Wole Soyinka

Nigerian writer

• Born: July 13, 1934
• Place of Birth: Ijebu Isara, near Abeokuta, Nigeria

The first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Soyinka is generally regarded as Nigeria’s foremost contemporary dramatist and possibly the most influential of all black African playwrights. Although he earned high praise equally for his poetry, fiction, memoirs, and literary criticism, it is as a playwright that Soyinka is best known.

Early Life

Wole Soyinka was born to Ayo and Eniola Soyinka on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, Nigeria. His mother was a successful businesswoman, and his father was the headmaster of the local missionary school, which Soyinka attended as a child. Describing his earliest memories in an autobiographical work, Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), Soyinka remembers that his father seemed to be on a first-name basis with God; he recalls that his mother was nicknamed the Wild Christian for her flamboyant faith.

Soyinka attended St. Peter’s School and Abeokuta Grammar School in his hometown before transferring to Government College in Ibadan. His undergraduate education began at University College, Ibadan (later to become the University of Ibadan), where he studied from 1952 to 1954. Interestingly, his classmates numbered among them such future literary giants as Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo. Soyinka traveled abroad to England to complete his undergraduate degree, graduating from the University of Leeds in 1957 with a bachelor's degree in English. It was at Leeds that he met G. Wilson Knight, a noted scholar, whose influence started Soyinka on a lifelong interest in the metaphysical and the imagistic.

After graduation, Soyinka spent two years working as a play reader at the Royal Court Theatre, where he was exposed to the experimental and innovative styles of some of Great Britain’s best young playwrights, among them Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Samuel Beckett, and John Arden. His experience at the Royal Court rounded out his academic and professional training in drama and theater. During these years, Soyinka wrote his first plays: The Swamp Dwellers (1958), about one community’s history; The Invention (1959), a one-act satire comparing the leaders of South Africa’s apartheid system to mad scientists conducting horrible experiments; and The Lion and the Jewel (1959), a comedy. The Invention was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1959, as part of a program that also featured excerpts from A Dance of the Forests (1960). That same year, The Swamp Dwellers was produced in London and in Ibadan, where The Lion and the Jewel was also performed.

Even as a child Soyinka had felt drawn to his Yoruba roots despite the Christian environment in which he was reared and educated. His grandfather had initiated him into adulthood through the traditional ritual incisions on the wrists and ankles to prepare him to face the world. As an adult, Soyinka realized that his dream of a thriving black African theater tradition required his immersion in traditional African culture and, in 1960, he returned to Nigeria with the support of a Rockefeller Research Fellowship to study African theater. Although the fellowship attached him to the University of Ibadan, he spent much of his year as a fellow in an intensive study of Nigerian culture. He traveled widely throughout the country to participate in community rituals and traditional festivals, and he experimented with ways to combine native traditions with Western culture. At the end of his fellowship year, Soyinka published a foundational essay based on his research, “Towards a True Theater,” and accepted a position as lecturer at the University of Ife in Ibadan. Since that time, he has held various faculty positions at universities all over the world.

Life’s Work

Soyinka returned from his university studies in England to a Nigeria that had no native dramatic tradition in English. Theatrical productions were limited to William Shakespeare’s plays and other English classics, or to popular European plays in English translation. Nothing on stage had any bearing on the average playgoer’s life; the only extant Nigerian play in English was written in Elizabethan speech. In 1960, Soyinka created the 1960 Masks, a theater company composed of professionals and civil servants who were interested if untrained amateurs. Formed in Lagos primarily to perform in Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests (1960) for Nigerians’ independence year celebrations, The 1960 Masks was that country’s first English-language theater company, although its amateur composition kept it from being the theater group that Soyinka had dreamed of forming. The year 1960 also saw the production of two more Soyinka plays, The Trials of Brother Jero and Camwood on the Leaves, a radio script.

Because the actors involved in the 1960 Masks were dependent for their livelihoods on their positions in the civil service and in the schools, Soyinka was hesitant about involving them in political drama for fear that their participation would cost them their careers. Consequently, in 1964, he formed the Orisun Theatre group, composed of theater professionals who could present his political revues as well as his longer plays.

For Soyinka, the years from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s proved to be a period of intense and fruitful playwriting. During this time he wrote many of his most important and political works for theater: The Strong Breed (1964), his most frequently anthologized play, is a portrayal of the individual sacrifices necessary for the atonement of communal guilt, a dramatization of the ancient scapegoat ritual; Kongi’s Harvest (1964) is a scathing indictment of Africa’s new politicians, who are driven by their passion for authority; The Road (1965) depicts a society moving inexorably toward death and destruction; Madmen and Specialists (pr. 1970) focuses on the gradual deterioration of humanity, which is subjected to the rigid control of an authoritarian society; Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973) is a cynical satire on the excesses of right-wing military dictatorships; and Death and the King’s Horseman (1976) returns to the same symbiosis of rhetoric with ritual that informs the earlier play The Strong Breed. Two plays from this period are interesting for their fusion of Western dramatic forms with Yoruba concepts and performance elements: The Bacchae (1973), an adaptation of the Euripides play, changes the original ending to allow for a positive interpretation inspired by Yoruba folk ritual, and Opera Wonyosi (1977), which caricatures modern African despots, is taken from Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera, 1949).

Although Soyinka believes as do many of his admirers that his Nobel Prize commemorates his dramatic work, he has also earned praise for his poetry and fiction, for his autobiographical work, and for his essays on literary criticism. His first collection of poetry, published early in his career, featured the long poem “Idanre” (1967), which celebrates the Yoruba god Ogun, who figures prominently in a number of Soyinka’s other works, including another long poem, “Ogun Abibiman” (1977). Imprisoned for two years for his outspokenness about human rights violations, Soyinka detailed the trauma of his solitary confinement in two more collections of poetry, Poems from Prison (1969) and A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), and in his prison diary, published in 1972 as The Man Died . Also a product of his own experience is Aké: The Years of Childhood, a warm but unsentimental memoir of his childhood.

Soyinka’s two novels, unlike the rest of his literary output, have elicited strongly contradictory commentary from serious students of African literature. The Interpreters (1965), a hilarious exposé of modern African society, is the focus of much of the controversy; while some readers believe the novel to be nothing less than a masterpiece, others point out that both the language and the structure are so convoluted and dense that whole sections of the book succeed only in confusing the reader. Season of Anomy (1973) is a much grimmer and more artistically successful novel that deals with the horrible consequences of the lust for power displayed by dictatorial rulers.

In the field of literary criticism, Soyinka has proven himself to be a formidable theorist and thinker with his Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), a collection of essays originally delivered as lectures at the University of Cambridge, and with various individual pieces, most notably “The Fourth Stage,” in which he outlines a theory of Yoruba tragedy based on Yoruba theology and concepts of existence.

Soyinka’s later work is more focused on the modern world and its evils, and deals less with traditional Yoruba cultural motifs. Nevertheless, Soyinka still displays a concern with the human race’s capacity for both creation and destruction. A Play of Giants (1984) explores the notion of power and how it is wielded for good or evil; the play is a satire on Africa’s self-appointed “presidents-for-life,” such as Idi Amin and Jean-Bedel Bokassa who used their power to destroy anyone who dared question their authority. A more humorous piece, Requiem for a Futurologist (1986) takes on television charlatans and their gullible public and proves that human beings are the potential victims of their own cleverness. Also in 1986, he devoted his Nobel Prize speech to Nelson Mandela and the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa and insisted that the prize, through him, was in fact honoring Africa as a whole.

The Nobel made Soyinka an international figure, and he capitalized on it to promote African causes. On stage, in print, and at the lectern he appealed for human rights, denounced dictators, urged fellow Africans to end corruption and make common cause, and sought help from the West for economic relief. In 1992, for instance, he called for the cancellation of debts owed foreign banks by African nations as a way to make reparations for the slave trade of previous centuries.

At the same time, he worked to improve conditions in his homeland. He headed a commission to reduce traffic fatalities on the highway, resigning in utter frustration in 1991. When yet another coup, headed by General Sani Abacha, ended the attempt to restore democracy, Soyinka spoke out against the military regime and in 1994 had to flee once again. From exile in France and then the United States, he continued to participate in the anti-Abacha movement, becoming such a symbol for the effort that, he later joked, he was afraid to shave his trademark cloud of white hair and bushy beard because it might disappoint supporters. The United Nations recognized his status by naming him UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Promotion of African Literature and Communication. In 1996, he published The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis , an indictment of human rights atrocities, such as the hanging of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Nigerian government accused Soyinka of participation in a bomb plot in 1997 and convicted him of treason in absentia. Soyinka wrote poetry in exile, collected in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002), and plays satirizing dictatorships and exploring the nature of state oppression of the individual.

In 1998 he returned to his homeland amid renewed hopes that the long era of military rule in Nigeria was nearing an end. More plays and volumes of memoirs and essays followed, such as The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1999) and, most notably, You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir (2006). The latter is Soyinka’s attempt to set the record straight about his involvement in Nigerian and African politics from the 1990s onward and to explain the personal inspirations, from friends to Yoruba beliefs, that impelled him. His play King Baabu, produced 2001, concerns a henpecked general, Basha Bash (modeled on Abacha), who stages a coup and has himself crowned King Baabu to avoid appearing a military dictator; his transparent ploys are shown to be purely self-deceiving and ridiculous. In 2012, he published the nonfiction work Of Africa, which looks critically at precolonial and postcolonial African politics.

Moreover, Soyinka remained a political figure. During a rally in 2004 he was arrested for claiming that the election of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a former dictator, was fraudulent. A year later he cofounded a political conference to discuss the shared values that give coherence to the many ethnic and political groups in Nigeria. In 2005 he published the lectures that he had delivered at London’s Royal Institution as Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World ; in this book he addresses the political and environmental forces that strip people of their autonomy and self-respect and allow opportunists and ideologues to wield power. In April 2007, he argued that the recently held presidential elections had again been fraudulent, as well as marred by extensive violence, and should be annulled.

Among the many honors bestowed on Soyinka are Nigeria’s Agip Prize for Literature and selection as Commander of the Federal Republic, the nation’s second-highest civilian distinction, both in 1986; honorary degrees from the University of Leeds (1973), Harvard University (1993), and Princeton University (2005); and, in 2005, the chieftaincy “Akinlatun of Egbaland” for the Ebga population of the Yorubas. In 2009, the Academy of Achievement presented Soyinka the Golden Plate Award, and he was given the International Humanist Award in 2014. In 2017, Soyinka won the "Special Prize" category of the Europe Theatre Prize in recognition of his contributions to the continued exchange of knowledge between people of different cultures. In July 2024, the National Arts Theatre in Iganmu, Lagos, was renamed in honor of Soyinka.

Significance

Whatever the focus of any specific piece of his writing, Wole Soyinka manifests a passionate concern for his society and for human rights worldwide. Much of his work is political, arising from his own outspokenness against human rights violations and from his own experience of repeated incarcerations in Nigerian prisons, exile, and denunciation by the corrupt powers-that-be in his own country. Out of the crucible of his own life, Soyinka has distilled his most pervasive and powerful themes: the struggle for selfhood and national identity, the cost of that struggle, the need for sacrifice and purging of collective guilt in the quest for progress, the duty of the artist, and the relationship between the health of the state and individual liberties.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, Soyinka was praised by the Nobel Committee for a body of work that is “vivid, often harrowing, but also marked by an evocative, poetically intensified diction.” Soyinka’s work is the artistic contribution of a man who courageously shares his vision of salvation for humanity and his denunciation of oppression in spite of harassment and persecution from the very society he seeks to serve. Characteristically, he sees the Nobel Prize not as an award for his own artistry but as a recognition of the African cultural traditions that have made his work possible.

Bibliography

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