Abstract
“Does the Queen know about this already?” queried one official, as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office went into action in the spring of 1973 to limit the probable political damage ensuing from the award by the University of Leeds of an honorary doctorate to Nigerian dissident writer Wole Soyinka. The Chancellor of the University of Leeds, who would confer the doctorate, was H. R. H. the Duchess of Kent, wife of the Queen’s cousin, and the ceremony was to take place less than a month before the arrival of General Gowon, the Nigerian military dictator, on an official visit to London. It was feared in Whitehall that Soyinka’s honorary doctorate would be interpreted abroad as a deliberate reflection on Gowon’s regime: “I have mentioned the matter unofficially to Sir M. Charteris (when he asked me who Soyinka was) so I expect She does”, responded the Foreign Secretary’s private secretary: Sir Martin Charteris was the Queen’s secretary, the usual channel for official communications with the sovereign. 1
This was not the first time Wole Soyinka had caused ripples in Whitehall. In 1967, some months after Yakubu Gowon had taken control of Nigeria, the Biafran region had broken away from the rest of the country and Soyinka had been amongst a number of personalities arrested and detained as supporters of the Biafran secession. Late in 1968, while he was still in prison, he had been awarded the Jock Campbell–New Statesman literary prize. He had turned the prize down, stating that in view of the accusations against him, “I find my position too ambiguous for the acceptance of literary honours”. 2 Paul Johnson, the editor of the New Statesman, wrote to Harold Wilson, the then Prime Minister, suggesting that Soyinka had been put under pressure to refuse the prize, and that Wilson should obtain from the Nigerian government “a fuller, and I trust more convincing, explanation”. 3 Harold Wilson, though a committed supporter of the Nigerian dictatorship’s brutal repression of the Biafran revolt, raised the matter with Gowon at a formal lunch in Lagos ten days later. A British official sitting across the table from the two leaders reported Gowon’s reaction as “rather stiffer” than that attributed to at least one of his colleagues: “He said straight out that Soyinka had in fact been intriguing with Ojukwu [the Biafran leader]”. 4 Two days later, on 1 April 1969, Wilson wrote to the Nigerian dictator, opening with “My dear General Gowon” and closing with “my warmest personal regards”, and suggesting that the Nigerian government “would have a good deal to gain by adopting a lenient attitude towards Mr. Soyinka”. 5 Gowon replied on 19 April pointing out, “His detention has nothing whatsoever to do with his literary attributes, and he knows it. You will agree that in the present situation in Nigeria the needs of state security cannot be ignored merely because of Mr Soyinka’s claims to literary eminence […] he has access to a library and has recently confirmed in a letter that he was deriving immense benefit from his reading […] I shall not hesitate to authorise his release as soon as I am personally satisfied that to do so would not be detrimental to the public interest”. 6
Soyinka was released later that year — according to the Nigerian Commissioner for External Affairs the police had previously recommended this on at least three occasions — and in due course moved to Britain. 7 In 1972 he published a book on his prison experiences, entitled The Man Died, accusing Gowon of genocide, characterizing him as a “nonentity” and “an obscenity”, and describing one of his speeches as “grandiloquent vomit”. 8 The decision of the University of Leeds to award the author an honorary doctorate was greeted by British officials in Lagos with alarm, and in January 1973 Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson’s immediate predecessor as Prime Minister and now Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, wrote expressing his concern to Lord Boyle, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. 9 Rather unusually, the Leeds Vice-Chancellor had only obtained a third-class degree as a student, but as Minister of Education in the early 1960s had been a member of Douglas-Home’s cabinet, and they were on Dear Alec, Yours ever Edward terms. (Douglas-Home, incidentally, had also only got a third; they had both been at Christ Church, Oxford, though two decades apart.) Boyle explained that Soyinka had been a diploma student at Leeds, and that his “political stance as a revolutionary socialist” had had no influence on his selection: in no sense had he been “foisted on the Honorary Degrees Committee by a ‘way out’ minority careless of the University’s reputation”. Despite the “problems of quite exceptional gravity” which Gowon had to face he did not think this was a case where University autonomy over the conferring of honorary degrees should be surrendered. Moreover H. R. H. the Duchess of Kent had already agreed to attend the degree ceremony and “I really do not see any means, capable of explanation within the University, of avoiding her personal involvement”. 10 Boyle offered to see the Foreign Secretary to discuss the matter face to face and the two men met on 29 March 1973. According to Douglas-Home’s private secretary, “They agreed that there was nothing which could be done, and that the risks involved in trying to contrive a postponement of the degree giving to Soyinka were almost as great as going ahead”. Boyle undertook to forward copies of his correspondence with Douglas-Home to the Duchess of Kent’s private secretary “on a strictly personal & confidential basis” so that the Duchess would “at least know the position and background”. 11 And that was that: Soyinka got his doctorate, Gowon made his state visit, in due course Gowon was overthrown, came to Britain, obtained a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Warwick with a dissertation, possibly somewhat tendentious, entitled “The Economic Community of West African States: A Study in Political and Economic Integration”, and became a churchwarden, and Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Soyinka is not the only Nobel Laureate to feature in Foreign Office files now preserved in The National Archives at Kew — Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn also have this distinction — though Soyinka is the only one to have been a subject of concern for both a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary. 12 It seems that falling out with one’s government is a good way for a writer from another country to come to the attention of Whitehall. Despite an official policy of permitting public access to government files after thirty years, the Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Office is somewhat in arrears with its releases, and more than half of the paperwork relating to former British colonies in the decades since Independence is yet to be made available. There are probably other files on authors in Commonwealth countries that will come into the public domain during the next few years and they may well be of interest to critics and readers of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. The material on Wole Soyinka discussed here shows that writers — particularly writers in the English language obtaining first publication and critical acclaim in Britain — might on occasion provoke concerns of some delicacy in Britain’s relationship with former colonies.