Wole Soyinka and his CIA critics

At the end of 2020, Caroline Davis, a British scholar based at England’s Oxford Brookes University, published the book, African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing.

A chapter titled “Wole Soyinka, the Transcription Centre, and the CIA” has caused a storm of controversy.
In it, Davis alleges that Africa’s first Nobel Literature laureate was supported by three United States (US) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded organisations: the US-centred Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the Farfield Foundation, as well as the London-based Transcription Centre. She further claims that this assistance helped Soyinka’s meteoric rise to international prominence.

Davis has used archival records from the CCF and the Transcription Centre to seek to substantiate her claims, and thus quotes extensively from personal correspondence between Soyinka and his alleged CIA-backed funders. The covert CIA funding of the CFF was exposed in The New York Times in 1966 and Ramparts in 1967.   

The author, however, admits that “there is no evidence that Soyinka was aware of the CIA source of his patronage during the 1960s, or that the CCF or its affiliated institutions exercised a direct influence on his writing.” But, Davis also asserts that Soyinka became aware of CIA funding of the Transcription Centre in 1967, and had not previously questioned the source of his funding.
 
The author quoted American scholar, Peter Kalliney, as insisting that CCF support did not, in any way, turn Soyinka into a “US puppet,” while citing American poet, Juliana Spahr’s explosive but unverified claim that the playwright had “unusually close ties to the US government” and met frequently with American intelligence in the 1970s. Soyinka had himself observed in his 2006 memoirs, You Must Set Forth At Dawn: “we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation the devil, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge! Nothing – virtually no project, no cultural initiative – was left un-brushed by the CIA’s reptilian coils.”

Davis argues that, from 1963, Dennis Duerden, the British Director of the Transcription Centre – through largesse from the Farfield Foundation – effectively became Soyinka’s chief external promoter. Duerden enthusiastically funded the playwright’s attendance at conferences and festivals, and financed stage productions, all reportedly to the tune of £2,000-3,000. The Briton also funded – in partnership with New York’s National Television and Radio Centre – eight 30-minute TV programmes featuring Soyinka and South African writer, Lewis Nkosi, interviewing leading African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Grace Ogot, and Camara Laye, with Soyinka himself, also interviewed by Nkosi.
 
Staging Theatre and Publishing Plays
Davis notes that the drama competition that Soyinka famously won on the eve of Nigeria’s independence in 1960 to stage the play, A Dance of the Forests, had been established by the CCF through CIA agent, Michael Josselson. Duerden reportedly bought the rights to Soyinka’s play, The Swamp Dwellers, in 1964 for £400 for broadcasting in the US, with the Farfield Foundation supporting the production. Davis notes that Soyinka was lukewarm about the project, and had advised Duerden to abandon it before its low-key release in 1966. The Briton also successfully pushed for the Farfield Foundation to fund the production of Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel at London’s Theatre Royal for a month between September and October 1965.