Wole
Soyinka is among contemporary Africa's greatest writers. Hw was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in
Literature (in 1986). He is also one of the continent's most
imaginative advocates of native culture and of the humane
social order it embodies. Soyinka is actively committed to social justice and he
has been an outspoken, daring public figure deeply engaged in
the main political issues of his country and Africa, and he
has become a symbol for humane values throughout the
continent. Wole Soyinka is perhaps Africa’s most versatile
and eclectic intellectual: playwright, poet, novelist,
literary and social critic. He has authored over 40 works.
Born
in in Abeokuta, Western Nigeria in 1934, Soyinka grew up in an
Anglican mission compound in Aké. An intelligent student, he
first attended the parsonage's primary school, where his
father was headmaster, and then a nearby grammar school in
Abeokuta, where an uncle was principal. Though raised in a
colonial, English-speaking environment, Soyinka's ethnic
heritage was Yoruba, and his parents balanced Christian
training with regular visits to the father's ancestral home in
`Isarà, a small Yoruba community secure in its traditions.
Soyinka
recalls his father's world in `Isarà, A Voyage Around
"Essay" (1989) and recounts his own early life
in Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), two of his
several autobiographical books. Aké ends in 1945 when
Soyinka is eleven, with his induction into the protest
movement that during the next decade won Nigeria's freedom
from British rule. The political turbulence of these years
framed Soyinka's adolescence and early adulthood, which he
chronicles in his most recent autobiographical work, Ibadan,
The Penkelemes Years, A Memoir: 1946-1965 (1994).
At
twelve Soyinka left Aké for Ibadan to attend that city's
elite Government College and at 18 entered its new university.
But in 1954, his ambition focused on a career in theater,
Soyinka traveled to England to complete a degree in drama at
Leeds, under the well-known Shakespearean critic, G. Wilson
Knight. After graduation in 1957, Soyinka extended his
European apprenticeship by working several years as a
script-reader, actor, and director at the Royal Court Theatre
in London. This period also saw the composition of Soyinka's
first mature plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion
and the Jewel, and their successful staging in both London
and Ibadan. In 1960 a Rockefeller research grant enabled
Soyinka, now 26, to return to Nigeria. There he assembled his
own acting company, produced a new play, A Dance of the
Forests, and timed its opening to coincide with the
country's official celebration of independence in October.
Though Soyinka's return from
England had been widely welcomed, A Dance of the Forests at once placed him at odds with Nigeria's newly installed
leaders as well as with many of his fellow intellectuals.
Thematically, the play presents a pageant of black Africa's
"recurrent cycle of stupidities," a spectacle
designed to remind citizens of the chronic dishonesty and
abuse of power which colonialism had bred in generations of
native politicians. Hostility greeted the play from almost all
quarters. Nigerian authorities were angered by Soyinka's
suggestion of wide-spread corruption, leftists complained
about the play's elitist aesthetics, and African
chauvinists -- those proponents of pure Negritude whom
Soyinka labels "Neo-Tarzanists" -- objected to his
use of European techniques.
From
posts at the universities in Ife, Lagos, and Ibadan, Soyinka
pursued his hopes for a reborn Nigeria with inventiveness and
energy. His plays, the core of Soyinka’s creative work range
from satirical political commentary in such works as Kongi’s
Harvest, Madmen and Specialists and the Brother Jero plays, to
the tragic cadences of Death and the King’s Horseman and The
Strong Breed. In
them he draws upon Yoruba myth and ceremonies, incantatory
poetry, dance and music to connect the historical with the
metaphysical, the timeless realm which unites the living, the
dead, and the unborn. Beyond
these full-length plays, Soyinka composed satirical revues,
organized an improvisational "guerrilla theater,"
and wrote for radio and television. He also published his
first novel, The Interpreters (1965), and his first
book of poetry, Idanre and Other Poems (1967).
The
problems of Africa, particularly the failures of authoritarian
politicians and military dictators, have concerned Soyinka
throughout his career. In
two novels he examines the responsibilities of public
intellectuals of his generation: The Interpreters and Season
of Anomy. Not
only did much of this large body of work openly challenge
Nigerian authorities, but Soyinka also involved himself in
practical politics. His actions led to a brief detention,
trial, and acquittal in 1965. Then in 1967 came extra-judicial
arrest and imprisonment for more than two years, much of it in
solitary confinement. He
was imprisoned during the Nigerian Civil War from1967-69, for allegedly
conspiring to aid the attempted secession of Biafra from
Nigeria. Following his release in 1969, Soyinka went into
voluntary exile and soon after entered a second period of
intense creativity. His
powerful prison diary, The Man Died (1972), was published after his release. “ The Man Died”
recounts his traumatic experience, as does some of his poetry,
including the important volume, ”A Shuttle in the Crypt”.
Other works included a new novel, Season of Anomy (1973) – also a bitter reflection on his years of
confinement, additional street satires, and, perhaps most
important, two extraordinary tragic dramas, Madmen and
Specialists (1970) and Death and the King's Horseman (1975).
Complementing
this literary outburst, Soyinka delivered lectures and wrote
essays that discussed the nature of his art, traced its roots
in Yoruba tradition, and compared his aesthetic principles and
practice to those of other writers, both African and European.
Some of this criticism Soyinka revised and published as Myth,
Literature and the African World (1976). Most of the rest
he collected a decade later in Art, Dialogue & Outrage (1988). In recent
years Soyinka has been very active in the pro-democracy
movement in Nigeria; his 1996 work “Open Sore of a
Continent” provides a trenchant commentary on crises in
leadership. This book traces Nigeria's decline into
increasingly inhumane military governments, a deterioration
epitomized by the 1995 execution of fellow playwright Ken
Saro-Wiwa as well as by the death sentence pronounced on
Soyinka himself in 1997. He was also co-editor of Black Orpheus.
Wole
Soyinka is currently professor
of English and drama at the University of
Ibadan,
and is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts at Emory
University.