Ake: The Years of Childhood (Vintage International) [Paperback]

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.

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.

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.