Ake is Wole Soyinka’s memoir of his childhood in Egbaland, Nigeria. As I neared the end of the book, I began to realise that the events he was narrating, involving a protest organised by a woman’s group his mother was a member of, were reminiscent of something else I’d read recently in other books, both histories of Africa. And the name of the leader of the protest, Ransome-Kuti, sounded awfully familiar too. It only took a few minutes to research for me to realise that Soyinka’s aunt, his Beere, was the renowned Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, women’s activist, anti-colonial crusader, and mother of Beko Ransome-Kuti, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti (who is briefly mentioned in the book), and of course the famous Fela Kuti. And the protest he writes about was indeed a seminal moment in Nigerian history, made more real to me somehow by his matter-of-fact narrative.

Reading the book, putting the pieces together and making the connections got me thinking about history and how history is created. Ake is a simple memoir, about young Wole, his friends, his family, the place and time in which he lived, the people he lived with. It just so happened that those people, in that place and time were changing the face of colonial Nigeria. They were doing extraorinary things, but Soyinka doesn’t write about it like he’s relating History, like he’s telling us about amazing auspicious events, he’s just telling us what happened to be going on around him.

Anyway, I’ll stop babbling on. Soyinka himself expressed it much better than I could, in this interview:

...There was an ordinariness about it because it was taking place with my aunt, with my mother, with their womenfolk, with my formidable uncle who also treated me as a friend. So there was a whole domestic ambiance. And at the same time, there was this epochal quality about the whole thing. And perhaps that sense of proportion, that combination of ordinariness and monumentalism has stayed with me as far as history-making is concerned, an awareness that history very often is made up of the most mundane events which grow into formidable historic proportions.