An Ode To Soyinkaresque.part 36

Continuing the cycle of five hundred sonnets, this fourth installment captures Wole Soyinka’s enduring presence in 2026—from the newly commissioned Laderin-Wole Soyinka Train Station Road in Abeokuta to his sharp-tongued satirical chronicles of a nation in constant flux. 

VII. The Road to Laderin (January 2026)

Upon the lithic path where trade descends,

The Laderin road unfolds its asphalt skin,

Where Ogun’s iron will with labor blends

To mask the ancient dust of what has been.

A Soyinkean transit for the masses' tread,

Bypassing the cacophonous urban maze,

Where ghosts of monoliths and heroes dead

Revisit in a post-industrial haze.

The Governor invokes the Laureate’s name,

A hagiographic nod to spirit-fire,

To tether modernity’s flickering flame

To the arch-mimetic prophet’s deep desire.

The train station stands as a secular shrine,

Where syntax and steel in one rhythm entwine. 

VIII. The Chronicles of the Happiest People 

The happiest people dance in satire’s grip,

Beneath the canopy of a fractured state,

Where petro-prophets let the nectar slip

From the bloated chalice of a preordained fate.

He maps the cartography of the soul’s decay,

With a gleeful irreverence for the crown,

Exposing the mountebanks of the modern day

In the charnel houses of a Lagos town.

No kleptocratic fog can hide the truth

From the Kongian gaze, so surgical and cold,

That seeks to salvage the unblemished youth

From the visceral rot of the bought and sold.

The lexical surge of his latest prose

Still blooms like a thorn in the tyrant’s nose. 

IX. The Lion and the Jewel (A 2026 Reflection)

The Bale of Ilujinle still commands the stage,

A primordial fox in a silk-spun snare,

Outwitting the Lakunle of every age

With a cunning that the modern cannot bear.

The Jewel reflects the cultural pivot’s weight,

Where tradition’s muscle flexes, dark and deep,

Against the mimetic gestures of the state

And the shallow promises the progressives keep.

Soyinka’s satire is a conflagration’s spark,

A polyphonic jest with a lethal edge,

That pierces through the Westernized dark

To reclaim the ancestral, iron-wrought pledge.

Though sixty years have passed since the first act’s breath,

The Lion’s roar still mocks the cultural death. 

In 2026, the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism remains a vital watchdog, recently convening scholars at the MUSON Centre to debate decolonization in honor of Professor Biodun Jeyifo’s 80th birthday.