TODAY, Nigeria’s literary icon and Noble Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka clocks 75. And the drums have been rolling since last month in celebration of one of Africa’s finest writers and most fiery political activists, who is not only rich in the corpus of works he has done, but also now in age. He was born Akinwale Oluwole Soyinka on July 13, 1934.
Wole Oguntokun’s Theatre @ Terra started it all with his yearly festival of Soyinka’s plays. The Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism will, today at the Agip Recital Hall, Muson Centre, Onikan, Lagos, present a commemorative lecture titled Narrating the Nigerian Story: The Challenges of Journalism, a Comparative Reflection to be delivered by Dr. Olatunji Dare of Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, US. Time is 11am.www.mannastores.com
From the late 50s when he began to publish and perform his plays, Prof. Soyinka has remained a dominant voice in Africa’s literary landscape. He helped expound some of the critical ideas that gave the continent’s literature its focus. Having trained under G. Wilson Knight, a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Leads in the UK, he returned to Nigeria with great ideas about experimental theatre for which he had garnered considerable experience before his return.
In 1960, the Nigerian government commissioned him to write a play to celebrate the new nation’s independence. He came up with A Dance of the Forests. It was a lyrical blend of Western experimentalism and African folk tradition, reflecting a highly original approach to drama.
Soyinka has always been proud of his African roots, dubbing his early theatre troupe “Masks,” to acknowledge the role Yoruba world-view plays in his works. In his plays, poetry, and critical writings, there’s a strong showing of Yoruba influence particularly the Yoruba Pantheon of deities with Ogun being the most celebrated because of the god’s ambivalence for defending his people as well as consuming them.
From the beginning also, this foremost African writer exhibited a political side to his apprehension of the Nigerian condition. Thus, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was put in solitary confinement for two years because he did not support Gen. Gowon’s government against Biafra. In fact, his anti-war posture was to have cost him his sanity and life in detention. He was released after intense international campaign. He recounted this moving experience in A Man Died.
If Gowon’s administration thought imprisoning Soyinka would stem his political fervour, then it had another thing coming. From one government to another, Soyinka has shown that while there has been no clear opposition voice to checkmate excesses of governments of the day, individuals could as well do it. So, together with other civil society groups and individuals, he has continued to be the gadfly prompting every administration to be responsible and responsive to the yearnings of Nigerians, who are alienated in their own land, the wretched of the earth.
The height of his political activism probably reached its zenith during the repressive regime of late Gen. Abacha. The bespectacled General saw his match in repressive ferocity with Soyinka’s intellectual guile in his Radio Kudirat that made nonsense of a national propaganda and mindless secret service operative. When Gen. Abacha’s desperation to get Soyinka got to its peak with a wide dragnet spread to that effect, the later simply left the country in circumstances that beat the SSS till date.
Even with the civil administrations that succeeded the military, Soyinka has not relented in advocating for better living conditions for the masses of Nigerians, who have borne the brunt of bad leadership. He has kept campaigning for a just society in Nigeria both in his writings and his personal interventions in discourses meant to engage the political leadership.
Much of his early writing has been satire directed against corrupt African leaders such as Bokassa and Amin, whose predecessors in various African states were targets of such plays as Madmen and Specialists. Such later works like The Beatification of Area Boy (1995); and The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (1996) are eloquent testimonies about his constant struggle to make the leaders accountable to the people.
Recently, Soyinka rejected a national honour bestowed on him by President Musa Yar’Adua. His argument, like Prof. Chinua Achebe, that the living condition of his fellowmen was far from being the one to celebrate as there was so much suffering in the land. Social justice, good governance and Nigeria’s development are some of his primary concerns for which his voice has remained strident over years. Not even old age has dampened his zeal to speak out on the ills that have continued to trail his beloved nation since independence.
Back in the 60s when the nation held a glimmer of hope as a citadel of advancement for the black race, he detected early that his generation tottered toward waste. This prompted him to dub it the ‘Wasted Generation’. His disillusionment has increasingly been confirmed and turned into nightmares ever since as subsequent governments sank deeper and deeper into unimaginable morass. So too has the erudite scholar been up in arms against all forms of bad governments across the continent.
As ‘Kogi’, as he is fondly called to underscore his fiery activism, marks his 75th year on earth, it is the prayer of all progressives in the country that he adds many more years to continue serving his fatherland. And he optimistically prophesied in one of his poems, “…in spite of stammering/Planes for great building in spite/Of crooked sights…/Despite corrosive fumes of treachery/
And spirits grow despite the midwifery.”
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Wole Soyinka: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1986
CULLED FROM NOBEL PRIZE WEBSITE
Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, “The 1960 Masks” and in 1964, the “Orisun Theatre Company”, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.
Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, “The 1960 Masks” and in 1964, the “Orisun Theatre Company”, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.
During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months untill 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.
As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge, but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance, music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre. He wrote his first plays during his time in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963. Later, satirical comedies are The Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, publ. 1963) with its sequel, Jero’s Metamorphosis (performed 1974, publ. 1973), A Dance of the Forests (performed 1960, publ.1963), Kongi’s Harvest (performed 1965, publ. 1967) and Madmen and Specialists (performed 1970, publ. 1971). Among Soyinka’s serious philosophic plays are (apart from “The Swamp Dwellers”) The Strong Breed (performed 1966, publ. 1963), The Road ( 1965) and Death and the King’s Horseman (performed 1976, publ. 1975). In The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), he has rewritten the Bacchae for the African stage and in Opera Wonyosi (performed 1977, publ. 1981), bases himself on John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Soyinka’s latest dramatic works are A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985).
Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work which has been compared to Joyce’s and Faulkner’s, in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is based on the writer’s thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba. Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké ( 1981), in which the parents’ warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).
Soyinka’s poems, which show a close connection to his plays, are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) the long poem Ogun Abibiman (1976) and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988).
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1986, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1987
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
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