Wole Soyinka

Biography

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, in what is now Ogun State, Nigeria. He is Yoruba — from the same ethnic group as several of the men who led Nigeria's federal government during the Biafran war — which made his opposition to the war's conduct a particularly pointed moral statement. Educated at University College, Ibadan, and then at the University of Leeds in England, where he read English, Soyinka became one of Africa's greatest dramatists, a writer who fused Yoruba mythology with Western theatrical traditions in ways that had never been attempted before. When the civil war broke out in 1967, Soyinka made an extraordinary and reckless personal intervention. He secretly traveled to Biafra to meet with Ojukwu, hoping to broker a peace settlement. He also attempted to persuade northern Nigerian officers to prevent the escalation of the conflict. The Nigerian federal government learned of his activities and arrested him in August 1967 on charges of conspiracy — specifically, that he had purchased Soviet aircraft for Biafra, a charge that was almost certainly fabricated. Soyinka spent the next twenty-two months in solitary confinement in Kaduna Prison, much of it in complete isolation, with almost no reading material. He secretly wrote poetry on toilet paper and cigarette packets. The conditions were deliberately designed to break him — he was a prominent international figure, and his imprisonment was a statement by the federal government that even celebrated intellectuals would not be permitted to challenge state policy. He survived through sheer intellectual determination, teaching himself German and meditating on philosophy. Released in October 1969, Soyinka left Nigeria and eventually published The Man Died (1972), his prison memoir — one of the most powerful documents of the war and its suppression of dissent. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African to receive the prize. He remains Nigeria's most internationally recognized living intellectual and continues to speak out on Nigerian political affairs.

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