Gerd Meuer mit Nobelpreisträger Wole Soyinka
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The Nobel and the GERMAN Shepherd 

The hundreds of paths and tracks in the outlying parts of thesprawling (400.000 inhabitants) city of Abeokuta look so much similar that you can easily get lost, and I did. Red African laterite all the way…along all the meandering paths. 
The tracks all look similar and yet they do present ever newdiscoveries since the latest ample rainy season has createdentirely new valleys and hills – well, just mounds, dangerousnew bumps for the under-carriage of my car. 
When I ask a uniformed secondary school student for the direction to Mr. Soyinka’s ‘residence’, he very decisively directs me to the "Soyinka Close", a dead-end street obviously named after the same. 
Only to discover that “the MAN” does NOT live there. 
My guide then – somewhat sheepishly – asks two other other Informal ‘guides’, to help him find out where “the Nobel” is really residing, and eventually we do end up at his house, hidden under some leafy trees.
I do „make noise“. I start shouting around loudly, and eventually a man, who looks like a cook or houseboy, appears from inside the house, only to tell me: 
“No, Sah, master is not home, he has travelled!“ 
Whereupon I keep on asking - noisly: „where has masta gone,to Lagos, Ife, Bergamo, New York or Cologne?” Rattling off several dozen place-names. 
A long, noisy questionnaire… to be heard by the landlord, who, I am dead-convinced, is definitely inside the house.And eventually the landlord inside does register my geographylesson, appears in the entrance and with his boomingproscenium voice commands: 
"Bushman, come in!"
My guide enters the living-room with me, only too happy, though somewhat ‘impressed’ to – at long last – meet ‘da famous brother’ in person. He starts recounting our search, telling how we first went looking for him in the said ‘ Soyinka Close: which earns him a stern rebuke from the ownerof that name:
“How inflated you think I am to have a street namedafter me, while I am still among the living. AlthoughI can hardly defend myself against the next generation from naming some dead-end after me after I havejoined the ancestors!” 
And then the – in catholic terms – explanation for the ‚useful lie“ of the cook-houseboy, who pretended that ‚ master is not in”… 
„No, I don’t really want to hide myself from the invasion by Nigerian visitors or ‚cultural pilgrims’ from Europe or… black America… but you did well to come in broad daylight, because, had you come at nighttime you might indeed have been attacked by one of your countrymen.” 
Now I am fully in the dark in the heart of… 
And then I made to make the acquaintance of my ‚countryman’… 
He is a… German shephard..
He is he new four-legged night-watchman.
Explanation offered: „Can you imagine that even in the worst of political confrontations I never have been ‚watched, andnow that!“ 
Well, the „writer and the fighter“, as he Nobel laudatoryphrased it, has, among other things, also always been engaged very intensely against “the killing on Nigerian roads”, as a consequence having created his own ‘Road Safety Corps’,and the uniformed ‘Road Marshalls’. 
Just because, while a Prof. at the University of Ife, he saw too many of his bright students being killed on the murderous road between Ibadan and Ife. 
When one of Nigeria’s - many - military regimes was replaced – for a short time – by the soon defunct civilian regime of Shehu Shagari that government very rapidly dissolved what it deemed to be „Mr. Soyinka’s own secret guerilla army”. 
In the second military regime that followed Shagari, the one of Ibrahim Babangida, Wole’s idea of the ‘Road Safety Corps’ was taken up again, and Wole was ‘awarded’ the honorary chairmanship of that Corps. 
Wole accepted: „How could I have refused, since it had been my idea in the first place!, and when even the boys in khaki do accept my idea!“ 
But  then such an organisation does have a budget, and any such budget with several million Naira does create certain appetites in crisis-plagued Nigeria. 
Fact is that one of the administrators did make away with several million Naira in no time, and when the man realised that he was going to be caught, the fellow simply spread some anonymous letters to the Nigerians papers, putting the blame on the boss, accusing the Nobel of having ‘eaten’ the money. 
But Wole having smelled as much, had already undertaken his own investigations, had – long before the police had even started to do so – established his own documentation.
Whereupon some thieves tried to get hold of that very documentation, breaking into his house at night, while he was away.
But Wole, fearing as much, had already carted his documentation away, put it a friend’s safe safe. 
But to be on the … safe side, his house was ever sincebeing guarded by what he otherwise doesn’t consider as his preferred pet: a German shepherd. 
Not that Wole doesn’t appreciate things German otherwise,be it literary or liquid. 
No, German wine, that is NOT his préféré, he would rather go for the Red from Italy or France, but when it comes to the German stuff, it is rather the more condensed stuff, just ashis "Opera Wonyosi" goes to prove his preference for things Brechtian, so does his preference for the proletarian Korn or Schnapps, preferably in those old-fashioned brownish, earthen containers: 
“Just give me a Häger (Steinhäger), plain serious stuff, that is,will do.” 
But only, when a dead-sober driver from the ‚Road Safety Corps’ is at the wheel!


Wole Soyinka mit old ladies in seiner Strasse bei St. Peters in AKE