The Interpreters

Soyinka's title names its subject directly: Egbo, Sagoe, Kola, Bandele, and the engineer Sekoni have all returned from study abroad to newly independent Nigeria expecting to function as interpreters, translating a colonial education into something useful for the country that sent them away and is now supposed to receive them back transformed. What the novel actually shows is a group whose fluency in two worlds, Yoruba cosmology and Oxford seminar rooms, western technical training and indigenous ritual, leaves them oddly unable to act in either. Interpretation, Soyinka suggests, is not the same skill as intervention, and the gap between the two is where most of these men spend the entire novel stranded.

Sekoni is the group's clearest casualty of that gap: an engineer who returns from England eager to build, his dam project is stalled and effectively stolen through bureaucratic corruption before it produces a single watt, and the breakdown that follows pushes him toward sculpture instead, welding scrap metal into a piece he calls The Wrestler. It is the novel's most sincere object, art produced not as vocation but as the only channel left open once every institutional path to real work has been deliberately closed to him by men with less talent and more access.

Kola, the group's painter, spends much of the novel working on a mural that recasts his own friends as Yoruba orisha: Sekoni becomes Sango, the volatile god of thunder and technology; Sagoe becomes Esu, trickster and disruptor; Egbo becomes Ogun, god of iron, war, and creation, patron of exactly the kind of restless, unresolved energy Egbo carries around Lagos without ever discharging it productively. The mural doesn't decorate the novel's themes so much as state them outright, mapping mythic permanence onto men who are, in every other scene, defined by drift and indecision, and daring the reader to notice how much better the old gods explain these men than any modern vocabulary does.