BENIN— NOBEL Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, faulted yesterday, the recent invasion by the police of the Okija shrine in Anambra State, describing it as a threat to the nation’s heritage.
Prof. Soyinka in a lecture, “Myth and history in the quest for identity,” to mark the 70th birthday of the Esama of Benin, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, said the police action was capable of drawing the country back into the dark age in which what is considered wrong by a few is taken as an act of the devil incarnate.
Said he: “The description of the word shrine by the police is the most depressing aspect of our national character. It is a lazy mental attitude, depressing, simplistic to the point of virility. Because of the recent events, revelations in the country, the word shrine has moved to take on diabolical connotations in the language of governance, law and order."
Pilgrimages by adherents of the major religions, he said, “are fixed to shrines of their prophets, saints and martyrs.
“Run through the highway of some deeply religious society of Mexico or Russia and you will find one shrine dedicated to one priest or the other;” he said, adding: “Even where visions are said to have been seen, substantiated or not, you can make a pilgrimage.
A distinction should be made between the knowledge of the past therefore, and the blanket endorsement of the past in the name of tradition, or the promotion of dubious and opportunistic methodology of deity and powers that strike to manufacture the dead and deposit their bodies and worldly goods.”
Professor Soyinka also speaking on the controversy on the origins of Oduduwa, the projector of the Yoruba, triggered by Omo N’oba Erediuawa of Benin in his memoirs said the dispute was a “healthy form of enquiry as long as it is not allowed to degenerate into a self serving exercise.
“The scripting of history going on in the media recently, pitching royalty against scholars, scholars against historians, prejudice against pride. These I agree with because these problems might find objective answers to the truthful knowledge of what we are. And the opposite might happen. It might pitch a university in Benin against the one in Ife.
“Not for once do I condone any effort to distort history for self gratification. It is sufficient to remind ourselves that while facts remain static, knowledge is dynamic and sometimes change facts.
“A solid foundation of knowledge is, in fact, the constant questioning of what has been up to a given point. But we must be careful in substituting myth for history or using them interchangeably. We cannot use myth to revalidate facts.
“The glory of the past should be made to have a powerful glow to the future within which the present will glow. Our ability to make ourselves the custodians of the past is a far more glorious undertaking than the attempt to dress each other in public. After all, we have nothing to do with the past, we only inherit it."
..speaks on the state of education
On the state of the nation’s universities, the Nobel Laureate, said until the call for three years closure of the institutions was heeded by the Federal Government and their functions reviewed, they would remain glorified secondary schools without a clear cut purpose on youths and educational development . According to him, the university system in operation at the moment had failed woefully in addressing and assisting in the formation of a credible and positive national identity for the youth.
Prof. Soyinka said the university system had failed the nation and must be closed down to allow room for a reflective exercise geared towards the true formation of a clear identity for the youths to follow.
“As one of the owners of a private university in Benin and you may not be aware of the callous condition of most tertiary institutions at this moment, some have been described as not worthy of the description of a glorified secondary school and which most of them are. Those of us who have had the experience in teaching in universities in several corners of the world are aware that many started with a small beginning, and others fairing better started as private schools,” he said.
