The World After Wole Soyinka’s Climate of Fear

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.