Before the Law(s)

Abstract

"Writing in 1983 about state violence in contemporary Nigeria, Wole Soyinka relates the story of a medical doctor, Seinde Arigbede, who had been kidnapped by a special wing of the state police and subjected to the terror of imprisonment and torture. “The circumstances,” Soyinka suggests, “would have amazed even Franz Kafka” (Man Died vii). The reference point creates an intriguing moment of intertextuality that connects the narrative of brutality in a troubled postcolonial Nigeria with a central expression of the horrors of European industro-capitalist modernity. The terrors experienced by Arigbede—“taken to an empty cell, where he was hung up by the wrists and left dangling, his feet away from the ground, from specially fixed ceiling hooks” (Man Died vii)—are here implicitly aligned with the metaphysical traumas that accompany Joseph K in The Trial as he is processed by a legal system that refuses to reveal his putative crime. In Soyinka’s rendering of it, the postcolonial space seems unable to escape the uncanny return of those most traumatic elements of colonial power systems, or is at least haunted by the possibilities of such repressed, and repressive, links. It is of note, then, that the allusion should come in the course of a new Preface for Soyinka’s prison notes, The Man Died, at the outset of which he insists on the obligation to witness the deprivation of humanity upon which certain forms of the Law rely: I testify to the strange, sinister by-ways of the mind in solitary confinement, to the strange monsters it begets. It is certain that all captors and gaolers know it; that they create such conditions specially for those whose minds they fear. Then, confidently, they await the rupture. It is necessary to keep in mind always that we know only of those who have survived the inhuman passage. (12)"(pg 1)