Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka – playwright, poet, ‘anatomist of the workings of power’ – shows a Munich audience he is still well able to pounce

Wole Soyinka, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, 17 February 2017. Photograph: Christine Madden

THE BUZZ in the lecture hall in the Literaturhaus München becomes more subdued as the minutes tick by – Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, scheduled to speak as part of the Munich Security Conference, is late. The audience were told yesterday that he was flying in from Los Angeles. Is the flight delayed? Or – in this age, one can’t help leaping to drastic worst-case scenarios – had something more sinister happened?

He arrives then, to enthusiastic applause, flanked by the deputy director of the MSC. It appears that Soyinka’s arrival occurred at the same time as “our chancellor’s” and in the worldwide political pecking order, her security took precedence. (It is, after all, a security – not a literary – conference.)

Literally an éminence grise with his eye-catching shock of white hair, Nobel laureate Soyinka explains what sets Cassandra and her heirs apart: “listening to the quiet, hearing the sounds of danger”. Soyinka has been speaking and writing with her voice for decades – he was imprisoned for using it in the 1960s when the government interrogated then imprisoned him for almost two years. He also criticised the 20^th-century concept of “négritude”, current among intellectuals using it to oppose a mentality of colonial racism. Being deliberately outspoken about their ethnicity did not give Africans power but put them on the defensive. “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces,” he stated. Most recently in Africa, Soyinka says, “the voice of Cassandra was heeded” when former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh was finally forced to step down after repudiating the results of an election he did not win.

Again he used that voice – the result of experience, of human knowledge, the practice of integrity – in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He relates how then French president Mitterrand convoked a conference of Nobel prize laureates. Asked for his opinion, Soyinka said that one of the few scientific principles he had retained from his schooling was that nature abhors a vacuum. The eastern bloc had crumbled. Had the rest of the world thought about what would take its place? “I think,” he told them, presciently, “it will be religious fundamentalism.” Only a few weeks later, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran issued the fatwa against writer Salmon Rushdie for the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. It was, as he explained, the first act to show the militancy, the disregard for humanity and lack of conscience of a movement that has now ascended to be the issue of our era.

‘What you call an enemy is very important’

“People say there was no warning,” Soyinka challenges, “but there is always a warning. The Cassandras in the world are never asleep.” He cites two examples in 20^th-century literature in which her voice was loud and clear. Max Frisch’s The Fire-Raisers (also known as The Arsonists) describes how a normal, seemingly innocent lodger takes over the house of a bourgeois family until he and his cohorts have taken it over turned it catastrophically upside down. In Eugène Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros, we see the effect of “peer pressure, wanting to conform”, says Soyinka. “Do I want to stand out? Oh, my neighbour, his children are already grow their horn,” he quips. You wouldn’t want to cause a disruption or make them feel bad. These plays offer a stark depiction of how easily the moral framework of society is disrupted to a point at which it can’t be reversed without cataclysmic struggle. “What greater warning do we want from literature?” he asks.

To do that, you have to oppose power with freedom, not bow before it in submission. “And what you call an enemy is very important,” he warns. He mentions the western use of the names Isis or Isil to describe the Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Middle East with scorn. They are not a state, he insists; to give them that name gives them a status, credibility. In the Middle East, in Africa, they are called Daesh. The Cassandras of this world refuse to show deference to those who control with force, with submission, with domination. “You have to show them your contempt,” he says. “If we listen to Cassandra, we can escape becoming rhinoceroses.”