want the artist who said, of V. S. Naipaul’s death, that “the white race has lost a good writer.” The one who walked into a studio-gallery in Senegal and upon seeing an Ousmane Sow sculpture immediately named it as that which should have stood on the Collines des Mamelles instead of the gigantic African Renaissance Monument.
It is necessary to acknowledge, as critic A.O. Scott asserts in his review of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, that documentaries about writers are always at a “certain disadvantage” when compared to their works. Therefore, all that Ebrohimie Road can credibly offer, in the absence of Ṣóyínká’s animating presence, is an activist attempt to preserve his legacy through an implicit advocacy for a museum to be raised in his name. Rest assured that this is a project made by serious people with legitimate intentions. (I once suffered through a viewing of Onyeka Nwelue’s documentary about Flora Nwapa, titled The House of Nwapa. Compared to the monument Túbọ̀sún and his collaborators built for Ṣóyínká, Nwelue’s project is a crumbling edifice held together by the mucilage of his trademark bluster.) But before we become evangelists of a “Wọlé Ṣóyínká Museum of Memory” at 8, Ebrohimie Road, it is worth asking what exactly such a museum means; as his daughter Peyìbòmí Ṣóyínká-Airewele rightly observed, a sterile location where people can only gaze at objects from a distance without engaging with the space is probably not an ideal celebration of Ṣóyínká.
The word museum has no direct translation in Yorùbá. And there are, in fact, not many clear analogues in cultures around Nigeria for the practice of creating an institution that exists solely for extracting artworks from their contexts and preserving them for the admiration of strangers. Museums in Nigeria are historically more known for their inability to preserve the artworks in their remit than their legacy as holders of memory. If museums were more efficient at preserving collective memory, perhaps Nana Olomu, the palm oil merchant, leader of the Itsekiri in the late 19th century, and British-appointed Governor of the Benin River, from whose headquarters the name Ebrohimie Road originates, would be more than a footnote in Nigerian history, and his story of resistance would be more prominent in the Nigerian imaginary. That we often pontificate so much about the British punitive expedition of Benin City in 1897 without speaking of their ransacking of Ebrohimi in 1894 reflects the extent to which we have refused to adequately integrate Olomu’s story into Nigerian lore. Yet Olomu lies today in Koko, Delta State, in a Living History Museum dedicated to his memory. Of his final resting place, the critic Emmanuel Iduma writes:
Not much of what we see in Koko recurs in my mind, except a grave and a bedframe. The body in question is Nanna Olomu’s, the Governor of Itserkiriland from 1884 to 1894. The grave, filled with loose sand, and the bedframe, lacking a bed, seems duplicitous as monuments. What it didn’t lack, in the minutes I stand becalmed, is the aura of Nanna, a benevolent ghost.
“Benevolent ghost,” a stretch of my imagination. And yet: the primary intention of establishing access to the room where Nanna slept and is buried is to intersect his life with that of others, in perpetuity. By now the room is part of a Living History Museum in his name, consisting mainly of his personal effects, and documentation of the epoch he lived and worked in.
Iduma recorded these impressions of the final resting place of Olomu in his essay Lives that Enter Mine, part of a series published by the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project in the wake of their Borders Within 2016 road trip. Perhaps it is sufficient that a house of memory preserve something of the aura of the one in whose honor it has been raised—yet I doubt if Túbọ̀sún, or any champion of Ṣóyínká, would be content with a house on the edge of the University of Ibadan campus that preserves his aura but is scarcely visited, only kept alive by the efforts of academic historians, a small group of devotees, and a lyric essay about travels through Nigeria.
The future the people in Ebrohimie Road envisage for Soyinka’s University of Ibadan house seems closer in conception to a shrine, where carvings are displayed to invite engagement by those who would pay obeisance to the memorialized. This desire, and a lack of an active Ṣóyínká in Ebrohimie Road, results in a film that reflects less of the man, and more of the legacy, related to but apart from his essence, or “aura” to use Iduma’s word. Rather, Ebrohimie Road is like a photograph used, in the absence of conceptual tools, to carve his ère. This practice of substituting mechanical reproduction for that which should be obtained by memory is not alien to Yorùbá culture: Art historians Rowland Abiodun and Olu Oguibe have written about the use of photographs in the making of àkó memorial effigies, when no artist is skilled or trusted enough to conceptually carve a memorial figure that can adequately depict the essence of the one who has passed. Bí a ò bá rí àdán, a sì fi òòbẹ̀ se ẹbọ. If we cannot obtain a large bat for the ritual, a small one will do just fine. Although Ebrohimie Road is not an ideal oríkì for Ṣóyínká, it is still an acceptable stop-gap until the eventual creation of an ideal shrine.
Has a deity ever visited a shrine dedicated to their memory? My knowledge of Yorùbá history does not provide a ready answer. While I have tried to suggest that the documentary Ebrohimie Road is largely defined by Ṣóyínká’s refusal to revisit his home in the University of Ibadan, the documentary does bring his first son to revisit the steps, reenact his father’s pose, and tell stories of his time in the house. Oláòkun is a competent òòbẹ̀ to his father’s àdán, for it is he who offers perhaps the only moment in the documentary to ripple its placid surface with a hint of horror and scandal. In his recollection, the young Olaokun unwittingly provides a sacrifice to Ogun. This macabre story, alongside mentions of carvings of monkeys with great phalluses, is the kind of memorial I hope will fill a shrine to the memory of Ṣóyínká’s time on the University of Ibadan campus. If a visitor cannot walk into a monument to Ṣóyínká and yell, “kí là wọn ère yìí,” as his daughter Móremí Sóyínká-Oníjàlá says guests exclaimed when they came into their residence, is the aura of Ṣóyínká really preserved? If we cannot visit a Ṣóyínká memorial and sense the wild and the uncanny from the writer who did his best work probing the strange ironies of Nigerian life, then to whom, really, does the memorial belong? The nonagenary birthday celebration of an accomplished artist is bound to inspire acts that feel final, yet there will continue to be opportunities to produce flawed memorials in Ṣóyínká’s honor, for the man himself is not done with his own story. One can sense that Túbọ̀sún is not done finding an ideal ère to raise in memorial for a writer who will continue to be worthy of praise, and Ebrohimie Road is just a verse in a longer oríkì.
