Abstract

Coffin for an oligarchy

The article presents information on the book "The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis," by Wole Soyinka. Open Sore is a passionately written recent history of Nigeria, that "tightly sealed can within cans, within cans of worms" encasing the annulled 1993 Presidential election of Basorun M.K.O. Abiola and the resulting "spiral of murder, torture, and leadership dementia that is surely leading to the disintegration of a once-proud nation." Soyinka hammers nails in the coffin of oligarchy and injustice all over the world. He anatomizes what he calls "the spoils of power" with a revealing glance at the case of former U.S. President Richard Nixon. He exposes the common control method of tribalizing dissent, and explains its effectiveness in recent years: "Man resorts to his cultural affiliations when politics appear to have failed him."