The Man Died

This condemnation of dictatorships by the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka was written from secret prison notes he kept while under detention by the Yakubu Gowon regime during the Nigerian Civil War. While showing how he was able to endure and survive the detention, it gave me a new insight into the character of Gowon: From what I’d read of him before he was supposed to have been too kind to have declared “No victor, no vanquished” at the end of the war; too naive and innocent to stop corrupt people in his government. Well, Soyinka has shown in this book that Gowon could have stopped the mass murders of Igbos in the North if he was determined for justice and fair play at the time, that he’d regarded the war as a David and Goliath little game from the boastful way he talked about it during his wedding, and he had squandered the country’s riches in the name of a wedding ceremony marked in the three cities of Lagos, Kaduna and Zaria while the war was raging.

The book has several revelations. Recently a court awarded millions in damages to a lady that was humiliated and beaten up by orderlies of a naval topshot, for not getting out of the way for their siren-blaring convoy quickly enough. This may never have happened under Gowon. His security men would never have been challenged in court, if the lady wasn’t made to “disappear” in the first place. Gowon had personally ordered the beating up of some journalists just because his wife had complained about their coverage of her dancing at a party. This assault eventually led to the death of one of the journalists, giving rise to the title for the book, “The Man Died.” Also, the Sardauna of Sokoto had brought in a hospital orderly from one of his visits to Pakistan, a relation of his hosts, and made him the chief medical officer in the North, thus enthroning a culture of mediocrity in the land. After Igbos were purged from the North, their professional positions were mainly taken over by other southerners. This caused another pogrom to be planned against southerners while the war raged in 1968, though the military governor in Kaduna got wind of it and nipped it in the bud. The purge this time was also targeted at Chadians that were mainly in the army, police and prisons. (They were supposed to have been fighting the war for the North.)

January 26, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1972 by Rex Collins, this Spectrum Books edition being published in 1993, ISBN 978-246-012-5.