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Related programme
An article by Lynda Morgan on 'A Quest for Dignity', part of the OU/BBC's programme website for the 2004 Reith Lectures on the 'Climate of Fear' by Wole Soyinka
The central component of dignity is freedom. Soyinka is acutely aware of the need to negotiate freedom within the inevitable constraints of social groupings. Yet, as he stated in an interview published in Spear in 1966, the maximum freedom possible should be achieved:
'I believe there is no reason why human beings should not enjoy maximum freedom. In living together in society, we agree to lose some of our freedom. To detract from the maximum freedom socially possible, to me, is treacherous. I do not believe in dictatorship benevolent or malevolent'.Soyinka's writing is consistently concerned with the theme of freedom. A chilling picture of the way in which tyranny seeks to remove freedom (and therefore dignity) from its victims occurs in Madmen and Specialists. The character Bero, a 'Specialist' in torture, says "power comes from bending Nature to your will' and "I control lives."
There are, of course, all sorts of ways of breaking down dignity in prison, and not just the atrocious tortures that are described in Madmen and Specialists. Soyinka was shackled and handcuffed, kept in solitary confinement, and denied books in an attempt to break down his mind. Mapanje describes weevils in his food, rotten corns on his toes, "malaria infested and graffiti / Bespattered walls," and "twelve months of barred visits from / Wife, daughters, son, relatives, friends!" (The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison). Ngugi cites the "brutal invasion" of privacy:
'Thus, I was daily trailed by a warder for twenty-four hours, in waking and sleeping. It was unnerving, truly unnerving, to find a warder watching me shit and urinate into a children's chamber pot in my cell, or to find him standing by the entrance to the toilet to watch me do the same exercise. The electric light is on the night long. To induce sleep, I had to tie a towel over my eyes. This ended in straining them so that after a month they started smarting and watering. But even more painful was to suddenly wake up in the middle of the night, from a dreamless slumber or one softened by sweet illusion or riddled with nightmares, to find two bodiless eyes fixed on me through the iron bars.'
He also describes the torment of monotony:
'Experiments done on animals show that when they are confined to a small space and subjected to the same routine they end up tearing each other. Now the KANU government was doing the same experiment on human beings'.
The effect of such 'experiments' can be the long-term destruction of self-esteem. The Medical Foundation, a charity dedicated to helping the victims of torture and confinement, describes in its regular updates on its work the terrible loss of dignity and confidence that many victims experience, sometimes for years afterwards: for example, not having the courage to go out alone, even when they have escaped from the tyrannical regime and are living in the comparative safety of London.
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Content last updated: 07/07/2004
