By Henry Akubuiro
Born on July 13 1934, legendary Nigerian writer, Prof Wole Soyinka, turns 90 today. Soyinka’s life is a testament to transcendental literature and dogged social activism. In 1986, Professor Soyinka made history as the first African Nobel laureate, winning the Nobel Prize in literature. It was a global validation of his prodigious talent.
Soyinka is best known as a dramatist, but his rich oeuvre teems with outstanding works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He attended the University College, Ibadan (now the University of Ibadan) before graduating in 1958 with a degree in English from the University of Leeds, England. His return to Nigeria birthed a private theatre group and the classical play, A Dance of the Forest, which was produced 1960 for Nigeria’s independence celebrations and later published in 1963. Steeped in satire, the play lampoon’s the new nation and reminds all that, compared with the past era, it is no longer a golden age.
Soyinka’s writings, whether drama, poetry or fiction, portray, in varying degrees, an iconoclastic bent, though some are modeled after everyday characters encountered in workaday life. Westernised school teachers are piloried in The Lion and the Jewel (1963), the upstart preachers disparaged in The Trials of Brother Jero (1963) and in Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973). Soyinka’s distinctive dramaturgy is a blend of elevated language steeped in social consciousness and an appropriation of Western dramatic tradition mixed with his indigenous Yoruba folklore and religious practices.
Other cerebral plays of his include The Strong Breed (1963), Kongi’s Harvest (1967), The Road (1965), From Zia, with Love (1992), and King Baabu (2002), a work that parodies the Nigerian despot, Sani Abacha, and the Nigerian society. Highly prolific, Soyinka is the author of the play, Madmen and Specialists (1971), Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), which was recently adapted into a movie, and The Beatification of Area Boy (1995).
Soyinka also made a name as a literary journalist, co-editing the much-talked about literary journal, Black Orpheus. He has spent a large chunk of his time as a university lecturer, teaching literature and drama in universities across the world. He has published less poetry volumes compared to drama, but most of them have become a staple in literature class. These include Idanre, and Other Poems (1967) and Poems from Prison (1969; republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972), Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988); and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). He has also written the following novels: The Interpreters (1965), Season of Anomy (1973), and Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021).
Soyinka’s political activism earned him a jail sentence in 1967–69 for vociferously condemning the Nigeria Civil War. That experience gave birth to The Man Died (1972), a prose account of his arrest and imprisonment for 22 months.
As a literary critic, he has published Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), a collection of essays that assess the artistic role and its relationship with Yoruba mythology and symbolism. Soyinka is considered the patron saint of the Yoruba god of iron, Ogun. Another of his critical works is Art, Dialogue, and Outrage (1988), thematically concerned with society, art and culture. There is also The Open Sore of a Continent (1996) and The Burden of Memory, and the Muse of Forgiveness (1999).
His autobiography, Aké: The Years of Childhood, was published in 1981; Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946–1965, published in 1994), and an updated memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, in 2006.
The Abacha junta that held sway in 1993-98 forced him to flee Nigeria following his campaign to return Nigeria to a democratic path. He has been involved in political groups, such as National Democratic Organization, the National Liberation Council of Nigeria, and Pro-National Conference Organisations (PRONACO). To this day, he has continued to function as a consummate dramatist, writer, and a social critic.