The World After Wole Soyinka’s Climate of Fear 

First presented as Reith Lectures exactly 20 years ago, what does it mean to revisit Wole Soyinka’s Climate of Fear in today’s chaotic world?

Wole Soyinka’s Climate of Fear, published as a documentation of his remarkable 2004 Reith Lectures, is a poignant exploration of our fear-riddled globe. It is a non-fiction narrative of five compositions, solid observations, and two noteworthy qualities: its language, which, crafted in an unusual simplicity, marries facts to interventions; and its timeless relevance to our world’s affairs in ways that appear uncanny enough to merit conspiracy theories yet eerie enough to engulf us in wonder. It is a delineation of the disturbing instrumentalities employed by the purveyors of chaos in their quest to seek and consolidate control over an otherized group. The text is ‘lamentful’ and strung with critical denunciation, and its primary actor, ‘the quasi-state’—an establishment Soyinka defines as a furtive invisible power… that lays no claim to any physical boundaries, flies no national flag [and] is unlisted in any international association—puts forth a new image of perpetrators: an image neither defined by legacy media’s propaganda nor indicative of social stereotypes, but one manifested in dictators, terrorists, and disturbingly, even peddlers of democracy. 

From his ‘changing mask of fear’ to ‘I am right; you’re dead,’ Soyinka highlights the polarity between what agents of the quasi-state say and do. Each of them, ranging from the Chechen insurrectionist Shamil Basayev, the Nigerian military murderers, the ‘desaparecidos’ of Latin America, the apartheid enforcers of South Africa, to the ominous state-sanctioned mercenaries of suppression in Asia, Europe, and North America, populate anarchism’s long list of adherents in varying forms. These past agents, like the fear facilitators known to us today—and indeed, both groups succeed one another in their orchestration of evil at a scale never witnessed in their times and only deserving of the most ‘unsanctimonious’ mention—are popular for their near-genius ability to essentialize wholesale slaughter. The naked senselessness and myopia of this agenda, as well as the totalizing violence it begets, constitute Soyinka’s argument on the incendiary framework of fear: the public cover for such violence changes; its primary target is freedom, and words delivered with infectious fervour are its most effective tool...

This essay features in our print issue, ‘The Enduring Voice of Wole Soyinka’ and is only available online to paying subscribers.

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