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Ake: The Years of Childhood

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There is a wonderful chapter in Wole Soyinka's "Ake: The Years of Childhood" which can be read as an extended metaphor for growing up or, more specifically, growing up in a small town in western Nigeria and becoming a world-recognized author and Nobel Prize winner. In that chapter Soyinka relates the story of how his older brother first hoisted the then four year old boy up on his shoulders so he could see over the wall, see outside the school compound, where he lived. This glimpse of the outside world fascinated the inquisitive young boy, so much so that the next time he heard a commotion outside the walls-a police band marching by-he ran to the gate, only to find it latched. As Soyinka relates: "Then I heard excited voices on the outside, obviously there were others before me who had the same idea. I banged on the gate and someone opened it."

It was an epiphany for the young boy, leaving the safe confines of the compound for the fascinations of the outside world. Soyinka clearly was enchanted by what he saw and experienced, following the band for many miles, to the next town, where he suddenly found himself alone. "The ragged, motley group of children who had followed, clowning, mimicking, even calling out orders had fallen off one by one. It occurred to me now that I had seen no one nor heard any of their festive voices for a while. They had all vanished, leaving no one but me."

Just as Wole, the little boy, plunged into the outside world only to find himself alone at the end, so has the mature Soyinka, the brilliant author of this densely written, deeply evocative childhood memoir, written himself into a singular position as Nigeria's leading and, perhaps most courageous, literary figure.

"Ake: The Years of Childhood" is not an easy book to read. Soyinka's prose is rich and detailed, his style at times elliptical, requiring the reader's careful attention. But the effort is certainly worth it, for Soyinka warmly and affectionately details not only his own memories and experiences from the age of four to eleven, but strikingly captures the universal feelings, sensations, and perceptions of childhood itself. Soyinka takes the particularity of growing up in a culture where traditional folklore, magic and superstition mix with Western Christianity, education and invention, where Yoruba is spoken along with English, where cultural and experiential references are polyglot, and he sees this particularity through the eyes of a child. By doing this, Soyinka brilliantly depicts not only his own experience of growing up in Nigeria during the late 1930s and 1940s, but also the experience of just plain growing up. It doesn't matter whether you know anything or nothing about Wole Soyinka or Nigeria to appreciate this marvelous memoir; it only matters that you have an inquisitive mind that wants to enter an even more inquisitive mind, the mind of a child.

I've never been to Nigeria, nor even West Africa, and though I've known many Nigerians, including a number of Yoruba, I could never say, until I read AKÉ, THE YEARS OF CHILDHOOD, that I had any real idea about where they came from. You can read other Nigerian writers---Tutuola, Achebe, Ekwensi, Nzekwu, Amadi---or listen to Nigerian music from Fela, Ebenezer Obey, `King' Sunny Ade, or Olatunji---there's a vast world of Nigerian culture, but until you've read Soyinka, you haven't tasted the real flavor of it. Seeing that I've just confessed that I haven't been there, how do I dare to say such a thing ? It's because I believe that the human experience has both particular and universal elements and Soyinka is at his best in describing his childhood days in such a way that both are clearly present. Childhood is a welter of impressions, small events, accidents, misunderstandings, broken promises, smells, sounds, and feelings. Everyone's childhood is composed of just these things. But how about a childhood in Abeokuta, Nigeria in the late 1930s and 1940s ? In Soyinka's autobiography, we appreciate the specific qualities of those years in that place in magnificent detail...addiction to powdered milk, getting lost because you followed a marching band, stewing a snake, dislike of being an 'exhibit', learning to love books. Everything is told from a child's point of view, with no attempt to be prescient after the fact. [The thing that annoyed me tremendously about Jean Paul Sartre's "The Words".] Soyinka comes across as a very honest man.

The first few pages are a little bewildering, before you sink into the comfortable flow of humorous, tender, wondering memories. I liked the use of Yoruba expressions and sayings, translated at the bottom of each page-if Europeans could bombard us with German, French, Latin, etc., why not Yoruba ? Soyinka makes no concessions, and that's great. Most of the famous autobiographies of world literature have come from Europe and America. Now Africa has produced one to stand up with the best of them.

I don't often read memoirs and autobiographies because I don't usually find them compelling. This is an exception. Soyinka's paean to his early youth reads like literature. He recounts his life in a Nigerian village in the Forties in ways that point up the universality of childhood wonderment, the special circumstances of life in an African village, and the unique perspective of a child on such deep topics as colonialism, Hitler(!), and the role of women.

The first chapter was somewhat bewildering to me and suggested that this would be a difficult read. In retrospect, I think the confusion in which this chapter left me -- I couldn't quite fathom who was who and what was going on -- may well have been intended as a realistic reflection of the world from the eyes of a toddler. After this first chapter, the book flowed more naturally and things became clearer.

There are plenty of amusing incidents, anecdotes, and characterizations in this work. Not the least of these is Soyinka's name for his mother: "Wild Christian," an appellation borne of respect and awe. The book draws to a close with a beautifully rendered depiction of early political action by the women of Soyinka's village, with his mother one of the ringleaders. One often hears of the moral power and underappreciated economic clout of African women but I have never read such a vivid account of these realities, an account which is all the more compelling in that it is true.

I highly recommend this book as a very entertaining and accessible recounting of life in a Nigerian village when colonialism was in full flower but beginning to wilt. That it describes the formative years of a Nobel laureate and a giant of world literature is a bonus.

I read Ake two months ago and loved it immensely. Not only did I learn more about the author, Wole Soyinka, but I also remembered what life is like back home. It took me back to my childhood. Even though I was raised in a totally different era (post-colonial Nigeria), I could somewhat relate to some events described in the book. I loved how Mr Soyinka described his hometown, some political events that took place at that time and also, the names he chose for the characters. I found them to be quite poetic. Thank you Mr. Soyinka for such wonderful writing. You are truly gifted. I have truly enjoyed all your books so far and I will continue to read all of your books. I hope and pray more people will also. I now know why you won the Nobel prize for literature. Keep up the good work.

These are Soyinka's memoirs of his early childhood, growing up the youngest son of a headmaster in the Yoruba town of Ake. But this is more than a memoir. Ake succeeds on every level: first as a vivid, humourous, touching, evocation of an African culture. Having spent years in Africa, I know no other book which so succesfully conveys the warmth, the intimacy, the web of interconnections which characterises African life at its best; second as an account of talented and much loved child's efforts to explore and rationalise the world opening up around him; third as a social document, minutely recording a particular facet of Nigeria's social history; fourth as a celebration of our world. I only have to re-read a single page of this book, and my faith and optimism in life itself is restored. Perhaps my all time favorite book. Unmissable.

This book is wonderful told from a child's perpective.The setting is a child in this case the author growing up in the late 30's and 40's in colonial Nigeria.It also has as it's backdrop several issues such as growing up as the son of a headmaster,the extended family system,conflicts between Christianity and traditional religion.It also explores the relationship of Kingship in Nigeria to their subjects and the colonial masters-Tax riots.As someone who is from Nigeria i can readily identify with it,but this book has a much wider perspective and deals with the innocense of childhood anywhere and everywhere.

This is without a doubt one of the best books I've ever read. I could not put it down. I think just about anyone should enjoy it, but it should be of special interest to anyone who grew up in Western Nigeria like myself. There are some subtle things like Soyinka's relationship with Fela's father that might be lost on non-Nigerians. I think this book should be required reading in Nigerian secondary schools, just like Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" was during my school days.

The best book about childhood I've read. Everything rings true -- the universalities of childhood are unsentimentally but movingly realized; while an alien, African setting is brought vividly to life to a Western reader. Soyinka has that rare ability to communicate relish for life in a sincere but unaffected, humorful manner. To read this book is to smile.

All I knew about Wole Soyinka, before reading Aké, was that he was sentenced to be executed in 1997 by the Nigerian military dictator Sani Abacha. I remember the international clamor. I signed the petitions. But Nigerian politics is a painful subject for me, one I try to avoid, since a college classmate and close friend was killed in the Biafran civil war. Soyinka was and is a professor of comparative literature --currently teaching in southern California, according to the internet--who has been compelled by the atrocities of post-colonial Nigeria to protest and to take political stances that have earned him acclaim as well as put him in mortal danger. But his extended Yoruban family, as he reveals in his memoirs, had already become politically activist even in his childhood, participating in the struggles that ended British colonial rule.

"Aké" tells the story of Soyinka's childhood, from his earliest naive memories of his family until his admission, as an eleven-year-old among men, to the British-operated Government College where, to his disappointment, the boys are not allowed to wear shoes. Young Wole had just acquired his first shoes through a clever family stratagem. His stern, idolized father had forbidden shoes for children as a form of shameful "spoiling" overindulgence, but Wole is precociously cognizant that the prohibition of shoes at the Government College represent another motive, a subtle racist subordination. His preparation for enrollment coincides with the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima; the boy hears his politically active aunt denounce that heinous event as evidence of the inveterate racism of the White Man, and his impressive uncle Daodu, the principal of a Christian school, has deep misgivings about the 'training for submissive inferiority' offered by White teachers.

But that's racing to the end of the book. Most of "Aké" is a collage of memories of Wole's early boyhood in the Christian compound - the parsonage, church, and school - within the still 'pagan' village culture of Nigeria in the 1930s. It was a culture in swift transition, a syncretic melange of Christian teachings, ancestral 'superstitions', and modern 'knowledge'. Likewise a world of scarcely compatible technologies, ancient and new-fangled, and even less compatible social institutions, ceremonial scarification and mandatory prostration before tribal elders side by side with the authority structures of European church and school. Wole's closest family is clearly elite, as he naively perceives; they are educated Christians on salary, living in houses with gramophones and later radios, yet embedded still in pre-Christian, pre-technological village kinships.

Wole loved his childhood. He relished its diversities and incomprehensible contradictions. It's clear that he's reluctant to lose even a morsel of his early memories. That's the pleasure of reading Aké, to savour the boy's mystifications and mythifications, to share his incomprehension of "the irrational world of adults and their discipline." The adults of Wole's memory are colorful monsters, unpredictable, sometimes indulgent, often overbearing, but invariably loving and beloved. As an author, Soyinka convinces us of his childish perspective. We are as much overawed by his teacher father "Essay" and perplexed by his mother "The Wild Christian" as the boy himself. Only occasionally and with sharply-defined purpose does Soyinka step back from his memories to suggest a retrospective adult evaluation of events. Wole also loved his exotic world. He loved its tangy tastes and smells, its odd conflicts of tradition and intrusive modernity, its pace, its abundance; again he rarely steps back to behold that world from the perspective of his adulthood, to revisit Aké as it has become today, and when he does revisit, the transformation is too depressing to dwell upon. One has to celebrate the demise of overt colonialism, he suggests, but there's little reason to celebrate the humiliating deculturization and self-oppression of his people since.

John Leonard, a New York Times reviewer, is quoted on the back cover of Aké as wondering "What if V.S. Naipaul were a happy man?... What if Vladimir Nabokov had grown up in a small town in western Nigeria and decided that politics were not unworthy of him?" That comparison of Soyinka with two masters of memoir is not overstated; Soyinka belongs in such company. But a more apt comparison, in my opinion, would be with the French writer/filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, who so lusciously recorded his own childhood in his slightly-fictionalized memoirs "The Glory of My Father" and "The Chateau of My Mother". Both Wole and Marcel had schoolmaster fathers and powerfully influential uncles. Both grew up in villages just on the edge of the modernizing world. Marcel's boyhood was brushed into history by World War 1; Wole's youth was eventually washed away by the distant World War 2 and the immediate struggles of anti-colonialism which resulted from it. More important to the Reader, both Pagnol and Soyinka are masterful describers, veritable impressionist painters of the landscapes of their childhoods. Both give us food so succulent we taste it, birds we hear flapping and squawking, adult hands on our shoulders whose callouses we feel, same-age friends whose secrets we know intuitively. Both men lived childhoods of such rich intensity that we envy and adore their memories.

I don't normally like autobiography but this is poetry and magic. This is a childhood you wish you'd lived. Alive with energy and emotionally and sensually drenched the descriptions dance along. Beware it's a hard read to put down and you will be searching for the sequel!!