Wole Soyinka

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Wole Soyinka. (credit: Vernon L. Smith)

(born July 13, 1934, Abeokuta, Nigeria) Nigerian playwright. After studying in Leeds, Eng., he returned to Nigeria to edit literary journals, teach drama and literature at the university level, and found two theatre companies. His plays, written in English and drawing on West African folk traditions, often focus on the tensions between tradition and progress. Symbolism, flashback, and ingenious plotting contribute to a rich dramatic structure. His serious plays reveal his disillusionment with African authoritarian leadership and with Nigerian society as a whole. His works include A Dance of the Forests (1960), The Lion and the Jewel (1963), Death and the King's Horseman (1975), and From Zia, with Love (1992). He has written several volumes of poetry; his best-known novel is The Interpreters (1965). A champion of Nigerian democracy, he was repeatedly jailed and exiled. In 1986 he became the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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The Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka (born 1934) was one of the few African writers to denounce the slogan of Negritude as a tool of autocracy. He also was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Wole Soyinka was born July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta a village on the banks of the River Ogun in the western area of Nigeria. His mother was a Christian convert so devout that he nicknamed her "Wild Christian" and he father was the scholarly headmaster of a Christian primary school whom he nicknamed "Essay" - a play on his occupation and his initials S.A. Soyinka was educated through the secondary level in Ibadan and later attended University College, Ibadan, and the University of Leeds, from which he graduated with honors. He worked for a brief period at the Royal Court Theatre in London before returning to Nigeria in 1960. His play, "The Invention" was staged in 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre. At that time his only published works were poems such as "The Immigrant" and "My Next Door Neighbour," which appeared in the magazine Black Orpheus.

Two of Soyinka's plays, The Lion and the Jeweland The Swamp Dwellers, were performed by students at Ibadan in 1960. Later that year his play A Dance in the Forest was produced for the Nigerian independence celebrations. In 1963 Oxford University Press issued a collection of his plays. These were The Trials of Brother Jero, The Strong Breed, The Swamp Dwellers, and The Lion and the Jewel. He also continued to publish poetry in Black Orpheus and other journals, and he was very active in theater group activities in Nigeria.

In the plays written and produced in the early 1960s, Soyinka showed his ability to project traditional Nigerian themes and stories through English instead of Yoruba. He was recognized as a dramatic poet and skilled dramatic craftsman. The plays dealt with a great diversity of theme - from the farce of The Trials of Brother Jero, to the romanticism of The Lion and the Jewel, to the tragedy of The Strong Breed. Soyinka was concerned with universal problems, and his plays examined town life, a retrograde countryside, and the ambitions of the "new" Nigerians.

Perhaps the best example of the juxtaposition of the past and present was in A Dance in the Forest. Three guilty persons were lured into a deep woodland where they were confronted with their spirit counterparts from the past. Selfishness, dishonesty, and lust were personified as elements in all societies - past and present.

The worsening political situation in Nigeria was reflected in Soyinka's theme for Kongi's Harvest, first performed at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts in 1965. The theme was the establishment of a dictatorship in an African state; and the venal politician, the uncommitted, corrupt traditional ruler, and the ruthlessness of a man driven toward power were all displayed. In Idanre and Other Poems, published in 1967, Soyinka ceased being a satirist and became a gloomy visionary. The title poem, reciting a creation myth, stressed the symbols of fire, iron, and blood, which were central to the poet's view of the modern African world.

Soyinka became a vocal critic of Negritude, accusing politicians of using it as a mask for autocracy. His increasing use of polemic against social injustice and his demands for freedom coincided with the military takeover in Nigeria and the later drift toward civil war. Soyinka was arrested by the Nigerian government in October 1967, was accused of spying for Biafra, and was kept in detention in the north for two years, after which he returned to his position as head of the drama department at Ibadan. Much of his creative attention following his release went into filming Kongi's Harvest, in which he also played the leading role.

Soyinka's Nigeria was a country in transition, attempting to mold itself out of a variety of tribal cultures and a turbulent European colonization. Soyinka did not romanticize his native land, nor was he willing to see African culture as a flat symbol of primitiveness. He was as willing to charge Nigerian politicians and bureaucrats with barbarity and corruption as he was to condemn the greed and materialism of the west. These attitudes were even more prevalent after his second incarceration on the trumped up spying charges. His work took on a darker and angrier tone. When he was released from prison in 1969, Soyinka left Nigeria and did not return until the government changed in 1975. Soyinka's prison diary, published in 1972 The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka was a fragmented and grim account of the days he spent incarcerated, often in chains. Along with his verses that captured the essence of his prison experience, The Man Died provided invaluable context for Soyinka' subsequent imagery in his works.

Soyinka's post-prison works striked readers as more angry and despairing than his earlier ones. The play Madmen and Specialists was about a young doctor who returned from war trained in the ways of torture and practices his new skills on his seemingly mad old father. Charles Larson in New York Times Review of Books called the play "a product of those months Soyinka spent in prison, in solitary confinement, as a political prisoner. It is, not surprisingly, the most brutal social criticism he has ever published."

Yet not all his post prison works were filled with despair. Ake: The Years of Childhood and its prequel Isara: A Voyage around Essay were beautiful memoirs of both his own childhood with its strong Yoruba background and his father's youth in a changing Nigeria. Isara, published in 1988 after his father's death, reconstructed his father's divided life and tried to reconcile two conflicting cultures - African and Western-that trapped him between.

In 1986 Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in recognition of his accomplishments. The prize committee recognized him for his commitment to render the full complexity of his African culture In addition to his literary output, Soyinka had produced two essay collections that define his literary philosophy Myth Literature and the African World (1976) and Art Dialog and Outrage (1991, 1994) in which Soyinka asserted that critics must approach African literature on its own terms rather than by standards established in western cultures. African literature was not monolithic and needs to be seen as a variety of voices, not merely one speaker.

In 1994, Soyinka escaped to Paris, just ahead of being arrested by the militarist government for his advocacy of democracy. In 1997, the same government charged him with treason, claiming he was involved in a series of bombing of army sites.

Further Reading

For a selection of his work see Soyinka's Five Plays (1964). A fine biographical, critical study was Gerald Moore, Wole Soyinka (1972). There was a good discussion of Soyinka in the essay by Martin Esslin, "Two Nigerian Playwrights," in Ulli Beier, ed., Introduction to African Literature (1967), and also in Wilfred F. Cartey, Whispers from a Continent: The Literature of Contemporary Black Africa 1969). See also The Emergence of African Fiction (1972) and The Novels of Wole Soyinka (1990); and The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972).

writer; actor; activist

Personal Information

Name pronounced " Woh- le Shaw-yin-ka"; born Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, Nigeria; son of Soditan Akinyode (nicknamed "Essay"; a school headmaster) and Eniola Soyinka.
Education: Attended University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, 1952-54; University of Leeds, England, B.A. (with honors), 1960.
Religion: "Human liberty."

Career

Reader at Royal Court Theater, London, 1958-60; University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Rockefeller research fellow in drama, 1960, chairman of department of theater arts, beginning in 1967; University of Ife, Nigeria, lecturer in English literature, 1961-63; Lagos University, Nigeria, senior lecturer in English, 1965-67; political prisoner at Kaduna Prison, 1967-69; Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, fellow of Churchill College, 1972-73; editor of African cultural magazine Transition, 1973-75; University of Ife (name changed to Obafemi Awolowo University in 1987), professor of comparative literature and chairman of department of dramatic arts, beginning in 1975; reassumed editorial post at Transition, 1991. Director of Nigerian theater groups the 1960 Masks and the Orisun Repertory.

Life's Work

In 1986 Wole Soyinka became the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy's presentation of the award recognized Soyinka's artistic commitment to render the full complexity of his African culture--a culture that Soyinka and other African intellectuals feel has often been reduced in the West to a flat symbol of primitiveness. In his desire to celebrate Africa, this writer, theatrical producer, actor, and activist does not romanticize his native land; he is as willing to charge Nigerian politicians and bureaucrats with barbarity and corruption as he is to condemn the greed and materialism of the West.

Soyinka's Nigeria is a society in transition, attempting to mold a new nation out of a variety of rich, tribal cultures and a turbulent legacy of European colonization. He maintains that an artist is "the record[er] of the mores and experience of his society and ... the voice of vision in his own time." As a playwright, Soyinka bridges the distance between these two disparate cultures in his works by infusing Western dramatic forms with elements of traditional Yoruban performance, such as masking, dance, and drums. In this way he both chronicles the social and political experience of modern Nigeria and creates on stage the "ideal fusion" that Nigeria has failed to achieve politically--one informed by both Nigerian tribal traditions and elements of European culture.

Soyinka was born July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, a village on the rocky banks of the River Ogun in western Nigeria. About ten million Yoruban people inhabit southwestern Nigeria and the nearby country of Benin. Although Christianity and Islam have through colonization impressed themselves upon much of this population, about two million people still adhere to the belief system and the rituals of the traditional ancestral spirit cults. Soyinka's mother became a Christian convert so devout that he nicknamed her "Wild Christian," and his father was the scholarly, agnostic headmaster of a Christian primary school established in their village by the British. (Soyinka nicknamed his father "Essay" for his occupation and also his initials, S. A.) In addition to these European influences, Soyinka's paternal grandfather and the village ogboni, or tribal elders, saw to it that young Wole's early years were also steeped in Yoruba mythology.

Soyinka has written an anecdotal account of the first eleven years of his life entitled Ake: The Years of Childhood. Critic James Olney in the New York Times Book Review called Ake "the best available introduction" to Soyinka's work because it immerses the reader in the sights, sounds, flavors, and aromas of the childhood world that shaped the playwright's adult vision." In Ake the Christian saints and the Yoruban ancestral spirits, or egungun-- who return to Yorubaland whenever their masks are danced at village festivals--comfortably coexist. Soyinka recalls in the memoir that, as a child, he viewed St. Peter as an egungun because his picture in the stained glass window of the Christian church in the village shows him wearing egungun- like robes. Later, as Soyinka's father encourages him to pursue a scholarship to the colonial government school in Ibadan, his paternal grandfather secretly subjects him to a painful scarification rite of initiation into Yoruba manhood. He consecrates Wole to the Yoruba god Ogun, despite the fact that the child's mother has entrusted him to Christ. These seeming contradictions do not trouble young Wole; rather, he derives a sense of security from the fact that his entire extended family of living relatives and ancestral spirits, along with the ogboni, cares for him.

Soyinka was a precocious and inquisitive child; the adults apparently warned one another: "He will kill you with his questions." At age four he was already fascinated by the rich profusion of life beyond the confines of the parsonage compound on which he and his family lived. As chronicled in Ake, he wandered off the grounds one day, following a police band all the way to the colorful, noisy, aromatic village market, only to be returned on the crossbar of a policeman's bicycle hours later. Ake has been praised by many critics for the vivid sensuousness of its description; Soyinka seems to have astonishingly detailed memories of the atmosphere and daily events of his childhood. The memoir has also won acclaim for the subtlety with which it registers the child's awakening perception of the fissures opened in his world by the strain of tradition and modernization pulling in opposite directions. At the end of Ake, Soyinka is watching his mother organize the Egba Women's Union to protest a tax that has been levied on local tradeswomen. While his own participation in the protest is restricted to running errands for the women, he is clearly absorbing his mother's capacity to deploy modern means to protect longstanding communal interests and to balance progressive politics with belief in a palpable spiritual world.

Soyinka next attended the University College at Ibadan, as his father had hoped. Among his classmates there was Chinua Achebe, who later also earned an international reputation as a novelist. Soyinka studied literature at the college, with an emphasis on drama, from 1952 to 1954. In his studies he explored Yoruba and Greek mythology, laying the groundwork for the imaginative synthesis of tribal and western sources that became a hallmark of his achievement in the theater. While at Ibadan he published several poems and short stories in the literary magazine Black Orpheus. Soyinka's first published poem, "Telephone Conversation," demonstrates his flair for satire; it manages to treat with great humor the difficult subject of a racial confrontation between an African student and his English landlady.

Soyinka then left Africa to study drama at Leeds University in England under the influential British critic and professor G. Wilson Knight. While in London he also worked as a reader at the Royal Court Theater, where his first play, The Invention, was staged in 1957. One of Soyinka's few explicitly political plays, The Invention explores in satirical fashion the consequences for the South African apartheid government of the sudden destruction of skin pigment in its entire black population. Horrified at their inability to distinguish black from white, the government assigns the nation's scientists to the task of restoring the visible differences on which apartheid is based.

In 1960 Soyinka triumphantly returned to the University of Ibadan as a Rockefeller research fellow in drama, and he commenced serious study of Nigerian folklore. His arrival was marked with productions at the Arts Theater in Ibadan of two of his early plays, The Swamp Dwellers, which had been given a student production in London in 1958, and The Lion and the Jewel. The Swamp Dwellers is a verse tragedy depicting the manipulation of a community of poor, superstitious swamp farmers by greedy religious leaders. The Lion and the Jewel is a comedy that warns against reckless modernization and strives to demonstrate that some of the old values ought not to be thoughtlessly abandoned. These two productions established Soyinka as a literary figure of serious consequence in Nigeria.

It was at this time that he founded his influential amateur theater group, the 1960 Masks, dedicated to forging a new Nigerian drama. This drama was to be written in English but draw its inspiration from the ceremonial performance traditions of Africa--religious festivals, pantomime, and traditional music among them. Most of the members of the group were teachers or civil servants who lived either in Ibadan or in Lagos, one hundred miles away; they frequently conducted rehearsals over the phone or in the Land Rover that carried Soyinka and the company from one city to the other.

The Masks' first major production was Soyinka's Dance of the Forests, which had been commissioned from him for the Nigerian independence celebrations of October 1960. Despite the festive occasion, Soyinka seized this opportunity to warn his fellow Nigerians of the dangers of repeating the violence and opportunism of their past and of romanticizing it at the expense of the present. In A Dance of the Forests, the tribes assemble for a great festival during which the egungun are ritually summoned. The people expect their ancestral spirits to be as heroic and noble as they are in legend, and they are shocked to discover that the petty meanness of the ancestors rivals their own bickering.

A Dance of the Forests is the Soyinka play that most deeply draws upon Nigerian folklore, and it has been criticized for its obscurity to westerners and even to non-Yoruban Nigerians. Canadian novelist and critic Margaret Laurence stated, moreover, that "there are some parts of A Dance of the Forests which seem overloaded. There are moments when the multiplicity of themes creates the feeling that there are a few too many plates spinning in the air--some of them speed by without being properly seen, and some crash down. But these are minor flaws in a work of enormous richness." Critic John Povey wrote in Tri-Quarterly of A Dance of the Forests: "The dramatic power of the surging forest dance carries its own visual conviction. It is this that shows Soyinka to be a man of the theater, not simply a writer who might air his concerns equally effectively in the pages of a novel."

Soyinka went on from Ibadan to lecture in English literature at the University of Ife, which he left in 1963 for what he termed "political reasons." He spent the next two years traveling, writing, and directing plays. In 1964 he disbanded the Masks to assemble a professional theater troupe, which he called the Orisun Repertory. The following year he returned to England for the Commonwealth Festival production of what some have called his most beautiful tragedy, The Road. Soyinka has named the Yoruba god Ogun, to whom his grandfather consecrated him in childhood, as his muse. In modern Nigeria, Ogun--god of iron and the forge, of creation and destruction--has become the god of electricity and the guardian of highways. In The Road, car accidents symbolize Ogun's destructive power over the careless traveler. His high priest is the Professor, a madman who deliberately rearranges crucial road signs, hoping to discover the meaning of life amid the carnage he helps to create.

Soyinka's first novel, The Interpreters, published in 1965, dramatizes another search for meaning. A group of young Nigerian intellectuals gathers periodically to discuss their country's tribal past and its westernized future. Each of them has been away to study in England or America and has returned hoping to help shape the new Nigeria. It becomes apparent that the young intellectuals are also searching for clues to their own identities. The Interpreters has been both lauded and criticized for its stylistic obscurity; some critics have likened the shifts in point of view and the general plotlessness of the novel to the writings of modernists like James Joyce and William Faulkner, while others have found it too difficult an introduction to an unfamiliar society.

In 1965 Soyinka was arrested by the Nigerian government, accused of forcing a radio announcer at gunpoint to broadcast incorrect election results. His arrest sparked a protest campaign by PEN, the international writers' organization. Such influential American authors as Norman Mailer and William Styron called for his release. No evidence was ever produced by the police to prove the allegation, and Soyinka was released after three months. Today it is commonly assumed that the election was rigged.

In 1967 Soyinka became the chairman of the Department of Theater Arts at the University of Ibadan, but in August of that same year he was once again arrested--this time during Nigeria's civil war, to which Soyinka was implacably opposed. Nigeria, a country roughly twice the size of the state of California, is occupied by people speaking hundreds of different languages. In 1967, after several military coups, 30,000 members of the Ibo tribe were slaughtered in the North, where the Hausa-Fulani tribe dominated. More than a million Ibos fled to the east, where they declared the independent Ibo state of Biafra. Federal troops then went to war against Biafra. Soyinka lived on the federal side of Nigeria and his own Yoruban tribe supported the federal cause, but he defied those loyalties and set about organizing Nigerian intellectuals to lobby for a ban on arms sales to both sides.

His peaceful initiative failed, however, because he was immediately arrested. Though he was never formally charged, a faked confession released by the government in October indicated that he was being accused of assisting the Biafrans in their attempt to overthrow the government. Ironically, the government specifically accused the pacifist Soyinka of supplying weapons to the rebels.

Soyinka spent two years as a political prisoner at the Kaduna Prison facility, mainly in solitary confinement. When his jailers vaccinated most of the prisoners against the deadly disease meningitis, Soyinka was passed by. In addition, he was not allowed medical attention when he developed vision problems. He was refused access to reading and writing materials, but manufactured his own ink and began keeping a prison diary and writing poetry on cigarette packages and toilet paper. Every time a letter or poem was miraculously smuggled from prison, the international press seized upon it both as an important literary event and as welcome evidence that he was still alive. Soyinka was released in 1969 and left Nigeria, not to return until after a change of government in 1975.

Many critics have remarked on a distinct darkening of tone in Soyinka's writing after his second imprisonment. His prison diary was published in 1972 as The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. It is a fragmented account of his experience, disorderly and wildly various in tone. Its achievement lies less in its attempts at political commentary, asserted Gerald Weales in the New York Times Book Review, than in "the notes that deal with prison life, the observation of everything from a warder's catarrh to the predatory life of insects after a rain. Of course, these are not simply reportorial. They are vehicles to carry the author's shifting states of mind, to convey the real subject matter of the book; the author's attempt to survive as a man, as a mind." While many critics also note that Soyinka seems to have had some difficulty finding a language adequate to this dehumanizing experience, Rex Collings asserted in World that "there are ... moments when he seems to strike a precise reality.... Thus I shall never forget what he calls his moment of 'self-definition,' at the moment when fetters were placed on his legs for the first time: 'I define myself as a being for whom chains are not, as, finally, a human being.'"

Two poems smuggled from Soyinka's cell were published in 1969 in a pamphlet entitled Poems from Prison; these were republished later in a larger volume entitled A Shuttle in the Crypt, a sort of verse companion to The Man Died. Many critics suggest that Soyinka's poetic exploration of his prison experience captures its essence more successfully than does his prose, but The Man Died is said to provide an invaluable context for Soyinka's imagery and for the personal and political references he makes in his poetry. (Soyinka's first poetry collection, Idanre and Other Poems, had been published in 1967, just before his long imprisonment; it examines the events leading up to the Biafran War and mourns the loss of the Ibo slaughtered in Biafra.)

Late in 1971 Soyinka accepted a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. He related in the preface to his essay collection Myth, Literature, and the African World that his reception at Cambridge was an ambivalent one; at one point in 1973 the university's English Department withdrew its support of a lecture series he had proposed to give on the subject of African literature and society, claiming that they had no reason to believe in the existence of "any such mythical beast as 'African Literature.'" Soyinka gave the series with the backing of the Department of Social Anthropology instead. After his stay at Cambridge, Soyinka went on to Ghana to edit the African cultural magazine Transition until 1975, when he accepted a position as professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife.

Soyinka published a second novel, Season of Anomy, several years after his release from prison. Some critics found the book horrifying in its explicit descriptions of torture and murder but compelling in its message that those who hope for peace must first confront such sickening realities. John Mellors wrote in London Magazine that "Soyinka seems to have written much of Season of Anomy in a blazing fury, angry beyond complete control of words at the abuses of power and the outbreaks of both considered and spontaneous violence at a time when winds of change are blowing at gale force through societies, governments, and individuals."

Soyinka's post-prison plays, like the novel Season of Anomy, also strike readers as more angry and despairing than his earlier works. In the play Madmen and Specialists, a young doctor returns from the war freshly trained in techniques of torture and practices his new skills on his seemingly mad old father. The play, like Season of Anomy, examines the tyranny and corruption that follow war. Charles Larson in the New York Times Book Review called Madmen and Specialists "a product of those months Soyinka spent in prison, in solitary confinement, as a political prisoner. It is, not surprisingly, the most brutal piece of social criticism he has ever published."

Not all of Soyinka's post-prison writings strike the same despairing note, however. He wrote the beautiful memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood after his imprisonment, and plays such as Death and the King's Horseman, which Thomas Hayes called in Dictionary of Literary Biography "not an attack against the effects of colonialism on traditional Africa as much as a beautiful tribute to the strength of Yoruba tradition." Death and the King's Horseman is based on an actual interruption of a ritual suicide in Nigeria in 1946. The king has died, and according to tradition his horseman must die as well so that he can escort his sovereign to the next world. When the colonial district officer hears of what is to happen he intervenes to prevent it, and the horseman's son, a western-educated doctor, kills himself in his father's place. According to John Colbey in Drama, "The climax [of Death and the King's Horseman ] is very beautiful. The power and the glory of Yoruba honor stand fully revealed."

In 1988 Soyinka published a prequel to Ake entitled Isara: A Voyage Around Essay. The book is a tribute to his father, who died while Soyinka was in political exile after his imprisonment. In 1983 Soyinka had discovered a box containing a collection of Essay's papers, a find which awakened in him the desire to reconstruct the lives of his father's generation of Nigerians. Essay had been one of a number of children who were sent away from their native village of Isara to be educated in a teachers' training seminary and found themselves caught between two conflicting cultures ever afterward. Each of the book's six chapters centers upon Essay or one of his friends and their attempts, during the years leading up to World War II, to reconcile their western-style educations with the demands of living in a country still dominated on the one hand by traditional African beliefs and on the other by condescending British colonial rule.

Soyinka's literary philosophy is laid out in two essay collections: Myth, Literature, and the African World, published in 1976, and Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, published in 1990. The first collection defines literature as social vision, or what Soyinka calls "the decongealment of the imaginative function by past or present reality." He asserts in the essays that critics must approach African literature on its own terms rather than measuring it by standards developed in western cultures. Moreover, he argues, no single African writer can speak for "the Africans"; Soyinka urges western readers to listen to the great variety of African voices recording African life. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage gathers a number of previously published essays together with several new ones to further elaborate Soyinka's literary philosophy.

In 1991, Soyinka returned to magazine editing, reclaiming his post as editor of Transition. The journal presents discourse on cultural and intellectual issues of international importance by such prominent thinkers as Houston A. Baker, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and the 1992 Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

Soyinka's 1996 play The Beatification of Area Boy deals with the direct and indirect activities of the military as these affect the lives of street traders on Broad Street in Lagos. Soyinka subtitled the play "a Lagosian kaleidoscope," and it looks at one incident-filled day in the lives of these marginalized members of Nigerian society and their methods of survival. In The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (1996), Soyinka looks at Nigeria's dictatorship and questions the corrupt government, the ideas of nationalism, and international intervention. The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1998), Soyinka's sequel to The Open Sore, considers the whole of Africa and considers how there can be reconciliation between victims and oppressors. In 2001, the University Press of Mississippi published Conversations with Wole Soyinka

In 1998, Soyinka ended a four-year self-imposed exile from Nigeria. His exile can be traced back to 1993, when a democratically elected government was to have assumed power. Instead, General Ibrahim Babangida, who had ruled the nation for eight years, prohibited the publication of the voting results and installed his deputy, General Sani Abacha, as head of the Nigerian state. Soyinka, along with other pro-democracy activists, was charged with treason for his criticism of the military regime. Faced with a death sentence, Soyinka went into exile in 1994, during which time he traveled and lectured in Europe and the United States. Following the death of Abacha, who held control for five years, the new government, led by General Abdulsalem Abubakar, released numerous political prisoners and promised to hold civilian elections. Soyinka's return to his homeland renewed hope for a democratic Nigerian state.

Soyinka's friend and former student, the celebrated African-American literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., characterizes Soyinka's literary achievement simply: "The universality of our experiences he never claims, he assumes. In his poetic representations of Yoruba beliefs, rituals, proverbs, and history, Soyinka allows the African part to speak for the human whole." About his own work, Soyinka told New York Times Magazine contributor Jason Berry: "I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be a part of the movement away from the unacceptable present. When the tool of the pen is inadequate, I get personally involved."

Awards

Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1960; John Whiting Drama Prize, 1966; Dakar Negro Arts Festival award, 1966; Jock Campbell Award, 1968; Nobel Prize in literature from the Swedish Academy, 1986; named Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria by General Ibrahim Babangida, 1986; named Commander of the French Legion of Honor, 1989; named Commander of Order of the Italian Republic, 1990; D.Litt., Yale University, University of Leeds, 1973, University of Montpellier, France, and University of Lagos; Prisoner of Conscience Prize, Amnesty International.

Works

Poetry

• Idanre and Other Poems, Methuen, 1967.
• Poems from Prison, Rex Collings, 1969, expanded version published as A Shuttle in the Crypt, Hill & Wang, 1972.
• Ogun Abibiman, Rex Collings, 1976.
• Mandela's Earth and Other Poems, Random House, 1989.
• Early Poems, Oxford University Press, 1997.

• The Interpreters, Deutsch, 1965.
• Season of Anomy, Rex Collings, 1973.

• The Invention, first produced in England at the Royal Court Theater, 1957.
• A Dance of the Forests, Oxford University Press, 1962.
• The Lion and the Jewel, Oxford University Press, 1962.
• Five Plays (includes The Lion and the Jewel, The Swamp Dwellers, The Trials of Brother Jero, The Strong Breed, and A Dance of the Forests ), Oxford University Press, 1964.
• The Road, Oxford University Press, 1965.
• Kongi's Harvest, Oxford University Press, 1966, screen adaptation produced by Calpenny-Nigerian Films, 1970.
• Three Short Plays, Oxford University Press, 1969.
• The Trials of Brother Jero, Oxford University Press, 1969.
• Madmen and Specialists, Methuen, 1971.
• Before the Blackout, Orisun Acting Editions, 1971.
• The Jero Plays, Methuen, 1973.
• Camwood on the Leaves, Methuen, 1973.
• The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, Methuen, 1973.
• Collected Plays, Oxford University Press, volume 1, 1973, and volume 2, 1974.
• Death and the King's Horseman, Norton, 1975.
• Opera Wonyosi, Indiana University Press, 1981.
• A Play of Giants, Methuen, 1984.
• Six Plays, Methuen, 1984.
• Requiem for a Futurologist, Rex Collings, 1985.
• The Beatification of Area Boy, first produced in Leeds, England, 1996.

• The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Harper, 1972.
• Myth, Literature, and the African World (essays), Cambridge University Press, 1976.
• Ake: The Years of Childhood (autobiography), Random House, 1981.
• Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, Random House, 1988.
• Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, New Horn Press, 1990.
• Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, Random House, 1989.
• Isara: A Voyage around "Essay," Spectrum Books (Ibadan), 1994.
• The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, Oxford University Press, 1996.
• The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Arms and the Arts -- A Continent's Unequal Dialogue, , University of Cape Town (Cape Town, South Africa), 1999.
• Conversations with Wole Soyinka,, edited by Biodun Jeyifo, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2001.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 36, 1986; Volume 44, 1987.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1986, Gale, 1987.
• Gibbs, James, editor, Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, Three Continents, 1980.
• Jones, Eldred, Wole Soyinka, Twayne, 1973.
• Katrak, Ketu, Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice, Greenwood Press, 1986.
• King, Bruce, editor, Introduction to Nigerian Literature, Africana Publishing, 1972.
• Larson, Charles R., The Emergence of African Fiction, revised edition, Indiana University Press, 1972.
• Laurence, Margaret, Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, Praeger, 1968.
• Moore, Gerald, Wole Soyinka, Africana Publishing, 1971.
• Omotoso, Kole, Achebe or Soyinka? A Re-Interpretation and a Study in Contrasts, K.G. Saur, 1992.
• Pieterse, Cosmo, and Dennis Dueren, editors, African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews, Africana Publishing, 1972.
• Rajeshwar, M., The Novels of Wole Soyinka, Advent, NY, 1990.
• Roscoe, Adrian A., Mother Is Gold: A Study in West African Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1971.
• Soyinka, Wole, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Harper, 1972.
• Soyinka, Wole, Myth, Literature, and the African World, Cambridge University Press, 1976.
• Soyinka, Wole, Ake: The Years of Childhood, Random House, 1981.

• Black American Literature Forum, Fall 1988.
• Black Orpheus, March 1966.
• Book Forum, Volume 3, Number 1, 1977.
• Drama, Winter 1975.
• Hudson Review, Autumn 1990.
• Library Journal, March 15, 1992.
• London Magazine, April/May 1974.
• New Republic, October 12, 1974; May 9, 1983.
• Newsweek, November 1, 1982.
• New Yorker, May 16, 1977.
• New York Review of Books, July 31, 1969; October 21, 1982.
• New York Times Book Review, July 29, 1973; October 10, 1982.
• New York Times Magazine, September 18, 1983.
• Time, October 27, 1986.
• Tri-Quarterly, Fall 1966.
• Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1990.
• World, February 13, 1973.

— Susan M. Marren

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (March 2009) (Find sources: Wole Soyinka – news, books, scholar)

Wole Soyinka
Born	13 July 1934 (1934-07-13) (age 75) Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria
Occupation	Author
Nationality	Nigerian
Genres	Drama, Poetry
Subjects	Comparative literature
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1986
Influences Yoruba mythology

Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African to be so honoured. In 1994, he was designated United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Goodwill Ambassador for the promotion of African culture, human rights, freedom of expression, media and communication.

One of the most prominent members of the eminent Ransome-Kuti family, his mother Grace Eniola, was the daughter of Rev. Cannon JJ Ransome-Kuti, sister to Olusegun Azariah Ransome-Kuti and Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, making Soyinka cousins to the late Fela Kuti, the late Beko Ransome-Kuti, the late Olikoye Ransome-Kuti and Yemisi Ransome-Kuti^[1].

Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family, specifically, a Remo family in Isara-Remo on July 13, 1934. His father was Christian Clergy, Canon SA Soyinka ( aka "Teacher pupa" (light skinned teacher). He received a primary school education in Abeokuta and attended secondary school at Government College, Ibadan. He then studied at the University College, Ibadan (1952-1954)where he founded the pyrates confraternity (an anti-corruption and justice seeking Student organization) and the University of Leeds (1954-1957) from which he received an First class honours degree in English Literature. He worked as a play reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London before returning to Nigeria to study African drama. He taught in the Universities of Lagos, Ibadan, and Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife). He became a Professor of Comparative Literature at the then university of Ife in 1975). He is currently an Emeritus Professor at the same University.

Soyinka has played an active role in Nigeria's political history. in 1965, he made a broadcast demanding the cancellation of the rigged Western Nigeria Regional Elections following his seizure of the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio. He was arrested, arraigned but freed on a technicality by Justice Esho. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal Government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring Nigerian and Biafran parties. While in prison he wrote poetry on tissue paper which was published in a collection titled Poems from Prison. He was released 22 months later after international attention was drawn to his unwarranted imprisonment. His experiences in prison are recounted in his book The Man Died: Prison Notes. 1972.

He has been an implacable, consistent and outspoken critic of many Nigerian military dictators, and of political tyrannies worldwide, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. A great deal of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". This activism has often exposed him to great personal risk, most notable during the government of General Sani Abacha (1993-1998), which pronounced a death sentence on him "in absentia ". During Abacha's regime, Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the "Nadeco Route" on motorcycle. While abroad, he visited parliaments and conferred with world leaders to impose a regime of sanctions against the brutal Abacha regime. These actions and his setting up of the Radio Kudirat helped immensely in securing Nigeria's return to civilian democratic governance. While living abroad (mainly in the United States, he was a professor at Emory University in Atlanta). When civilian rule returned in 1999, Soyinka returned to a hero's welcome back in Lagos, Nigeria. He accepted an Emeritus Professorship at Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) on the condition that the university bar all former military officers from the position of chancellor. Soyinka is currently the Elias Ghanem Professor of Creative Writing at the English department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the President's Marymount Institute Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.^[2]

In 2005, he became one of the spearheads of an alternative National conference - PRONACO. Wole Soyinka is a connoisseur of wine and loves outdoor sports such as hunting.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Studies abroad and at home 1.3 Civil war involvement and imprisonment 1.4 Release and literary productivity 2 Bibliography 2.1 Plays 2.2 Novels 2.3 Memoirs 2.4 Poetry collections 2.5 Essays 2.6 Movies 2.7 Awards and honors 3 See also 4 References 5 Further References 6 External links

Biography

Early life

Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934, in the town of Isara-Remo,Ogun State in Nigeria's Western Region (at that time a British dominion), as second of six children of Samuel Ayodele Soyinka and Grace Eniola Soyinka. His father, whom Wole often refers to as S.A. or "Essay" in literalized form, was the headmaster of St. Peters School in Abẹokuta. Wole's mother, dubbed "Wild Christian" by Wole, owned a shop in the nearby market and was a respected political activist within the women's movement in the local community. She followed the Anglican faith, although among his father's family and in the vicinity, there were many followers of the indigenous Yorùbá religious tradition. Soyinka since the beginning had grown in an atmosphere of religious syncretism, which has had a great influence on his yet forming personality, because as a little boy he had contact with the traditional Yorùbá beliefs as well as Christianity.

In 1939 when Wole was barely five years old, World War II erupted. The home of the Soyinka family had electricity and radio (chiefly thanks to his father), so little Wọle listened with curiosity to the news from war-torn Europe. This information was almost completely dominated by Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany.

In 1940, after attending St. Peters Primary School, Soyinka went to Abẹokuta Grammar School, where he won several prizes for literary composition. In 1946 he was accepted by Government College in Ibadan, at that time one of Nigeria’s elite secondary schools. Upon completion of his studies there, Soyinka moved to Lagos where he found employment as a clerk. During this time he wrote some radio plays and short stories that were broadcast on Nigerian radio stations. After finishing his course in 1952, Soyinka began studies at University College in Ibadan, connected with University of London. During this course he studied English literature, Greek, and Western history.

In the year 1953-1954, his second and last at University College, Ibadan, Soyinka commenced work on his first publication, a short radio broadcast for Nigerian Broadcasting Service National Programme called "Keffi's Birthday Threat," which was broadcast in July 1954 on Nigerian Radio Times. Whilst at university, Soyinka and six others founded the Pyrates Confraternity, the first confraternity in Nigeria. He then moved to Leeds, England to attend the University of Leeds.

Soyinka gives a detailed account of his early life in Aké: The Years of Childhood, which chronicles his experiences until about the age of ten.

Studies abroad and at home

Later in 1954 Soyinka relocated to England, where he continued his studies in English literature, under the supervision of his mentor Wilson Knight. He became acquainted then with a number of young, gifted British writers. Before defending his B.A., Soyinka successfully engaged in literary fiction, publishing several pieces of comedic nature. He also worked as an editor for The Eagle, an infrequent periodical of humorous character. In a page two column in The Eagle, he wrote commentaries on academic life, often stingingly criticizing his university peers. Well known for his sharp tongue, he is said to have courteously defended, affronted and insulted female colleagues.

After completing his studies, he remained in Leeds with the intention of earning an M.A. Influenced by his promoter, Soyinka decided to attempt to merge European theatrical traditions with those of his Yorùbá cultural heritage. In 1958 his first major play emerged, titled The Swamp Dwellers. One year later, he wrote The Lion and the Jewel, a comedy which garnered interest from several members of the London Royal Court Theatre. Encouraged, Soyinka left his doctoral studies and moved to London, where he worked as a play reader for Royal Court Theatre. During the same period, both of his plays were performed in Ibadan.

However, by 1960, Soyinka had received the Rockefeller Research Fellowship from his alma mater in Ibadan, and returned to Nigeria. In March he produced his new satire The Trials of Brother Jero, which established his fame as Nigeria’s foremost dramatist. One of his most recognized plays, A Dance of The Forest, a biting criticism of Nigeria's political elites, won a contest as the official play for Nigerian Independence Day. On 1 October 1960, it premiered in Lagos as Nigeria celebrated its sovereignty. Also in 1960, Soyinka established an amateur ensemble acting company which would consume much of his time over the next few years: the Nineteen-Sixty Masks.

In addition to these activities, Soyinka published various works satirizing the "emergency" in the Western Region of Nigeria, as his Yorùbá homeland was increasingly occupied and controlled by the federal government. This had usurped the democratically-elected, Yorùbá-based Action Group (AG) political party by installing the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), an amalgamation of conservative Yoruba interests backed by the largely Northern-dominated federal government. The increasingly militarized occupation of the Western Region eventually led to a disequilibrium in power, placing the more left-leaning Action Group and the Igbo-centric National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in tenuous positions, as national politics began catering exclusively to more conservative interests. This imbalance eventually led to a coup by military officers under Major Kaduna Nzeogwu.

With the money gained from the Rockefeller Foundation for research on African Theater, Soyinka bought a Land Rover and began traveling throughout the country as a researcher with the Department of English Language of the University College in Ibadan. In an essay published at this time, he criticized Leopold Senghor's Négritude as a nostalgic and indiscriminate glorification of the black African past that ignores the potential benefits of modernization. "A tiger does not shout its tigritude," he declared, "it acts."

In December 1962, his essay "Towards a True Theater" was published, and he began working for the Department of English Language at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ifẹ. Soyinka discussed current affairs with "negrophiles," and on several occasions openly opposed government censorship. At the end of 1963, his first feature-length movie emerged, Culture in Transition. In April 1964, his famous novel The Interpreters was published in London. That December, together with other scientists and men of theater, he founded the Drama Association of Nigeria. This same year he resigned his university post, as a protest against imposed pro-government behavior by authorities. A few months later, he was arrested for the first time, accused of underlying tapes during reproduction of recorded speech of the winner of Nigerian elections, but he was released after a few months of confinement, as a result of protests by the international community of writers. This same year he also wrote two more dramatic pieces: Before the Blackout, the comedy Kongi’s Harvest, and a radio play for London BBC called The Detainee. At the end of the year he was promoted to headmaster and senior lecturer in the Department of English Language at Lagos University.

Soyinka's political speeches at that time criticized the cult of personality and government corruption in African dictatorships. April 1965 brought a revival of his play Kongi’s Harvest at the International Festival of Negro Art in Dakar, Senegal, where another of his plays, The Road, was awarded the Grand Prix. In June, Soyinka produced his play The Lion and The Jewel for Hampstead Theatre Club in London.

Civil war involvement and imprisonment

The coup led by Major Chukwuma K Nzeogwu in January 1966 was counteracted by another coup in July of the same year, this time led by a cabal of largely Northern officers, placing General Yakubu Gowan in the position of head of state. Immediately following the coup, sectarian violence erupted as many Igbo living outside of their homeland in the southeast were subjected to violent retaliatory action, which many considered to be of genocidal proportions. Droves of Igbos were forced to return home, where calls for secession from the Nigerian state increased under military governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.

After becoming chief of Cathedral of Drama at University of Ibadan, Soyinka who had gained considerable respect within Nigeria would involve himself in the destabilizing political situation. In August 1967, he secretly and unofficially met Ojukwu in the Southeastern town of Enugu, with the aim of averting civil war. For his attempts at negotiating a peaceful solution to the conflict, Soyinka was forced to commence living underground.

However, his involvement in the developing national crisis did not end here. Wọle returned to Ẹnugu to meet with one Victor Banjọ, a Yorùbá who had been swayed to the Biafran side. Banjọ intimated to Soyinka a message of critical importance in regards to Biafra's goals, which he claimed were "national liberation" for the whole of Nigeria. For these efforts, Banjọ sought the support of Western military leaders; in particular, he delivered Banjo's message directly to Lieutenant Colonel Olusegun Obasanjo, who had recently been appointed to commanding officer for the Western Region. Four evenings after Soyinka returned to the West, Biafran forces invaded the Midwest region, an area which previously maintained de facto neutrality; this altered the terms and conditions of the war drastically, as the Biafrans had turned into both secessionists and expansionists.

Following the occupation of the Midwest, Soyinka met Obasanjo face-to-face to relay the goals of the Biafrans to the man in control of the West. Unfortunately Ọbasanjọ's decision to side with the Nigerian federation had already been made. The invasion of the Midwest eventually sparked counter-attacks into the Midwest by federal government forces, signaling the commencement of civil war. Ọbasanjọ disclosed his meeting with Soyinka to his superiors, who declared Wọle a traitor and convened search parties to obtain Soyinka for arrest, which they eventually did. Soyinka was then incarcerated until the end of the unfolding civil war.

He endured imprisonment for 22 months as his country slid into civil war between the federal government and the Biafrans. Though he was refused basic materials, such as books, pens, and paper, for continuing his creative work during much of his imprisonment, he did manage to write a significant body of poems and notes criticizing the Nigerian government. Despite his imprisonment, in September 1967, his play The Lion and The Jewel was produced in Accra, and in November The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed were produced in the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York. He also published a collection of his poetry entitled Idanre and Other Poems. Idanre, considered by many to be a masterpiece, was inspired by Soyinka’s visit to the sanctuary of the Yorùbá deity Ogun, whom Soyinka regards irreligiously as his companion deity, kindred spirit, and protector.

In 1968, also in New York, the group Negro Ensemble Company showed Kongi’s Harvest. While still imprisoned, Soyinka translated from Yoruba a fantastical novel by his compatriot D.O. Fagunwa, called The Forest of a Thousand Demons: A Hunter's Saga.

Release and literary productivity

In October 1969, when the civil war came to an end, amnesty was proclaimed, and Soyinka was released from prison. For the first few months after his release, Soyinka stayed at a friend’s farm in southern France, where he sought solitude after the period of mental stagnation. From this experience emerged one of his most prominent masterpieces, “The Bacchae of Euripides”. He soon published out of London a tome of his poetry based on his experience in prison, Poems from Prison. At the end of the year, he returned to his office of Headmaster of Cathedral of Drama in Ibadan, and cooperated in the founding of the literary periodical “Black Orpheus”.

In 1970 he produced the play “Kongi’s Harvest”, while simultaneously creating a film by the same title. In June 1970, he concluded another play, called “Madman and Specialists”. With the intention of gaining theatrical experience, along with the group of fifteen actors of Ibadan University Theatre Art Company, he went on a trip to the famous Eugene O’Neil Memorial Theatre Centre in Waterford, Connecticut in the United States, where his latest play premiered. In 1971 his poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt was published. While “Madmen and Specialists” was exposed afresh in Ibadan, Soyinka took the lead role as the murdered first Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, in the Paris production of "Murderous Angels". His powerful autobiographical work The Man Died, a collection of notes from prison, was issued the same year. In April, concerned about the political situation in Nigeria, Soyinka resigned from his duties at the University in Ibadan, and began a few years of voluntary exile. In July, in Paris, fragments of his famous play “The Dance of The Forests” were performed.

In 1972 he was declared an Honoris Causa doctorate by the University of Leeds. Soon thereafter, another of his novels, Season of Anomy, came out, in addition to his Collected Plays, published by the Oxford University Press. The same year National Theatre of London, which actually commissioned the play, put on a performance of “The Bacchae of Euripides”. In 1973 the plays "Camwood on the Leaves", and "Jero's Metamorphosis" were first published. From 1973-1975, Soyinka devoted himself to scientific activity. He underwent one year probation at Churchill College of Cambridge University, and gave a series of lectures at a number of European universities.

In 1974 “Collected Plays, Volume II” was issued by Oxford University Press. In 1975 Soyinka was promoted to the position of editor for “Transition”, a magazine based in the Ghanaian capital, Accra (where he moved for some time). Soyinka utilized his columns in Transition to once again attack the “negrofiles” (in his essay “Neo-Tarsanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition”), and military regimes, protesting against the military junta of Idi Amin in Uganda. After the political turnover in Nigeria, and the subversion of Gowon's military regime in 1975 he returned to his homeland and re-assumed his position of the Cathedral of Comparative Literature at the University of Ife.

In 1976 the poetry collection Ogun Abibiman appeared, and a collection of essays entitled Myth, Literature and the African World, in which Soyinka explores the genesis of mysticism in African theatre and, using examples from the literatures of both continents, compares and contrasts European and African cultures. At The Institute of African Studies at the University of Legon in Ghana, he delivered a series of guest lectures and became a professor at the University of Ife. In October, the French version of “The Dance of The Forests” was performed in Dakar, while in Ife “Death and The King’s Horseman” premiered.

In 1977 one of his greatest plays, an adaptation of Bertold Brecht's "Three Penny Opera" called “Opera Wọnyọsi”, was staged, and in 1979 he both directed and acted in Jon Blair and Norman Fenton's drama “The Biko Inquest”, a work based on the story of Steve Biko, a South African student and human rights activist beaten to death by Apartheid police forces. In 1981 Wọle Soyinka’s first autobiographical novel Ake: The Years of Childhood was released.

Soyinka founded another theatrical group (after Nineteen-Sixty Masks), called Guerrilla Unit, its aim being to cooperate with local communities analyzing their actual problems and then responding to some of their grievances in dramatic sketches. In 1983 the play “Requiem for a Futurologist” had its initial performance at the University of Ife. In July one of Soyinka's musical projects, the Unlimited Liability Company, issued a long-play record titled “I Love My Country”, where a number of famous Nigerian popular musicians play songs composed by and provided with lyrics by Wọle Soyinka. In 1984, he directed his new movie "Blues for a Prodigal", which premiered the same year as a new play, “A Play of Giants”.

The years 1975-1984 were for Soyinka a period of increased political activity. During that time he was among the authorities at The University of Ife; among other duties, he was responsible for the security of public roads. He continuously criticized the corruption in the government of democratically-elected President Shehu Shagari, and often found himself at odds with his military successor, Mohammadu Buhari. In 1984 a Nigerian court banned The Man Died and in 1985 the play "Requiem for a Futurologist" went into print in London.

In the midst of several violent and repressive African regimes, Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, as one “who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence” becoming the first African laureate. His Nobel acceptance speech was devoted to South African freedom-fighter Nelson Mandela. Soyinka's speech was a humane and characteristically outspoken criticism of apartheid and the politics of racial segregation imposed on the indigenous population by the Nationalist South African government. In 1986, he received another award - the Agip Prize for Literature.

In 1988, his new collection of poems Mandela's Earth, and Other Poems was published, while in Nigeria another collection of essays entitled Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture appeared. The year 1990, the second portion of his memoir called Isara: A Voyage Around Essay was released. In July 1991 the BBC African Service transmits his radio play “A Scourge of Hyacinths”, and the next year (in June 1992) in Siena (Italy), his play “From Zia with Love” has its premiere. Both the performances are very bitter political parodies, based on events which took place in Nigeria in the 1980’s. In 1993 Soyinka was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Harvard University. The next year appears another part of his autobiography Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (A Memoir: 1946-1965). The following year brings the publication of the play “The Beatification of Area Boy”. On 21 October 1994 Soyinka is appointed UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Promotion of African culture, human rights, freedom of expression, media and communication. In November 1994 Soyinka flees from Nigeria through the border with Benin and then to the United States. In 1996 his book The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis is first published.

In 1997 Wọle Soyinka was charged with treason by the government of General Sani Abacha. In 1999 a new volume of poems of Wọle Soyinka entitled Outsiders was released. His newest play, released in 2001, "King Baabu" is another strong, political satire on the theme of African dictatorship. In 2002 a collection of his poems Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known is printed by Methuen. And in 2004 Bankole Olayebi publishes A Life is Full, an illustrated biography of Wọle Soyinka, with more than 600 photographs dating from 1934. In April 2006, his memoirs, titled "You Must Set Forth at Dawn", were published by Random House. In 2006 he cancelled his keynote speech for the annual S.E.A. Write Awards Ceremony in Bangkok to protest the Thai military's successful coup against the government.^[3]

In April 2007 Wole Soyinka called for the cancellation of the Presidential elections held two weeks earlier in his native Nigeria because of the widespread fraud and violence that characterised the process.

In 2009, "The Literary/Political Philosophy of Wole Soyinka" was published by Yemi D. Ogunyemi. This book is dedicated to him for his literary, political and philosophical contributions to the Africans in Africa and Africans in Diaspora. The book is also an edifice celerating his 75th Birthday in July 13, 2009. One of the chapters in the book, "Telephone Conversation," which he had with his London landlady in 1962 reveals that the political philosophy of Wole Soyinka actually began in 1962.

Bibliography

Plays

• The Swamp Dwellers
• The Lion and the Jewel
• The Trials of Brother Jero
• A Dance of the Forests
• The Strong Breed
• Before the Blackout
• Kongi's Harvest
• The Road
• The Bacchae of Euripides
• Madmen and Specialists
• Camwood on the Leaves
• Jero's Metamorphosis
• Death and the King's Horseman
• Opera Wonyosi
• Requiem for a Futurologist
• A Play of Giants
• A Scourge of Hyacinths (radio play)
• From Zia, with Love
• The Beatification of the Area Boy
• King Baabu
• Etiki Revu Wetin

Novels

• The Interpreters
• Season of Anomie

Memoirs

• The Man Died : Prison Notes
• Aké: The Years of Childhood
• Isara: A Voyage around Essay
• Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: a memoir 1946-65
• You Must Set Forth at Dawn

Poetry collections

• A Big Airplane Crashed Into The Earth (original title Poems from Prison)
• Idanre and other poems
• Mandela's Earth and other poems
• Ogun Abibiman
• Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known
• Abiku
• "After the Deluge"
• "Telephone Conversation"

Essays

• Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition
• Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture
• Myth, Literature and the African World
• "From Drama and the African World View"

• The Burden of Memory The Muse of Forgiveness

Movies

• Culture in Transition
• Blues For a Prodigal

Awards and honors

1967: Head of the Department of Theater Arts, University of Ibadan; June: "The Writer in a Modern African State;" August to October 1969 imprisoned for writings sympathetic to secessionist Biafra; September: The Lion and the Jewel produced Accra; November: Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed produced, Greenwich Mews Theatre, New York; Idanre and Other Poems.

April 1968: Kongi's Harvest, produced by Negro Ensemble Company, New York.

February 1969: The Road produced by Theatre Limited, Kampala, Uganda; Poems from Prison, London.

August 1970: Completes and directs Madmen and Specialists with Ibadan University Theare Arts Company in New Haven, Connecticut (at Yale?); play tours to Harlem; directs plays by Pirandello and others; Kongi's Harvest (film).

1971: A Shuttle in the Crypt (poems); March: revives Madmen and Specialists in Ibadan; acts Patrice Lumumba in John Littlewood's French production of Conor Cruise O'Brien's Murderous Angels, Paris; testifies before Kazeem Enquiry on violation of students' rights.

1972: Publishes his prison notes, The Man Died, London; July: produces extracts from A Dance of the Forests in Paris.

1973: Honorary Ph. D., University of Leeds; Season of Anomy (novel); Collected Plays I; August: National Theatre, London, produces Bacchae of Euripides, which it commissioned.

1973-74: Overseas Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor of English, University of Sheffield; Collected Plays II.

1975: Edited Poems of Black Africa, London and New York; "Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition" (essay); attacks Idi Amin in Transition.

1976: Ogun Abibiman (poems); Myth, Literature, and the African World; Visiting Professor, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon; Professor, University of Ife; September: Nairobi High School production of A Dance of the Forests; October: French production of A Dance of the Forests, Dakar, Gambia; December: produces Death and the King's Horseman, Ife.

1978: "Language as Boundary" (essay).

1981: Aké: The Years of Childhood (autobiography); Opera Wonyosi, an adaptation of Brecht's Three Penny Opera; "The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy, and Other Mythologies" (essay).

1982: Blues for the Prodigal (film) released; "Cross Currents: The 'New African' after Cultural Encounters" (essay).

1983: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

December 1983: Die Still, Rev. Dr. Godspeak (radio play); Requiem for a Futurologist (play) produced at Ife university; Blues for a Prodigal (film); "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist" (essay); (July) - Unlimited Liability Company (phonograph recording).

1984: A Play of Giants (play).

1985: Requiem for a Futorologist published; "Climates of Art" (Herbert Read Memorial Lecture), Institute of Contemporary Art, London.

1986: Nobel Prize for Literature. "The External Encounter: Ambivalence in African Arts and Literature" (essay), A Play of Giants (play), Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University; Agip Prize for Literature; 1986 (October); Awarded of Nigeria's second highest honour, Commander of the Federal Republic, CFR.;

1987: Six Plays; Childe Internationale (play) republished.

1989: "The Search" (short story).

1991: Sisi Clara Workshop on Theatre (Lagos); A Scourge of Hyacinths (radio play) BBC African Service; "The Credo of Being and Nothingness" (The First Rev. Olufosoye Annual Lecture in Religion, delivered at the University of Ibadan on 25 January 1991; published.

1992: From Zia With Love.

1993: honorary doctorate, Harvard University.

1994: Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (A Memoir: 1946-1965) (autobiography); Memories of a Nigerian Childhood; Flees Nigeria (November).

1995: The Beatification of Area Boy.

1996: The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis.

March 1997: Charged with treason by military dictatorship. Considered one of Africa's poets alongside Cesair, Senghor, Ohaeto, B'tek, Okigbo, Ohanyido, Okara, Clark and so forth. [1]

2004: Reith Lecturer for BBC Radio 4, discussing A Climate of Fear.

2005: Honorary doctorate degree, Princeton University^[4]. Together with Nigerian elder statesman Chief Anthony Enahoro, he convened an alternative national confab under the aegis of PRONACO (Pro -national conference group). On 26 November 2005 he was conferred with the chieftaincy title of Akinlatun of Egbaland by the Alake (King) of the Egba people of Yorubaland where he hails from.

2008: Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University [2]

See also

• List of African writers
• Black Nobel Prize laureates

References

1. ^ Maya Jaggi, The voice of conscience in The Guardian, Monday 28 May 2007
2. ^ Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka Joins LMU
3. ^ The Nation, Why artistic freedom matters, 16 November 2006
4. ^ http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S11/75/58Q44/index.xml?section=

Further References

• "Soyinka, Wole (Vol. 179): Introduction." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 179. Gale Cengage, 2004. eNotes.com. 2006. 23 Jan, 2009 <[3]>

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Wole Soyinka

• Interview with BBC Africa Beyond about his memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn
• Interview with Black Britain about the state of democracy in Nigeria
• Wole Soyinka discusses Ake: The Years of Childhood on the BBC World Book Club
• Transcript and audio of Deutschlandradio Kultur interview with Soyinka, 13 June 2006, German/English
• Transcript, video and audio of interview with Democracy Now!
• Second part of interview on Democracy Now!
• The Responsibility of a Hero An essay about a Soyinka speech given partially about Louis Farrakhan at a theater conference
• Study guide for The Lion and the Jewel, The Trials of Brother Jero, and Madmen and Specialists
• "The Climate of Fear", Soyinka's Reith Lectures 2004
• Encyclopedia.com entry
• Interview with Soyinka at UC Berkeley
• Interview with Soyinka in Mother Jones
• Short biography, brief excerpt, list of works, and links
• UNLV faculty biography
• Wole Soyinka. All you want to know about
• Wole Soyinka’s Play Swamp Dwellers: An Exposition of Religious Hypocrisy
• The Wole Soyinka Society
• Interview with Wole Soyinka, online at CBC Words at Large (audio)
• Article about Freedom of Speech commissioned to mark 75th anniversary of the BBC World Service

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