Soyinka, Wole

Soyinka, Wole [ Akinwande Oluwole] (1934– ), Nigerian writer, the first to become known for his dramatic works outside his own country. Born at Abeokuta in Western Nigeria, he attended University College, Ibadan, before taking a degree in English at Leeds University, where he wrote several plays including The Lion and the Jewel (1957; Royal Court, 1966), which satirically contrasts old and new Nigeria. In 1958 he joined a writers' group conducted by George Devine and William Gaskill at the Royal Court, where his one-act play The Invention (1959) was given a Sunday night performance. He returned to the University of Ibadan in 1960 as a research fellow in drama and wrote The Dance of the Forests for the Nigerian independence celebrations. He then produced two satirical revues, The Republican (1964) and Before the Blackout (1965), and also in 1965 had a play, The Road, produced in London. This was followed by Kongi's Harvest (1966), about a tyrannical modern African state, produced at the Dakar World Festival of Negro Arts and, in 1968, in New York. Active in politics, he was arrested in 1965 and again in 1967, when his attempts to negotiate a truce in the Biafran War led to two years in jail. He returned to the School of Drama at Ibadan of which he had been appointed Director in 1967, but resigned in 1972 after disturbances on the campus. His next play, Madmen and Specialists (NY, 1970), expressed his horror of war and destruction. In 1973 the National Theatre in London commissioned his adaptation of Euripides' Bacchae, and he went home in 1975 to occupy the Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Ifé. Death and the King's Horseman, written in England in 1975 and staged in Ifé in 1976 (NY, 1987), deals with an incident in Yoruba history in 1946, when the British opposed the ritual suicide of the King's Horseman after his King's death. Among his later works are Opera Wonyosi (1977), based on Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, and A Play of Giants (1984), based on Genet's The Balcony, both of which again attack modern African tyrants. Essentially a political satirist, Soyinka fully deserves his international reputation, being a sophisticated craftsman with a fine command of the English language and an innovative approach to stage-craft. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.