Jack Mapanje makes a similar point by employing as an epigraph to his collection of poetry, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, a verse from Proverbs (29:12): "When a ruler listens to false reports, all his ministers will be scoundrels." We are very familiar with the idea of the 'false report' presented as truth. George Orwell satirised it in his highly influential (this, after all, is the novel that gave us the phrase 'Big Brother'!) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), with his 'Ministry of Truth' that insists on such lies as "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," and "Ignorance is strength." Soyinka himself, in his play Madmen and Specialists (1971), reveals the distortion of truth to devastating effect, when the torturer, Aafaa, refers to himself as a 'Specialist in truth', yet says to his victim, "Say anything, say anything that comes into your head but SPEAK, MAN!"

But in his third lecture Soyinka is concerned with more than such obvious distortions. He refers to "our season of rhetorical hysteria," by which he means the deliberate willing of oneself into a state of hysteria, through phrases that become commonplace and generate fear. He cites religion as an example of this use of language, and claims that it is a technique that has been taken over by politicians. We have seen recently how phrases like "the axis of evil" are used to promote intense anxiety about certain parts of the world and certain peoples. They become unthinking clichés, reiterated in newspapers, radio and television interviews, and casually in the pub. Thus they perpetuate a climate of anxiety that is fuelled by fear of the 'racial other'.

And how do we resist such clichés, so that they do not end up infecting us all? The answer that Soyinka proposes in Madmen and Specialists is by encouraging people to think. This is surely such an obvious solution that one might wonder why it needs to be stated. But Soyinka's ironic script reveals that one of the strategies of powerful regimes is to try to prevent independent thought. Bero, another 'Specialist' in torture, refers with horror to what his father has done with the victims of torture. His assignment was "to help the wounded readjust to the pieces and remnants of their bodies;" for example, to "teach them to make baskets if they still had fingers," or to use their mouths "to sing if their vocal chords had not been shot away." Instead, Bero says, "he began to teach them to think, think, THINK! Can you picture a more treacherous deed than to place a working mind in a mangled body?" But who is this an act of treachery against? The victims themselves or the torturers who have tried to control these victims?

Soyinka is of course writing in Madmen and Specialists about the atrocities of tyrannical regimes. But his third lecture raises uncomfortable questions about the ways in which governments that we do not see as tyrannical use rhetoric to generate thoughtless hysteria. Apparently safe in the West from the obvious cruelties of tyranny, we cannot afford to allow our minds to be dulled by complacency. No government is free from the drive towards power, and we must follow Soyinka's incitement to 'think' if we are to remain alert to the linguistic strategies employed to generate 'unthinking' agreement.

  < previous   Page 3 of 3

Content last updated: 07/07/2004

About the author

Lynda Morgan completed her Ph.D thesis on South African settler fiction at the School of Oriental and African Studies (the University of London), and her main literary interests continue to be in African literature and colonial/postcolonial studies. She publishes papers in these areas, and regularly contributes to national and international conferences. In August she will deliver a paper on South African and Australian settler fiction at the ICLA Congress in Hong Kong. She is also a published poet.

Comments