Ake: The Years of Childhood

The parsonage wall had vanished forever but it no longer mattered. Those token bits and pieces of Ake which had entered our home on occasions, or which gave off hints of their nature in those Sunday encounters at church, were beginning to emerge in their proper shapes and sizes.

He returned, perched upon the handlebars of a policeman's bicycle, "markedly different from whatever I was before the march." The reader's horizons feel similarly expanded after finishing this astonishing book.

Nobel laureate Soyinka is a prolific playwright, poet, novelist, and critic, but seems to have found his purest voice as an autobiographer. Ake: The Years of Childhood is a memoir of stunning beauty, humor, and perception--a lyrical account of one boy's attempt to grasp the often irrational and hypocritical world of adults that equally repels and seduces him. Soyinka elevates brief anecdotes into history lessons, conversations into morality plays, memories into awakenings. Various cultures, religions, and languages mingled freely in the Ake of his youth, fostering endless contradictions and personalized hybrids, particularly when it comes to religion. Christian teachings, the wisdom of the ogboni, or ruling elders, and the power of ancestral spirits--who alternately terrify and inspire him--all carried equal metaphysical weight. Surrounded by such a collage, he notes that "God had a habit of either not answering one's prayers at all, or answering them in a way that was not straightforward."

In writing from a child's perspective, Soyinka expresses youthful idealism and unfiltered honesty while escaping the adult snares of cynicism and intolerance. His stinging indictment of colonialism takes on added power owing to the elegance of his attack. He also spears Nigeria's increasing Westernization, its movement toward modernity and materialism, as he describes his beloved village markets deteriorating from a "procession of magicians" to rows of "fantasy stores lit by neon and batteries of coloured bulbs" where the "blare of motor-horns compete with a high-decibel outpouring of rock and funk and punk and other thunk-thunk from lands of instant-culture heroes."

The book closes with an 11-year-old Soyinka preparing to enroll in a government college, declaring it "time to commence the mental shifts for admittance to yet another irrational world of adults and their discipline." Ake is an eloquent testament to the wisdom of youth. --Shawn Carkonen

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 Flavor of Childhood is Universal   June 19, 2000
Robert S. Newman (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

I've never been to Nigeria, nor even West Africa, and though I've known many Nigerians, including a number of Yoruba, I could never say, until I read AKE, THE YEARS OF CHILDHOOD, that I had any real idea about where they came from. You can read other Nigerian writers---Tutuola, Achebe, Ekwensi, Nzekwu, Amadi---or listen to Nigerian music from Fela, Ebenezer Obey, `King' Sunny Ade, or Olatunji---there's a vast world of Nigerian culture, but until you've read Soyinka, you haven't tasted the real flavor of it. Seeing that I've just confessed that I haven't been there, how do I dare to say such a thing ? It's because I believe that the human experience has both particular and universal elements and Soyinka is at his best in describing his childhood days in such a way that both are clearly present. Childhood is a welter of impressions, small events, accidents, misunderstandings, broken promises, smells, sounds, and feelings. Everyone's childhood is composed of just these things. But how about a childhood in Abeokuta, Nigeria in the late 1930s and 1940s ? In Soyinka's autobiography, we appreciate the specific qualities of those years in that place in magnificent detail...addiction to powdered milk, getting lost because you followed a marching band, stewing a snake, dislike of being an 'exhibit', learning to love books. Everything is told from a child's point of view, with no attempt to be prescient after the fact. [The thing that annoyed me tremendously about Jean Paul Sartre's "The Words".] Soyinka comes across as a very honest man.

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.


Stronger Than Fiction   August 24, 2000
Bill Jackson (Alexandria, VA USA)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

I don't often read memoirs and autobiographies because I don't usually find them compelling. This is an exception. Soyinka's paean to his early youth reads like literature. He recounts his life in a Nigerian village in the Forties in ways that point up the universality of childhood wonderment, the special circumstances of life in an African village, and the unique perspective of a child on such deep topics as colonialism, Hitler(!), and the role of women.

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.


Nyeh.   December 4, 1999
Melanchthon (USA)
9 out of 23 found this review helpful

I read this recently on the recommendation of a good friend whose judgment I really trust and I have to say I was unmoved. I couldn't really sympathize with the young boy from whose point the book is written and I didn't find the things that happened to him all that interesting. After reading the other reviews on this page, I came to two conclusions: (1) if you already know something about Africa, the book apparently calls to mind that knowledge and/or memories. I didn't, so the book didn't do anything for me; and (2) other readers also found the writing verbose. The best thing I can say about this book is that it finally provoked me to read "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe (MUCH better), which had been on my reading list for years.


A refreshing and funny story of life in Nigeria   November 24, 1999
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

I read Ake two months ago and loved it immensely. Not only did I learn more about the author, Wole Soyinka, but I also remembered what life is like back home. It took me back to my childhood. Even though I was raised in a totally different era (post-colonial Nigeria), I could somewhat relate to some events described in the book. I loved how Mr Soyinka described his hometown, some political events that took place at that time and also, the names he chose for the characters. I found them to be quite poetic. Thank you Mr. Soyinka for such wonderful writing. You are truly gifted. I have truly enjoyed all your books so far and I will continue to read all of your books. I hope and pray more people will also. I now know why you won the Nobel prize for literature. Keep up the good work.