Soyinka, Wole 1934–

Wole Soyinka 1934–

Author, actor, political activist

At a Glance…

Began Writing Career

Twice Arrested

Post-Prison Writings

Literary Philosophy

Selected writings

Sources

In 1986 Wole Soyinka became the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy’s presentation of the award recognized Soyinka’s artistic commitment to render the full complexity of his African culture—a culture that Soyinka and other African intellectuals feel has often been reduced in the West to a flat symbol of primitiveness. In his desire to celebrate Africa, this writer, theatrical producer, actor, and activist does not romanticize his native land; he is as willing to charge Nigerian politicians and bureaucrats with barbarity and corruption as he is to condemn the greed and materialism of the West.

Soyinka’s Nigeria is a society in transition, attempting to mold a new nation out of a variety of rich, tribal cultures and a turbulent legacy of European colonization. He maintains that an artist is “the record[er] of the mores and experience of his society and... the voice of vision in his own time.” As a playwright, Soyinka bridges the distance between these two disparate cultures in his works by infusing Western dramatic forms with elements of traditional Yoruban performance, such as masking, dance, and drums. In this way he both chronicles the social and political experience of modern Nigeria and creates on stage the “ideal fusion” that Nigeria has failed to achieve politically—one informed by both Nigerian tribal traditions and elements of European culture.

Soyinka was born July 13,1934, in Abeokuta, a village on the rocky banks of the River Ogun in western Nigeria. About ten million Yoruban people inhabit southwestern Nigeria and the nearby country of Benin. Although Christianity and Islam have through colonization impressed themselves upon much of this population, about two million people still adhere to the belief system and the rituals of the traditional ancestral spirit cults. Soyinka’s mother became a Christian convert so devout that he nicknamed her “Wild Christian,” and his father was the scholarly, agnostic headmaster of a Christian primary school established in their village by the British. (Soyinka nicknamed his father “Essay” for his occupation and also his initials, S. A.) In addition to these European influences, Soyinka’s paternal grandfather and the village ogboni, or tribal elders, saw to it that young Wole’s early years were also steeped in Yoruba mythology.

Soyinka has written an anecdotal account of the first eleven years of his life entitled Ake: The Years of Childhood.

At a Glance…

Name pronounced “Woh-le Shaw-yin-ka ”; born Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, Nigeria; son of Soditan Akinyode (nicknamed “Essay”; a school headmaster) and Eniola Soyinka. Education; Attended University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, 1952-54; University of Leeds, England, B.A. (with honors), 1960. Religion; “Human liberty.”

Reader at Royal Court Theater, London, 1958-60; University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Rockefeller research fellow in drama, 1960, chairman of department of theater arts, beginning in 1967; University of Ife, Nigeria, lecturer in English literature, 1961-63; Lagos University, Nigeria, senior lecturer in English, 1965-67; political prisoner at Kaduna Prison, 1967-69; Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, fellow of Churchill College, 1972-73; editor of African cultural magazine Transition, 1973-75; University of Ife (name changed to Obafemi Awolowo University in 1987), professor of comparative literature and chairman of department of dramatic arts, beginning in 1975; reassumed editorial post at Transition, 1991. Director of Nigerian theater groups the 1960 Masks and the Orisun Repertory.

Awards: Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1960; John Whiting Drama Prize, 1966; Dakar Negro Arts Festival award, 1966; Jock Campbell Award, 1968; Nobel Prize in literature from the Swedish Academy, 1986; named Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria by General Ibrahim Babangida, 1986; Prisoner of Conscience Prize, Amnesty International; several honorary degrees.

Addresses: Agent —Carl Brandt, Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc., 1501 Broadway, New York, NY 10036; or c/o Transition: An International Review, 1430 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138.

Critic James Olney in the New York Times Book Review called Ake “the best available introduction” to Soyinka’s work because it immerses the reader in the sights, sounds, flavors, and aromas of the childhood world that shaped the playwright’s adult vision.” In Ake the Christian saints and the Yoruban ancestral spirits, or egungun —who return to Yorubaland whenever their masks are danced at village festivals—comfortably coexist. Soyinka recalls in the memoir that, as a child, he viewed St. Peter as an egungun because his picture in the stained glass window of the Christian church in the village shows him wearing egungun like robes. Later, as Soyinka’s father encourages him to pursue a scholarship to the colonial government school in Ibadan, his paternal grandfather secretly subjects him to a painful scarification rite of initiation into Yoruba manhood. He consecrates Wole to the Yoruba god Ogun, despite the fact that the child’s mother has entrusted him to Christ. These seeming contradictions do not trouble young Wole; rather, he derives a sense of security from the fact that his entire extended family of living relatives and ancestral spirits, along with the ogboni, cares for him.

Soyinka was a precocious and inquisitive child; the adults apparently warned one another: “He will kill you with his questions.” At age four he was already fascinated by the rich profusion of life beyond the confines of the parsonage compound on which he and his family lived. As chronicled in Ake, he wandered off the grounds one day, following a police band all the way to the colorful, noisy, aromatic village market, only to be returned on the crossbar of a policeman’s bicycle hours later. Ake has been praised by many critics for the vivid sensuousness of its description; Soyinka seems to have astonishingly detailed memories of the atmosphere and daily events of his childhood. The memoir has also won acclaim for the subtlety with which it registers the child’s awakening perception of the fissures opened in his world by the strain of tradition and modernization pulling in opposite directions. At the end of Ake, Soyinka is watching his mother organize the Egba Women’s Union to protest a tax that has been levied on local tradeswomen. While his own participation in the protest is restricted to running errands for the women, he is clearly absorbing his mother’s capacity to deploy modern means to protect longstanding communal interests and to balance progressive politics with belief in a palpable spiritual world.

Began Writing Career

Soyinka next attended the University College at Ibadan, as his father had hoped. Among his classmates there was Chinua Achebe, who later also earned an international reputation as a novelist. Soyinka studied literature at the college, with an emphasis on drama, from 1952 to 1954. In his studies he explored Yoruba and Greek mythology, laying the groundwork for the imaginative synthesis of tribal and western sources that became a hallmark of his achievement in the theater. While at Ibadan he published several poems and short stories in the literary magazine Black Orpheus. Soyinka’s first published poem, “Telephone Conversation,” demonstrates his flair for satire; it manages to treat with great humor the difficult subject of a racial confrontation between an African student and his English landlady.

Soyinka then left Africa to study drama at Leeds University in England under the influential British critic and professor G. Wilson Knight. While in London he also worked as a reader at the Royal Court Theater, where his first play, The Invention, was staged in 1957. One of Soyinka’s few explicitly political plays, The Invention explores in satirical fashion the consequences for the South African apartheid government of the sudden destruction of skin pigment in its entire black population. Horrified at their inability to distinguish black from white, the government assigns the nation’s scientists to the task of restoring the visible differences on which apartheid is based.

In 1960 Soyinka triumphantly returned to the University of Ibadan as a Rockefeller research fellow in drama, and he commenced serious study of Nigerian folklore. His arrival was marked with productions at the Arts Theater in Ibadan of two of his early plays, The Swamp Dwellers, which had been given a student production in London in 1958, and The Lion and the Jewel. The Swamp Dwellers is a verse tragedy depicting the manipulation of a community of poor, superstitious swamp farmers by greedy religious leaders. The Lion and the Jewel is a comedy that warns against reckless modernization and strives to demonstrate that some of the old values ought not to be thoughtlessly abandoned. These two productions established Soyinka as a literary figure of serious consequence in Nigeria.

It was at this time that he founded his influential amateur theater group, the 1960 Masks, dedicated to forging a new Nigerian drama. This drama was to be written in English but draw its inspiration from the ceremonial performance traditions of Africa—religious festivals, pantomime, and traditional music among them. Most of the members of the group were teachers or civil servants who lived either in Ibadan or in Lagos, one hundred miles away; they frequently conducted rehearsals over the phone or in the Land Rover that carried Soyinka and the company from one city to the other.

The Masks’ first major production was Soyinka’s Dance of the Forests, which had been commissioned from him for the Nigerian independence celebrations of October 1960. Despite the festive occasion, Soyinka seized this opportunity to warn his fellow Nigerians of the dangers of repeating the violence and opportunism of their past and of romanticizing it at the expense of the present. In A Dance of the Forests, the tribes assemble for a great festival during which the egungun are ritually summoned. The people expect their ancestral spirits to be as heroic and noble as they are in legend, and they are shocked to discover that the petty meanness of the ancestors rivals their own bickering.

A Dance of the Forests is the Soyinka play that most deeply draws upon Nigerian folklore, and it has been criticized for its obscurity to westerners and even to non-Yoruban Nigerians. Canadian novelist and critic Margaret Laurence stated, moreover, that “there are some parts of A Dance of the Forests which seem overloaded. There are moments when the multiplicity of themes creates the feeling that there are a few too many plates spinning in the air—some of them speed by without being properly seen, and some crash down. But these are minor flaws in a work of enormous richness.” Critic John Povey wrote in Tri-Quarterly of A Dance of the Forests: “The dramatic power of the surging forest dance carries its own visual conviction. It is this that shows Soyinka to be a man of the theater, not simply a writer who might air his concerns equally effectively in the pages of a novel.”

Soyinka went on from Ibadan to lecture in English literature at the University of Ife, which he left in 1963 for what he termed “political reasons.” He spent the next two years traveling, writing, and directing plays. In 1964 he disbanded the Masks to assemble a professional theater troupe, which he called the Orisun Repertory. The following year he returned to England for the Commonwealth Festival production of what some have called his most beautiful tragedy, The Road. Soyinka has named the Yoruba god Ogun, to whom his grandfather consecrated him in childhood, as his muse. In modern Nigeria, Ogun—god of iron and the forge, of creation and destruction—has become the god of electricity and the guardian of highways. In The Road, car accidents symbolize Ogun’s destructive power over the careless traveler. His high priest is the Professor, a madman who deliberately rearranges crucial road signs, hoping to discover the meaning of life amid the carnage he helps to create.

Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpreters, published in 1965, dramatizes another search for meaning. A group of young Nigerian intellectuals gathers periodically to discuss their country’s tribal past and its westernized future. Each of them has been away to study in England or America and has returned hoping to help shape the new Nigeria. It becomes apparent that the young intellectuals are also searching for clues to their own identities. The Interpreters has been both lauded and criticized for its stylistic obscurity; some critics have likened the shifts in point of view and the general plotlessness of the novel to the writings of modernists like James Joyce and William Faulkner, while others have found it too difficult an introduction to an unfamiliar society.

Twice Arrested

In 1965 Soyinka was arrested by the Nigerian government, accused of forcing a radio announcer at gunpoint to broadcast incorrect election results. His arrest sparked a protest campaign by PEN, the international writers’ organization. Such influential American authors as Norman Mailer and William Styron called for his release. No evidence was ever produced by the police to prove the allegation, and Soyinka was released after three months. Today it is commonly assumed that the election was rigged.

In 1967 Soyinka became the chairman of the Department of Theater Arts at the University of Ibadan, but in August of that same year he was once again arrested—this time during Nigeria’s civil war, to which Soyinka was implacably opposed. Nigeria, a country roughly twice the size of the state of California, is occupied by people speaking hundreds of different languages. In 1967, after several military coups, 30,000 members of the Ibo tribe were slaughtered in the North, where the Hausa-Fulani tribe dominated. More than a million Ibos fled to the east, where they declared the independent Ibo state of Biafra. Federal troops then went to war against Biafra. Soyinka lived on the federal side of Nigeria and his own Yoruban tribe supported the federal cause, but he defied those loyalties and set about organizing Nigerian intellectuals to lobby for a ban on arms sales to both sides.

His peaceful initiative failed, however, because he was immediately arrested. Though he was never formally charged, a faked confession released by the government in October indicated that he was being accused of assisting the Biafrans in their attempt to overthrow the government. Ironically, the government specifically accused the pacifist Soyinka of supplying weapons to the rebels.

Soyinka spent two years as a political prisoner at the Kaduna Prison facility, mainly in solitary confinement. When his jailers vaccinated most of the prisoners against the deadly disease meningitis, Soyinka was passed by. In addition, he was not allowed medical attention when he developed vision problems. He was refused access to reading and writing materials, but manufactured his own ink and began keeping a prison diary and writing poetry on cigarette packages and toilet paper. Every time a letter or poem was miraculously smuggled from prison, the international press seized upon it both as an important literary event and as welcome evidence that he was still alive. Soyinka was released in 1969 and left Nigeria, not to return until after a change of government in 1975.

Post-Prison Writings

Many critics have remarked on a distinct darkening of tone in Soyinka’s writing after his second imprisonment. His prison diary was published in 1972 as The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. It is a fragmented account of his experience, disorderly and wildly various in tone. Its achievement lies less in its attempts at political commentary, asserted Gerald Weales in the New York Times Book Review, than in “the notes that deal with prison life, the observation of everything from a warder’s catarrh to the predatory life of insects after a rain. Of course, these are not simply reportorial. They are vehicles to carry the author’s shifting states of mind, to convey the real subject matter of the book; the author’s attempt to survive as a man, as a mind.” While many critics also note that Soyinka seems to have had some difficulty finding a language adequate to this dehumanizing experience, Rex Collings asserted in World that “there are... moments when he seems to strike a precise reality.... Thus I shall never forget what he calls his moment of ’self-definition,’ at the moment when fetters were placed on his legs for the first time: ’I define myself as a being for whom chains are not, as, finally, a human being.’”

Two poems smuggled from Soyinka’s cell were published in 1969 in a pamphlet entitled Poems from Prison; these were republished later in a larger volume entitled A Shuttle in the Crypt, a sort of verse companion to The Man Died. Many critics suggest that Soyinka’s poetic exploration of his prison experience captures its essence more successfully than does his prose, but The Man Died is said to provide an invaluable context for Soyinka’s imagery and for the personal and political references he makes in his poetry. (Soyinka’s first poetry collection, Idanre and Other Poems, had been published in 1967, just before his long imprisonment; it examines the events leading up to the Biafran War and mourns the loss of the Ibo slaughtered in Biafra.)

Late in 1971 Soyinka accepted a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. He related in the preface to his essay collection Myth, Literature, and the African World that his reception at Cambridge was an ambivalent one; at one point in 1973 the university’s English Department withdrew its support of a lecture series he had proposed to give on the subject of African literature and society, claiming that they had no reason to believe in the existence of “any such mythical beast as ’African Literature.’” Soyinka gave the series with the backing of the Department of Social Anthropology instead. After his stay at Cambridge, Soyinka went on to Ghana to edit the African cultural magazine Transition until 1975, when he accepted a position as professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife.

Soyinka published a second novel, Season of Anomy, several years after his release from prison. Some critics found the book horrifying in its explicit descriptions of torture and murder but compelling in its message that those who hope for peace must first confront such sickening realities. John Mellors wrote in London Magazine that “Soyinka seems to have written much of Season of Anomy in a blazing fury, angry beyond complete control of words at the abuses of power and the outbreaks of both considered and spontaneous violence at a time when winds of change are blowing at gale force through societies, governments, and individuals.”

Soyinka’s post-prison plays, like the novel Season of Anomy, also strike readers as more angry and despairing than his earlier works. In the play Madmen and Specialists, a young doctor returns from the war freshly trained in techniques of torture and practices his new skills on his seemingly mad old father. The play, like Season of Anomy, examines the tyranny and corruption that follow war. Charles Larson in the New York Times Book Review called Madmen and Specialists “a product of those months Soyinka spent in prison, in solitary confinement, as a political prisoner. It is, not surprisingly, the most brutal piece of social criticism he has ever published.”

Not all of Soyinka’s post-prison writings strike the same despairing note, however. He wrote the beautiful memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood after his imprisonment, and plays such as Death and the King’s Horseman, which Thomas Hayes called in Dictionary of Literary Biography “not an attack against the effects of colonialism on traditional Africa as much as a beautiful tribute to the strength of Yoruba tradition.” Death and the King’s Horseman is based on an actual interruption of a ritual suicide in Nigeria in 1946. The king has died, and according to tradition his horseman must die as well so that he can escort his sovereign to the next world. When the colonial district officer hears of what is to happen he intervenes to prevent it, and the horseman’s son, a western-educated doctor, kills himself in his father’s place. According to John Colbey in Drama, “The climax [of Death and the King’s Horseman ] is very beautiful. The power and the glory of Yoruba honor stand fully revealed.”

In 1988 Soyinka published a prequel to Ake entitled Isara: A Voyage Around Essay. The book is a tribute to his father, who died while Soyinka was in political exile after his imprisonment. In 1983 Soyinka had discovered a box containing a collection of Essay’s papers, a find which awakened in him the desire to reconstruct the lives of his father’s generation of Nigerians. Essay had been one of a number of children who were sent away from their native village of Isara to be educated in a teachers’ training seminary and found themselves caught between two conflicting cultures ever afterward. Each of the book’s six chapters centers upon Essay or one of his friends and their attempts, during the years leading up to World War II, to reconcile their western-style educations with the demands of living in a country still dominated on the one hand by traditional African beliefs and on the other by condescending British colonial rule.

Literary Philosophy

Soyinka’s literary philosophy is laid out in two essay collections: Myth, Literature, and the African World, published in 1976, and Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, published in 1990. The first collection defines literature as social vision, or what Soyinka calls “the decongealment of the imaginative function by past or present reality.” He asserts in the essays that critics must approach African literature on its own terms rather than measuring it by standards developed in western cultures. Moreover, he argues, no single African writer can speak for “the Africans”; Soyinka urges western readers to listen to the great variety of African voices recording African life. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage gathers a number of previously published essays together with several new ones to further elaborate Soyinka’s literary philosophy.

In 1991, Soyinka returned to magazine editing, reclaiming his post as editor of Transition. The journal presents discourse on cultural and intellectual issues of international importance by such prominent thinkers as Houston A. Baker, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and the 1992 Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

Soyinka’s friend and former student, the celebrated African-American literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., characterizes Soyinka’s literary achievement simply: “The universality of our experiences he never claims, he assumes. In his poetic representations of Yoruba beliefs, rituals, proverbs, and history, Soyinka allows the African part to speak for the human whole.” About his own work, Soyinka told New York Times Magazine contributor Jason Berry: “I’m not sure I’m trying to communicate a message. I’m just trying to be a part of the movement away from the unacceptable present. When the tool of the pen is inadequate, I get personally involved.”

Selected writings

Poetry

Idanre and Other Poems, Methuen, 1967.

Poems from Prison, Rex Collings, 1969, expanded version published as A Shuttle in the Crypt, Hill & Wang, 1972.

Ogun Abibiman, Rex Collings, 1976.

Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, Random House, 1989.

Novels

The Interpreters, Deutsch, 1965.

Season of Anomy, Rex Collings, 1973.

Plays

The Invention, first produced in England at the Royal Court Theater, 1957.

A Dance of the Forests, Oxford University Press, 1962.

The Lion and the Jewel, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Five Plays (includes The Lion and the Jewel, The Swamp Dwellers, The Trials of Brother Jero, The Strong Breed, and A Dance of the Forests ), Oxford University Press, 1964.

The Road, Oxford University Press, 1965.

Kongi’s Harvest, Oxford University Press, 1966, screen adaptation produced by Calpenny-Nigerian Films, 1970.

Three Short Plays, Oxford University Press, 1969.

The Trials of Brother Jero Oxford University Press, 1969.

Madmen and Specialists, Methuen, 1971.

Before the Blackout, Orisun Acting Editions, 1971.

The Jero Plays, Methuen, 1973.

Camwood on the Leaves, Methuen, 1973.

The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, Methuen, 1973.

Collected Plays, Oxford University Press, volume 1, 1973, and volume 2, 1974.

Death and the King’s Horseman, Norton, 1975.

Opera Wonyosi, Indiana University Press, 1981.

A Play of Giants, Methuen, 1984.

Six Plays, Methuen, 1984.

Requiem for a Futurologist, Rex Collings, 1985.

Other

The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Harper, 1972.

Myth, Literature, and the African World (essays), Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Ake: The Years of Childhood (autobiography), Random House, 1981.

Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, Random House, 1988.

Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, New Horn Press, 1990.

Sources

Books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 36, 1986; Volume 44, 1987.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1986, Gale, 1987.

Gibbs, James, editor, Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, Three Continents, 1980.

Jones, Eldred, Wole Soyinka, Twayne, 1973.

Katrak, Ketu, Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice, Greenwood Press, 1986.

King, Bruce, editor, Introduction to Nigerian Literature, Africana Publishing, 1972.

Larson, Charles R., The Emergence of African Fiction, revised edition, Indiana University Press, 1972.

Laurence, Margaret, Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, Praeger, 1968.

Moore, Gerald, Wole Soyinka, Africana Publishing, 1971.

Omotoso, Kole, Achebe or Soyinka? A Re-Interpretation and a Study in Contrasts, K.G. Saur, 1992.

Pieterse, Cosmo, and Dennis Dueren, editors, African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews, Africana Publishing, 1972.

Rajeshwar, M., The Novels of Wole Soyinka, Advent, NY, 1990.

Roscoe, Adrian A., Mother Is Gold: A Study in West African Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Soyinka, Wole, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Harper, 1972.

Soyinka, Wole, Myth, Literature, and the African World, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Soyinka, Wole, Ake: The Years of Childhood, Random House, 1981.

Periodicals

Black American Literature Forum, Fall 1988.

Black Orpheus, March 1966.

Book Forum, Volume 3, Number 1, 1977.

Drama, Winter 1975.

Hudson Review, Autumn 1990.

Library Journal, March 15, 1992.

London Magazine, April/May 1974.

New Republic, October 12, 1974; May 9, 1983.

Newsweek, November 1, 1982.

New Yorker, May 16, 1977.

New York Review of Books, July, 31, 1969; October 21, 1982.

New York Times Book Review, July 29, 1973; October 10, 1982.

New York Times Magazine, September 18, 1983.

Time, October 27, 1986.

Tri-Quarterly, Fall 1966.

Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1990.

World, February 13, 1973.

—Susan M. Marren