A Play of Giants

Abstract

Soyinka regarded Idi Amin, who overthrew Milton Obote and began a reign of terror in Uganda during February 1971, as a symptom of an African disease. Using Transition/Ch’Indaba, the Union of Writers of African Peoples and the Nigerian press, he waged a fierce campaign against the bloody tyranny in Uganda from the mid-seventies. In May 1979, he published a particularly densely textured and carefully structured celebration of the tyrant’s downfall, entitled ‘Happy Riddance’. The whole gruesome Ugandan sequence, from Amin’s rise to power, through his manipulation of black opinion and his posturing as a revolutionary leader to his downfall, scattered lessons which, in Soyinka’s opinion, the continent had to learn. In ‘Happy Riddance’, he wrote:

An all-African commission must sit for an entire year if need be, taking evidence and educating the world yet again on the terrible price paid by ordinary human beings for the illusion of power, and the conspiracy of silence among the select club of leaders.

We are tired of the lies of the past eight years, lies with which the minds of Africans — and black peoples in America and the Caribbean have bent to accommodate a sadist, mass murderer, an incompetent administrator and political buffoon as a hero for black emulation.¹