The massacre took place in what is now the state of Benin, in which innocents were lined up. I didnt want to go into college completely dependent on my parents, and also I wanted a scholarship. You have your own community. Concentrated on literature. They got married in 1989 when the prof was 55 Years Old. And Im afraid I didnt take very kindly to over-restriction. And thats what the British did. I couldnt resist any longer. After graduating from the University of Leeds, Wole Soyinka continued to study for a masters degree while writing plays drawing on his Yorb heritage. Looking out for members, looking out for one another, accepting the trials and celebrating the triumphs together. He created a new theatrical troupe, the Guerilla Unit, to perform improvised plays on topical themes. Among the books, I remember reading the bowdlerized versions of Charles Dickens. He was also a family friend. And I began sketching out the first few chapters on toilet paper, and between the lines of some books. Meanwhile, Soyinka continued his criticism of the military dictatorship in Nigeria. He married British writer Barbara Dixon in 1958; Olaide Idowu, a Nigerian librarian, in 1963; and Folake Doherty, his current wife, in 1989. Not the kind of murderous nonsense you have these days, religious extremists and so on. I was following that case and working with others inside, within Nigeria, to make sure that he got his dues, the people involved were punished. Isnt this the first line of concern we should have? Because I began to see them as neo as potential internal colonialists. Soyinka judged Abacha to be the worst of the dictators who had imposed themselves on Nigeria since independence. And they are my family, wherever they are. Wife: Not Available: Sibling: Not Available: Children: Not Available : Wole Soyinka Net Worth. And I couldnt wait to get back, and of course I wrote The Dance of the Forest as a warning play, that what we saw indicated quite clearly that we might have to fight the war of independence all over again, this time against our own leaders. Now this got derailed when we then encountered the first flag-bearers of our national independence. In 1986, the playwright and political activist became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. shelved 69,220 times Showing 30 distinct works. In 1994, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) named Wole Soyinka a Goodwill Ambassador for the promotion of African culture, human rights and freedom of expression. Wole Soyinka: Well, because colonial powers never really want to leave anywhere. They got married in 1958. The fissures had become quite open, had blown wide open. Where do you think your confidence as a child came from? And that included the Muslim festivals. He was a pharmacist. I was about just under 17. In any case, I felt I was ready now. He married British writer Barbara Dixon in 1958; Olaide Idowu, a Nigerian librarian, in 1963; and Folake Doherty, his And that community, as far as Im concerned, is without color, without gender, without class. When her service was completed, she received a job at the Guardian. Costs under a pound or whatever, and I substituted one, anyway so it wasnt and I left that one. Sometimes, you know, some of these countries behave as if you need to bring your death certificate by extrajudicial execution before youre admitted as a political refugee. Wole Soyinka: First of all, I was held in a maximum security prison in Lagos. In the late 1950s Soyinka wrote his first important play, A Dance of the Forests, which satirized the Nigerian political elite. Maybe people think a prize like that should count, but no, not at all. I should add that when I went there, we had formed what we called the Third Force. Since the cause of the federal side, in our view, was not just, and since the Igbo had committed a tactical error in deciding on secession, we thought there should be a third force, a neutral force, which would put on the table various concrete proposals, in effect neutralizing the positions of both sides. So if anything, in fact, we were treated even more harshly than the other children because we were supposed to know better and to show an example. Hed reached out in every corner of the country. And then I take that one stage further, and I say possibly there is a fourth, and that there is no truth. Thats the brutal dictator I mentioned earlier. See More, Opera News is a free to use platform and the views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent, reflect or express the views of Opera News. There she met an old acquaintance and got to know that Professor Wole Soyinka was interested in her life and wondered where she was. When Ojukwu and the Eastern forces declared an independent Republic of Biafra, Soyinka contacted General Obasanjo of the Western forces to urge a negotiated settlement of the conflict, but Obasanjo sided with the national government, and a full-scale civil war ensued. As I said, its an exercise in self-preservation. Get the hottest stories from the largest news site in Nigeria. Wole Soyinka: Well, it was not even Ak that I wanted to write. But just follow your instinct, and dont ever pretend to be what youre not. Exchange of ideas between adults just used to fascinate me for some reason. Its all coming out in the wash, of course, with the Official Secrets Act ended. Ransome-Kuti, who was another very erudite person, a great educationist. Independence from Britain had not brought about the open democratic society Soyinka and others had hoped for. You were still living in London when you wrote your first well-known plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel. So that kind of insurgency is still going on at this moment. WebSidi A beautiful but somewhat egotistical village girl who is wooed by both Baroka and Lakunle. We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right,contact us! His father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, was a prominent Anglican minister and headmaster. Make sure they cannot come into their countries to enjoy their loot. And each time I was teaching in Ife, thered be a new space in my classroom, lost to the road. Why did you take on this role of intermediarybetween the Biafrans and the West? Wole Soyinka: Oh yes. There was sort of physical, geographical mobility among many employees of the time. Some of them were already positioning themselves to take over power. And so that led to some fracas. Independence from the British. Community, we spoke earlier of the community. His first major works, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel, date from this period. "The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.". So thats how good he was. Youve made a distinction between your first arrest, in the mid-60s, and your second arrest. And some of these parents would bring their children to us. Ive so many interests. The West African Students Union, for instance. Somehow they disappeared for some time. One of his greatest works appeared the following year, the poetic tragedy Death and the Kings Horseman. So the population of our household was constantly shifting, and they came from different strata of society. And they were collected from women coming in, bringing their crops to the market. And so I eventually settled into the politics of Nigeria itself, which for me was sad. Nigerian author and Nobel prize winner Prof Wole Soyinka was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014. But at the same time, its not considered healthy for a child to be too individual. There were massacres, especially against the Igbos, because the first coup, the leaders were mostly Igbo, and so reprisal claims took place and the drums of war began to sound very, very loud. I used to gather my siblings and perform sketches based on stories, folktales, and sometimes even improvised comic turns in which we mimicked the adults around us and their peculiar ways and so on. Once that was done, I threw my books all my mathematics books out of the window. He is currently married to Folake Doherty and has children from his three marriages. Theres your truth, and there is my truth, and there is the truth. Even then, they always tried to pretend it wasnt there. Reading a novel is almost, its an individual exercise. previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 next sort by previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 next * Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. Then there was Sunday school. We had Lafenwa Barracks, and we had foreign soldiers who sometimes came through. Trying to see what lies behind the slogans, and how after one phase of struggle is ended, the next phase might have to be confronted. They were not the full editions. So getting them back together took a while, and I could not find the documents. Anybody was co-opted who happened along. Unfortunately, that grassroots movement has not yet reached a point where it can actually battle for its voice, which was where it all began in the West. Its nothing, nothing at all. So were friends. What writers do you find inspiring today? Once I was taken from Lagos to Kaduna and placed in solitary confinement, I knew I would never be tried. Therefore they encouraged me to read as much as I wanted to, my father in particular, and to ask questions about the books, which he answered very patiently, I thought. Writing became a therapy. Soyinka interrupted his graduate studies to join the theaters literary staff. Wole Soyinka: Well, the period of close scrutiny began while I was in England. Unfortunately, the process into independence was flawed, because the British wanted to leave their surrogates behind, on their own admission later on, but this was evident even at the time. Prof. Wole Soyinka and Datti Baba Ahmed. Was it also coming through in newspapers and radio? Because even though we lived in a Christian missionary compound a parsonage, as it was called St. Peters Parsonage, we had Muslim neighbors. Home life was a very disciplined one. And the first indication no, in fact, by the time Gowon began to seek me out, by the time he began to seek me out, I had already come to my own conclusions. This overconfidence, thats going to kill you one of these days. That kind of a thing. My cousin went to work, but hed let in a journalist. I took a photograph, I remember, in my apron, telephone on the one side. And occasionally, when a light plane flew overhead, we learned to associate that with the war effort. How did you go back to normal life? For instance, once I started going to school, sometimes I wouldnt go back to my own home. But I was curious. So I knew I would never be tried in court. These were just expressions of my own observations of society. Well be haunted, Nigeria will remain haunted by that day for another generation to come. As a child, Soyinka lived in an Anglican Christian enclave known as the Parsonage. All Rights Reserved. Even to the extent that I undertook military training. In your memoir The Penkelemes Years, you discuss your first years back in Nigeria after independence. You took instructions and you made yourself available at all times for any kind of extra duties that might be imposed on you. The petty racism they encountered in Britain seemed less important than the reports they read from South Africa of black Africans being subjected to legally enforced racial discrimination in their own country by the white-led apartheid government. Anyway, I was tried and acquitted, thank goodness. Wole Soyinka: Penkelemes (pandemonium) summed up for me the mess, the political mess into which wed got ourselves. I would have loved to be an architect. If you were going to school you had to have books. I went straight to see my uncle in Lagos. Now all these opinions dont matter much, after almost a quarter of a century, but at that time she had to listen to them all. They used to get excited over issues, and so somehow I was allowed to eavesdrop, unlike the other children. She is the titular Jewel. I wrote one of my earliest plays, The Invention, which was staged at the Royal Court Theatre, on the situation in South Africa. Wole Soyinka: He even came to my birthday! So thats how I came to absorb that sense of community. Wole Soyinka: It is impossible to quantify, but theres no question whatsoever that people are looking at the United States, for a change, as a space of opportunity for its own self-fulfillment. Her parents were first opposed to the move as the professor had already made his interest clear by then, but her siblings were said to support her anyways. Wole Soyinka: The early influence in my life I think was my father. Print Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known simply as Wole Soyinka, cant be easily described. Its one of the most horrible things that can happen to anybody in prison, that you feel, What else? How did you see that at the time? We had other writers like Gabriel Okara in the East, and I felt maybe by linking up and resurrecting that tight community we might be able to do something to prevent that war, and so I traveled. Do you think the diversity of that community, and of all the visitors that came to your family home influenced your perception of culture? To dominate others seems to be kind of an animal part of the human make-up which we havent quite evolved out of. Wole Soyinka: That was another watershed loss for the democratic struggle of Nigeria, which was allowed just to trickle away. And the interaction between the two faiths was quite a normal accommodative communal kind of existence. Let me begin this way. My friend Christopher Okigbo was Igbo, of course. His next book of verse was called Mandelas Earth and Other Poems. And then we really felt the war was coming very, very close. It was one of the most bitter moments, bitterest moments of my incarceration, to find the Minister of Information calling an international press conference and reading what was supposed to be my confession. It was a banquet which was thrown by the governor of my state, and also another governor, on my 70th birthday. That really is a problem. And then outside the compound itself, I couldnt help noticing, in a kind of osmotic way, how even those who did not belong to my fathers profession or my mothers profession, the townspeople, somehow they formed a kind of outer perimeter of the immediate micro-community. News ), Opera News is a free to use platform and the views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent, reflect or express the views of Opera News. The third marriage was in 1989, to Folake Doherty. AllRightsReserved. So it wasnt enough just for me to sit in and watch, no. Can you talk about the early years of independence and writing the play A Dance of the Forest? I no longer read some of the novels of my childhood, like Charles Dickens, for instance, Tolstoy. So there was never known, up to a certain point, anything, any personal thing my holding him personally responsible ceased not long after I came out of prison, when I began my inquiries into the conduct of the civil war. There were missionary schools, so children of very poor families who happened to be attached to missionary families might be assisted through school, but there werent scholarships as such. When the Alake levied oppressive taxes against the shopkeepers, Mrs. Ransome-Kuti, Mrs. Soyinka, and their followers refused to pay, and the Alake was forced to abdicate. But no, that was not enough! So Im afraid the status, any kind of status, was to my disadvantage as a child! So I have interests, and so I do not see them as anything Im working on is just something Im working on, and it may work, it may not work. WebThe old Soyinka died in the 80s and died in installments, to give way to the new strange personality. My uncle was the chief pharmacist, and eventually I was put in charge of a store. We felt that our main mission, our first mission, was to go and liberate South Africa. One of them was a governor of one of these regions. Now when the British came, then they brought their own levy capitation tax, poll tax, taxes on salaries you know. So it was letting us see that we had that responsibility to ourselves, to the family. So I grew up in this really, really exciting atmosphere of politics, real political activism, on the one hand, and then the more, shall we say, staid political discussions which went on around my father. In other words, the project had always been there. You were still able to play a constructive role. How did being a young Nigerian man in Britain in the 50s differ from your life in Nigeria? His prison memoir, The Man Died, was published in 1972, followed by a novel, The Season of Anomy. I was in charge of what you call Section B. For those who feel that Barack Obama, because he has some African ancestry, therefore will make Africa his priority, for me thats foolish thinking. In 1984, he also directed the film Blues for a Prodigal. He went back to the front. Orji Uzor Kalu holds open casket viewing for late ex-wife (photos) Wole Soyinka is not a supporter of any of the candidate. You went to dinner, high dinner, high tea. We used to go to farms. Soyinka returned to Nigeria to head the Department of Theater Arts at the University of Ibadan. If the content contained herein violates any of your rights, including those of copyright, and/or violates any the above mentioned factors, you are requested to immediately notify us using via the following email address operanews-external(at)opera.com and/or report the article using the available reporting functionality built into our Platform. In The Swamp Dwellers, for instance, I was trying to capture a sense of community which Id known in Nigeria. In other words, despite the discipline, one was able to go out on ones own and discover things for oneself. First, we had to go to church every Sunday morning morning and evening on Sundays. So I enjoyed that moment. If votes were counted in his hometown ward, he beat him there. How did you know it was time to go back? How many months were you in prison? Where were you born? I would love to be a musician, just to spend more time with music, and so on. Residence at the time of the award: Nigeria. I learned about that. If the content contained herein violates any of your rights, including those of copyright, and/or violates any the above mentioned factors, you are requested to immediately notify us using via the following email address operanews-external(at)opera.com and/or report the article using the available reporting functionality built into our Platform I grew up in an atmosphere of political contestation because Nigeria, like most colonial places, was busy trying to decolonize, to free itself from British rule. So when I came in, Mrs. Kuti would just say, All right, where have you reached now in your school? Ransome-Kuti. I was known as the questioner. Totally divorced. Even when there were disagreements, it was still part of the same community. What do you think will be one of the big achievements in the next quarter century? The grassroots movement is very strong in Nigeria. So it was like the community was constantly expanding outwards. Weve talked about elections and corruption and so on. For years, Soyinka had written songs. When you went into exile, you completed your book The Man Died. What led to your release in 1969? Since General Abachas death, youve returned to Nigeria several times. Wole Soyinka: Yes. WebWole Soyinka Biography, If you enjoyed this video, kindly LIKE and COMMENT below. In 2014, Soyinka revealed he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and cured 10 months after treatment. What led you to write your memoir, Ak: The Years of Childhood? Wole Soyinka: Ah, yes! The people were resolved in the Western Region, and cast their votes, and yet power took over their votes and pronounced them its own, which is what led to my original intervention. What was the impetus for writing those? He oversaw stage and film productions of his play Kongis Harvest and wrote one of his most compelling satirical plays, Madmen and Specialists. It was more than one massacre, it was like a wave of massacres. WebDeath and the King's Horseman study guide contains a biography of Wole Soyinka, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and He was quite fond of me and he loved arguing, so he loved me, a kindred spirit. They feel there is something wrong with you. So I had this in two directions, this dichotomy, this conflict of interests between one group and the other group in authority. You had to wear robes to go to dinner. The Igbo by that stage didnt trust anyone, and in any case they could not, they had nothing concrete to take over to the other side. So occasionally, after the really hermetic isolation of a couple of months, I was able to start formulating links with the outside world. Wole Soyinka: Power is involved in this, you know. Didnt even attempt to reach the outside world. He needs no further introduction. Werent you recruited at an early age to assist, teaching some of these peasant women to read? It was, first of all, a womens improvement society, in which women were being taught how to be part of the evolving modern society. I found one had to thread ones way through, on the one hand, the recognition in society of the individual stamp of every child. There were bushes, sort of semi-forest not far from us. And since then, Nigeria has not had one credible election. In the late 60s, his opposition to a repressive regime in his own country led to his imprisonment in solitary confinement for nearly two years, an experience he reflects on in the memoir The Man Died and the verse collection A Shuttle in the Crypt. So I spent most of my time just watching rehearsals, reading plays in London instead of doing my thesis in Leeds. His second marriage was in 1963 to Nigerian librarian Olaide Idowu, with whom he had three daughters Moremi, Iyetade (deceased), Peyibomi and a second son, Ilemakin. Soyinka married Folake Doherty in 1989. He wanted you to hear exactly how it sounded, because it was a very aural, musical kind of poetry. Any/all written content and images displayed are provided by the blogger/author, appear herein as submitted by the blogger/author and are unedited by Opera News. That is easily answered. He was a musician also, by the way, so that wasnt surprising. I.O. In Western Nigeria, the results of a 1964 regional election were set aside so that a candidate favored by the central government could claim victory. I wanted to capture a particular period that was disappearing, a period which was very important to my childhood. That was the main difference. And sometimes the women would be arrested, their goods seized completely. That newspaper, it was a Swedish newspaper which tries to get the immediate reaction of the Nobel laureate. He met the Asagba of Asaba, the traditional ruler, who met him in council, and he was received by the citizens and so on, because by then, the very fact that he came there to apologize made a great impression on them. Veteran singer and social activist, Charles Oputa, aka Charly Boy has criticized Nobel laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka for his comments criticising supporters of Peter Obis presidential campaign after making a statement denouncing Labour Party vice presidential candidate Datti Baba-Ahmed. 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