Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka: The Playwright Who Refused Silence

When the Swedish Academy called his name in 1986 — the first African writer ever to take the Nobel Prize in Literature — Soyinka did something characteristic with the honour: he dedicated his acceptance speech to Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid, and treated the award as a verdict on African cultural tradition rather than on himself. It was consistent with a life in which almost every prize, professorship and platform got converted into leverage against somebody powerful. Two decades earlier the same instinct had cost him nearly two years in solitary confinement.

Abeokuta, and Two Inheritances at Once

Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, Nigeria, to Ayo and Eniola Soyinka. His father headed the local missionary school; his mother was a successful businesswoman and an advocate for women's rights. The household was Anglican and Christian, but his grandfather pulled him in the other direction, putting him through traditional Yoruba coming-of-age rites. Soyinka never resolved the tension, and that is the point — the whole body of work runs on it.

He attended St. Peter's School and Abeokuta Grammar School, then Government College in Ibadan, then University College, Ibadan from 1952 to 1954, where his contemporaries included Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo. He finished his degree in English at the University of Leeds in 1957, studying under the Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight.

The Royal Court Apprenticeship

Leeds led to London, and London led to the Royal Court Theatre, where Soyinka spent two years as a play reader. It was the most consequential job of his life. The Court in the late 1950s was the laboratory of the English stage, and Soyinka read and absorbed Harold Pinter, John Osborne and Samuel Beckett at close range. He was also writing: *The Swamp Dwellers* (1958), *The Invention* (1959) and *The Lion and the Jewel* (1959) date from this period.

1960 Masks and Orisun

He returned to Nigeria in 1960 on a Rockefeller Research Fellowship and threw himself into fieldwork on traditional ritual and performance. That same year he founded the 1960 Masks, Nigeria's first English-language theatre company, in order to stage *A Dance of the Forests*. When it emerged that his actors' civil service jobs made political material dangerous for them, he simply built a second company: Orisun Theatre, founded in 1964 with professionals who could afford to give offence.

The plays came fast. *The Strong Breed* (1964) took apart communal guilt through the scapegoat ritual. *Kongi's Harvest* (1964) skewered the appetite of African politicians for power. *The Road* (1965) staged social disintegration. His first novel, *The Interpreters*, appeared in 1965, and the poem sequence "Idanre" in 1967, addressed to Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, creation and destruction.

The Cell

The Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967. Soyinka's offence was not partisanship but its opposite: he advocated dialogue and reconciliation between the warring sides, and was jailed for it. He spent close to two years in solitary confinement. What came out of that cell became some of his most durable writing — *Poems from Prison* (1969), the collection *A Shuttle in the Crypt* (1972), and the prison memoir *The Man Died* (1972). The Swedish Academy would later single out the poetry written during his imprisonment for particular praise.

The post-prison work is angrier and stranger. *Madmen and Specialists* (1970) anatomises authoritarian control. *Season of Anomy*, his second novel, followed in 1973, along with *Jero's Metamorphosis* and *The Bacchae*, a version of Euripides rebuilt with Yoruba materials. *Death and the King's Horseman* (1976) fused rhetoric and ritual into the play most often called his masterpiece; the Academy described it as an ancient tragedy of sacrifice and of the traffic between the unborn, the living and the dead. *Myth, Literature, and the African World* (1976) laid out the theory, extending the argument of his essay "The Fourth Stage" on Yoruba tragic form. *Opera Wonyosi* (1977), after Brecht's *Threepenny Opera*, and the poem "Ogun Abibiman" (1977) round out the decade. *Aké: The Years of Childhood* (1981) turned unexpectedly warm, recovering the boy in Abeokuta.

The Nobel, and Then the Death Sentence

The 1986 citation reads: "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence." The Academy called him one of the finest poetical playwrights to have written in English, praising a prolific store of words and expressions deployed across witty dialogue, satire, grotesquery and quiet poetry, and identifying the engine as his combination of Yoruba myth, rite and cultural pattern with a deep familiarity with Western culture.

The prize bought him no safety. When General Sani Abacha seized power in 1993, Soyinka fled Nigeria. From exile in France and the United States he became the regime's most visible antagonist; the government convicted him of treason in absentia and accused him of a bomb plot. He returned home in 1998. *King Baabu* (2001) settled the account onstage, satirising a fictional despot modelled on Abacha.

Later work has stayed argumentative: *The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness* (1999), *Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known* (2002), *Climate of Fear* (2005), the memoir *You Must Set Forth at Dawn* (2006), and *Of Africa* (2012).

Why Wole Is Called a Genius

The specific capacity is synthetic rather than inventive. Soyinka's gift is for holding two complete cultural systems in working order simultaneously — Yoruba cosmology and the European dramatic tradition from Euripides to Brecht — and building structures that are genuinely load-bearing in both. Most writers who attempt this produce pastiche, an African subject in a Western frame or the reverse. Soyinka produced plays in which Ogun and Dionysus are the same problem examined from two sides, and then wrote the theory to explain why in *Myth, Literature, and the African World*. The Swedish Academy named exactly this: a wide cultural perspective, myth and rite fused with European learning.

Alongside it sits a linguistic gift the Academy called a prolific store of words, capable of shifting between satire, grotesquery and quiet lyric within a scene.

The counter-case deserves airing. Soyinka's difficulty is notorious — the density of allusion and syntax has kept some of his best work off stages and out of the hands of the African readership he addresses, and critics have argued that a body of writing about the people is written in a register the people cannot easily read. His moral authority is also inseparable from his biography; the prison years and the exile confer a standing that criticism struggles to weigh separately from the pages. Genius here is real but specific: not a new form invented, but two traditions made to speak one language.

Legacy

Now in his nineties, Soyinka remains Nigeria's preeminent dramatist and one of the most influential playwrights of African descent, a writer whose subject has always been the struggle for selfhood against the state. He gave African drama a place in world literature without conceding that it needed one.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1986
• Nigerian National Order of Merit Award
• Benson Medal — 1990
• Weilheim Literature Prize — 2006
• Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences — 1991
• Notable work: Season of Anomy
• Notable work: The Interpreters
• Notable work: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
• Notable work: Harmattan Haze on an African Spring