These gestures to other times and spaces have an important discursive role. Students in the US often compare Palestine’s history and our history of organizing to the past: the Atlantic abolitionist campaigns against slavery, the movements against the American invasion of Vietnam, Jim Crow segregation, and South African apartheid. The name ‘Palestine’ we invoke along a list of deepening catastrophes in the black and African world: Congo, Tigray, Sudan, Haiti.  

Of course, the analytic parallels between these contexts are sometimes strained, and the litany of anti-imperial slogans can sometimes appear as an incoherent, tokenized attempt at synergizing struggles related only in the abstract, vague sense and not in a way that is specifically articulated or historically compelling. On the other hand, the analogies serve to build a moral community. By invoking South Africa and civil rights, we are saying, ‘we are the ones who fought apartheid, who fought Jim Crow, and who fight Israeli occupation now.’ We place ourselves in a lineage. 

As a Nigerian, Soyinka was attuned to this far-gazing hope of building common solidarity across great geographic and temporal distance. His epic poem, ‘Ogun Abibiman’, published in 1976, is a spirited defence of pan-African unity and armed struggle against South African apartheid and Rhodesian white minority rule. Sampling from the deep reservoirs of Yoruba mythology, Soyinka tells of Ogun, the god of war, forging an alliance with the nineteenth-century Zulu king Shaka to pit the ‘black soldier ant’ against the white ‘termites’ who ‘gnawed / the houseposts of our kraals.’  

The tone is bellicose and unapologetic, perhaps recognizable to the Palestinian poets who rail against the Israeli apartheid state. And yet in the double-personality of his poetic character Shaka, flitting between the manic caprices of the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, and the discipline of the Mozambiquan anti-imperialist, Samora Machel, we can read in Soyinka’s poem the potential for a parallel kind of Palestinian authoritarianism—exemplified, perhaps, in the leadership styles of the Fatah party heads Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.  

At present, the focus on building an accountable, democratic Palestinian leadership is overshadowed by more immediate concerns: the horrific assault on Gaza, the violence of Israeli apartheid and its settler project, and the degree to which Palestinian governance structures are already co-opted and dominated by Israeli and Western interests. But if a real de facto, independent Palestinian state is one day established in some or all of historic Palestine, the perils of decolonization that Soyinka warned about in his eloquent 1996 reflection, The Open Sore of a Continent, will become quite real. Indeed, there are spheres of Palestinian life where Soyinka’s rejoinders are already useful. 

Soyinka in The Open Sore can be grouped with a generation of African intellectuals who mapped the perils and promise of decolonization: Albert Memmi, Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Amílcar Cabral. One theme stands out clearly: Soyinka’s stubborn opposition to any kind of ethnic chauvinism, ‘patriotic’ fervour, or religious zeal. In his words,  

…I am able to claim that I accept Nigeria as a duty, that is all. I accept Nigeria as a responsibility, without sentiment. I accept that entity, Nigeria, as a space into which I happen to have been born, and therefore a space within which I am bound to collaborate with fellow occupants in the pursuit of justice and ethical life, to establish guaranteed access for all to the resources it produces, and to thwart every tendency in any group to act against that determined common denominator of a rational social existence. (p. 133).  

Any attempt to fetishize notions of ‘territorial integrity’ and the ‘sacro-sanctity of boundaries’ in Africa by imbuing those ‘relics of a colonial master-slave’ with patriotic belonging he mocks as meaningless—a glorification of the ‘diktat of colonial powers.’ He rejects any organizing principle for social and political life that does not place, ‘the centrality of the human being as the initiator and beneficiary of development, the means and the end…’ For Palestine, The Open Sore is a reminder that Palestinians’ inalienable status as human beings comes first as the basis of solidarity, and any kinship, religious, or ethnic ties second. Soyinka’s book can also be read as an invitation to Palestinians to be ever vigilant against the ‘parasitic elite and feudal scions’ who seek to whip up prejudice in the service of their own goals. As he writes: 

…a common denominator of crisis in many areas may actually be found in the refusal of a section – be this understood in terms of class, ethnic grouping, profession, or religion – to grant others the simple right of participation in the process of deciding a collective destiny. The military dictatorships of the African continent, parasitic, unproductive, totally devoid of social commitment or vision, are an expression of this exclusionist mentality of a handful; so are those immediately postcolonial monopolies that parade themselves as single-party states.

Indeed, The Open Sore of a Continent serves up a lashing jeremiad against Nigeria’s junta and kleptocrats—Sani Abacha, Shehu Shagari, Yakubu Gowon, Ibrahim Babangida, Muhammadu Buhari etc—bookended by a reflection on the show-trial and execution of the Ogoni dissident writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. Saro-Wiwa had laboured to bring attention to the many poisons of the petroleum industry seeping into the Niger Delta, and Soyinka uses his comrade’s killing and Nigeria’s post-independence history to interrogate the discontents of the nationalist state project as a whole. ‘It took five attempts to hang him,’ reports Soyinka. On his third or fourth time being led away from the scaffold, Saro-Wiwa cried out, ‘Why are you people doing this to me? What sort of a nation is this?’