By Bolaji Olabode
Brymo’s latest question to Prof. Wole Soyinka—“Why did you start these killer movements (i.e fraternity)?”—may sound like a singer’s impetuous poke at an old man’s legacy. But in that question lies a universal lament, the kind that trails every movement that has walked too far away from its founding fire. The singer might as well have been asking Christ why His church now thrives on tithes and jets, or Muhammad why His ummah has fractured into sects drenched in blood, or even Marx why his gospel of equality degenerated into gulags and dictatorships.
Religions, fraternities, ideologies—all were born of light. Christianity flowered on the soil of sacrifice and holiness, Islam on submission and justice, Soyinka’s Pyrates Confraternity on brotherhood and resistance to tyranny. But as years rolled into decades, what was once a flame grew dim, distorted, and sometimes dangerous. They kept the name, the rituals, and the paraphernalia, but the essence drifted. Conviction became costume. Fire became ash.
Brymo’s audacity is not about Soyinka alone; it is about the tragedy of continuity without soul. The Pyrates Confraternity of 1952 was an answer to colonial arrogance, a declaration that young Africans would not be conscripts in the empire’s theater. But what is left today is no longer that brotherhood of fearless dissenters. In the hands of their inheritors, confraternities on our campuses now spell fear, violence, and blood. The irony is chilling: what began as a protest against oppression now survives as an instrument of oppression.
And Nigeria knows this story too well. The NCNC of Nnamdi Azikiwe, born as a nationalist force to confront colonial injustice, was later reduced to petty squabbles and regional bargaining chips. The fiery labour unions of the 1970s, once the conscience of the masses and lions that roared against military tyranny, gradually learned to purr at the banquet table of the state—trading their radicalism for brown envelopes and political appointments. Like the confraternities, they kept the slogans but lost the spirit. What once terrified despots now entertains them.
But this is not peculiar to Nigeria’s fraternities. History mocks us with parallels. Christianity, once a faith of martyrs, was turned into an empire’s sword, a justification for crusades and inquisitions. Islam, which preached equality in the desert, was seized by dynasties that built palaces on the backs of peasants. Even the Yoruba Egungun cult, once a solemn invocation of the ancestors, has in places become a masquerade for extortion and political showmanship. Institutions betray their founders the moment men mistake the symbol for the spirit.
So, Brymo’s question lingers not as disrespect, but as diagnosis. Perhaps what he really asked was: “Why begin anything noble, when time will twist it into what you never intended?” It is a cruel paradox of human history: noble beginnings rarely survive the appetite of men for power and spectacle. The prophet starts a path; the priest builds a temple; the politician takes over the temple; the mob desecrates it. And all along, the founder’s name is invoked as if he authored the decay.
Soyinka himself has lived long enough to watch the seed he planted sprout thorns. Yet one suspects he knows, more than anyone else, that the fate of his fraternity is not unusual. It is the fate of all human institutions to wrestle against entropy, to be dragged by generations into directions unimagined by their originators. If Christ and Muhammad could not prevent it, who could?
Brymo, then, is the boy who dares to point at the emperor’s robe and call it naked. His question to Soyinka is not only an interrogation of the Pyrates; it is a mirror held up to us all. What have we done with the legacies entrusted to us? How many of our altars still burn with the fire of their first love?
Because the tragedy is not just that religions, fraternities, and movements fall short. The greater tragedy is that we pretend the fall is progress, that we polish the ruins and call them monuments.
Bolaji Olabode is a public affairs analyst and Educational Consultant. A native of Edunabon, Osun State.
