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with Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi's 
government during the Northern Nigeria 
anti-Igbo pogrom (which Soyinka tells 
with greater liberty in the fictional 
version of The Man Died titled Season 
of Anomy) the messy conducts or 
misconducts of those who held power 
and how rather than evaporate have 
given countless and even more vicious 
incestuous births. He says it more clearly 
here how the wreckage now referred to 
as Nigerian universities began their 
initial slow gravitations towards 
the 1960s has been the theme of previous 
books, some very prominent in the 
modern Nigerian literary corpus. Among 
these are Chinua Achebe's very 
important books, A Man of the People 
and No Longer at Ease. They are 
excellent picturesque recounts of what 
early post-independence Nigeria looked 
like, with Nigerian First Republic 
politics and their heroes caricatured in 
fiction but with very strong memorable 
resemblances with their real-life 
originals. 
Even Soyinka has given us slices of his 
impressions of that phase of life of 
modern Nigeria before in his prison 
notes, The Man Died and his first novel 
The Interpreters. It is so visible to the 
reader what struggles Soyinka goes 
through in not outrightly repeating 
himself in this latest memoir Ibadan: 
review 
that it was he - and no one else - who 
broke into the Nigerian Broadcasting 
Service (NBC) studios in Ibadan gunin-
hand during theWestern Premier, 
Chief Ladoke Akintola's tenure and 
switched the Premier's priorly recorded 
statewide broadcast tape for another 
(subversive) tape, which Soyinka now 
admits he singlehandedly recorded 
with an American expatriate friend's 
reel-to-reel, borrowed and utilised in 
Tedder Hall, University of Ibadan. 
The prime accomplice was Jimi 
Solanke, an acting apprentice with 
Soyinka's private drama group, the 
Orisun Theatre. Soyinka also tries to 
extinction, thanks to the less than 
responsible utilisation of instruments of 
state power, atimes from venerated and 
by all means unexpected quarters. 
justify his actions. But more than 
anything else, it is this mere admission 
and the telling of this thriller story that 
we find especially interesting about 
this third book in the line of Soyinka's 
So, what then - more than any other 
perhaps - does this book tell us that we 
have not already known? And especially 
to warrant these special features on the 
book? memoirs. 
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