biography of wole soyinka wikipedia

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet, author, teacher and political activist. In 1986, he became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Who Is Wole Soyinka?

Wole Soyinka was born Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. His father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, was a prominent Anglican minister and headmaster. His mother, Grace Eniola Soyinka, who was called "Wild Christian," was a shopkeeper and local activist. As a child, he lived in an Anglican mission compound, learning the Christian teachings of his parents, as well as the Yoruba spiritualism and tribal customs of his grandfather. A precocious and inquisitive child, Wole prompted the adults in his life to warn one another: “He will kill you with his questions.”

After finishing preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, Soyinka moved to England and continued his education at the University of Leeds, where he served as the editor of the school's magazine, The Eagle . He graduated with a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1958. (In 1972 the university awarded him an honorary doctorate).

Plays & Political Activism

In the late 1950s Soyinka wrote his first important play, A Dance of the Forests , which satirized the Nigerian political elite. From 1958 to 1959, Soyinka was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship and returned to Nigeria to study African drama.

In 1960, he founded the theater group, The 1960 Masks, and in 1964, the Orisun Theatre Company, in which he produced his own plays and performed as an actor. He has periodically been a visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

"The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism."

Soyinka is also a political activist, and during the civil war in Nigeria he appealed in an article for a cease-fire. He was arrested for this in 1967, and held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969.

Nobel Prize and Later Career

In 1986, upon awarding Soyinka with the Nobel Prize for Literature, the committee said the playwright "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence." Soyinka sometimes writes of modern West Africa in a satirical style, but his serious intent and his belief in the evils inherent in the exercise of power are usually present in his work. To date, Soyinka has published hundreds of works.

In addition to drama and poetry, he has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anom y (1973), as well as autobiographical works including The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972), a gripping account of his prison experience, and Aké ( 1981), a memoir about his childhood. Myth, Literature and the African World (1975) is a collection of Soyinka’s literary essays.

“Against my rational instincts, I believe that we have here a genuine case of a born-again democrat,” he said. Ultimately, “the real heroes of this exercise have been the Nigerian people and that gingers me up.”

Now considered Nigeria’s foremost man of letters, Soyinka is still politically active and spent the 2015 election day in Africa’s biggest democracy working the phones to monitor reports of voting irregularities, technical issues and violence, according to The Guardian . After the election on March 28, 2015, he said that Nigerians must show a Nelson Mandela–like ability to forgive president-elect Muhammadu Buhari’s past as an iron-fisted military ruler, according to Bloomberg.com.

Personal Life

Soyinka has been married three times. He married British writer Barbara Dixon in 1958; Olaide Idowu, a Nigerian librarian, in 1963; and Folake Doherty, his current wife, in 1989. In 2014, Soyinka revealed he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and cured 10 months after treatment.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Wole Soyinka
• Birth Year: 1934
• Birth date: July 13, 1934
• Birth City: Abeokuta
• Birth Country: Nigeria
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet, author, teacher and political activist. In 1986, he became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• Writing and Publishing
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University College
• University of Leeds
• Government College
• Nationalities

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• The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

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World History Edu

• Africa / Renowned Writers

Wole Soyinka: Biography, Political Activism, Major Plays, Nobel Prize, & Achievements

by World History Edu · May 3, 2021

Wole Soyinka — Image courtesy — from the Nobel Foundation archive

In recent decades, very good playwrights have emerged from the African continent, but nowhere do they reach the excellence of Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka.

Most known for winning the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, Wole Soyinka has written critically acclaimed plays for both theatre and radio. He thus became the first sub-Saharan African to win a Nobel Prize.

Drawing heavily from Yoruba people’s myths, rites and cultural patterns, Soyinka, a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University, has attained incredible feats to the point where he is now considered one of the finest poetical playwrights of all time.

Wole Soyinka: Quick Facts

Born: Akinwande Ouwole “Wole” Soyinka

Birthday: July 13, 1934

Place of birth : Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria (formerly Nigeria Protectorate)

Parents: Grace Eniola Soyinka and Samuel Ayodele Soyinka

Siblings: Folashade (died at age one), Kayode, Omofolabo “Folabo”, Yeside, Femi, and Atinuke “Tinu”.

Education: Abeokuta Grammar School, Government College in Ibadan (1946-1952), University College Ibadan (1952-1954); University of Leeds

Spouses: Married three times and divorce twice: Barbara Dixon (married in 1958), Olaide Idowu (married in 1963), Folake Doherty (1989-)

Influenced by : Irish writer J.M. Synge, British literary scholar Molly Maureen Mahood

Most famous for : Works that help to advance understanding and the exchange of knowledge of different cultures and peoples

Notable awards and honors: Nobel Prize in Literature (1986), Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (2009), Europe Theatre Prize in the “Special Prize” category (2017)

Who is Wole Soyinka?

Wole Soyinka is the son of Samuel Ayodele Soyinka and Grace Eniola. Both his parents grew up in strong Anglican values. His father for example was an Anglican minister and a headmaster of Anglican school in Abeokuta. His mother, a shop owner, was a political activist in Abeokuta.

His family belongs to the Yoruba people, one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria. As a result of his family’s Anglican background as well as the prevailing Yoruba religious tradition around him, he benefited tremendously from the merging of those two religious beliefs. As a matter of fact, many of his works were inspired by the culture and traditions of the Yoruba people.

Growing up, Soyinka attended a primary school in Abeokuta before studying at Government College in Ibadan, Nigeria. He then proceeded to the University of Ibadan (1952-1954) and then the University of Leeds in England (1957), where he studied drama. While at Leeds, he was tutored by the famous literary critic Wilson Knight.

While in the United Kingdom, he worked for some time as a dramturgist at the Royal Court Theater, London. Once back in Nigeria, Soyinka followed his passion and studied African drama before going on to teach drama and literature at the University of Lagos.

He also had teaching spells at his alma mater the University of Ibadan, and later Obafemi Awolowo University (formerly the University of Ife).

Like his famous aunt-in-law, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (the mother of Afro-Beat king Fela Kuti ), Soyinka was very active in Nigeria’s fight to gain independence from Great Britain.

Since 1975 Soyinka has been the professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Ibadan. He has on numerous occasions served as a visiting professor in universities in England and the U.S., including Yale, Cambridge, and Sheffield.

In November 1994 he fled his home country Nigeria (through Benin) after then-military ruler General Sani Abacha accused him of treasonous crimes. Soyinka made his way to the U.S., where he lived until Nigeria was returned to civilian rule following the death of Gen. Abacha in 1998.

In October 1994 Soyinka was appointed the UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Promotion of African culture and human rights, freedom of expression, media and communication

Imprisonment during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970)

Frustrated by the extent of cult of personality and rampant government corruption in his country, he began to firm statements critical of the Nigerian government, especially the January 1966 military coup

Beginning around 1967, Soyinka had secret talks with the Ibo community in a bid to avert a civil war from breaking out in Nigeria. He wrote a passionate article, appealing to both sides to exercise restraint. However, his good intentions were misread by the Nigeria government (headed by General Yakubu Gowon) who described him as a traitor.

Soyinka was subsequently imprisoned in 1967 on the charge of conspiring with the leaders of Biafra rebels. He remained locked up (in solitary confinement in some cases) for close to two years before his release in 1969.

Fight against oppressive governments and dictators

Soyinka does not mince words when it comes to rejecting the numerous military dictatorships that have blighted many African countries for decades. For example, he was very vocal in criticizing the brutal dictatorships of General Idi Amin of Uganda (1971-1979), Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (1987-2017), and Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha’s (1993-1998). The latter dictator, in a farce trial, sentenced Soyinka in absentia to death on the charge of treason against the state.

As a result of the frequent suppression of dissent in Nigeria by various military juntas of the past, Soyinka was forced to spend a bulk part of his adult life living in exile, particularly in countries such as the U.S. and the UK.

He has also relentlessly called on his Nigerian government to end the endemic corruption and abuse of powers by people placed in positions of trust.

Nobel Prize in Literature (1986)

In 1986, Soyinka became the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His  works were deemed by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, as being “full of life and urgency”.

In his Nobel lecture , titled “This Past Must Address Its Present”, on December 8, 1986, he praised the invaluable contribution anti-apartheid fighter Nelson Mandela in ending the politics of racial segregation in not just South Africa, but across the world.

Two years after his 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, he received the Agip Prize for Literature.

Major plays and essays

Broadcast in July 1954 by the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, Soyinka’s “Keffi’s Birthday Treat” was a short radio play that he wrote while studying in the U.K.

During his stay in London, he also wrote plays such as The Lion and the Jewel (1959) and The Swamp Dwellers (1958) . The latter play was a philosophical play with a touch of comedy, highlighting how Nigerians could blend development and tradition.

Other famous plays by Wole Soyinka

Drawing heavily from Yoruba people’s myths, rites and cultural patterns, Soyinka has attained incredible feats to the point where he is now considered one of the finest poetical playwrights of all time.

The following are some of his famous plays:

The Invention (1957) – Soyinka’s first play to be produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London

A Dance of the Forest (performed 1960, published in 1963)

The Strong Breed (performed 1966, published in 1963)

The Detainee (1964) – a radio play for the BBC in London

The Road  (1965) – premiered in London at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in September, 1965

Kongi’s Harvest (performed 1965, published 1967)

Madmen and Specialists (performed in 1970, published in 1971)

Death and the King’s Horseman (performed in 1976, published in 1975)

Opera Wonyosi (performed in 1977, published in 1981)

A Play of Giants  (1984)

Requiem for a Futurologist  (1985)

Famous novels by Wole Soyinka

Some examples of Wole Soyinka famous novels are The Interpreters (1964) and Season of Anomy (1973). The latter delves into his thoughts during his time behind bars as political prisoner.

Wole Soyinka — A line from Soyinka’s 1960 essay for the Horn

More Wole Soyinka Facts

• In an interview in 2007, he stated that he although he attended church regularly and sang in the choir while growing up in Abeokuta, he went on to gravitate towards agnosticism in his adult life, which was then followed by “outright atheistic convictions”.
• Soyinka’s mother – Grace Eniola Soyinka – was a member of the Ransome-Kuti family. She was also the niece-in-law to Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the mother of Afro-Beat king Fela Kuti.
• Some notable first cousins (once removed) are Fela Kuti, Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, and politician Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. As a result, his second cousins are Femi Kuti Seun Kuti, and Yeni Kuti.
• Soyinka is a big admirer of Yoruba mythology, particularly the orisha (god) Ogun, the god of iron and war.
• Some of his most famous autobiographies are   The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972), which was banned by a Nigerian court in 1984, and Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), which  won the 1983 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
• Soyinka’s first essay “Towards a True Theater” was published in December 1962. He would go on to write several others, including Culture in Transition (1963), Myth, Literature, and the African World  (1976), and The Credo of Being and Nothingness  (1991)
• In 1960, Wole Soyinka founded a theatre group called The 1960 Masks. Four years later, in 1964, he founded the Orisun Theatre Company, producing many great plays and acting in a number of them.
• His 1963 play A Dance of the Forest (performed 1960, published 1963) was a brilliant work that exposed the flaws of the elites of Nigerian society. It was selected as the official play for the independence celebration on October 1, 1960.
• He released his first feature length film – Culture in Transition – in 1963.
• Soyinka briefly lived in Accra, Ghana, where he served as the editor of the literary magazine Transition. The magazine was very critical of numerous African dictators of that era, including Idi Amin, Uganda’s dictator of the 1970s.

Tags: Abeokuta-Nigeria African Writers Nigeria Nobel Prize in Literature Playwrights Poets Wole Soyinka

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Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on a Lifetime of Art and Activism

Aysegül sert talks to the nigerian writer in paris.

Wole Soyinka is writer-warrior: at 89, he still has his abundant hair, lanky frame and lavish beard, which give him the look of a charming mad scientist.

Born in 1934 in Abeokuta, in the forested land of the Yoruba region of southwestern Nigeria, he was the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, winning in 1986. He studied in England, founded two theatre companies [in 1960 and 1964], is a professor of comparative literature, was primarily exiled in the U.S., and currently lives between Nigeria and California. His impact on the history of literature is rivaled only by his political activism. Jailed in his homeland in the sixties, he served twenty-two months in solitary confinement out of twenty-seven months of incarceration. His prolific work—over 45 published plays, poems, essays, memoirs, novels—has been translated into dozens of languages.

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is his third novel, and his first in nearly fifty years. Recently released in French by Editions du Seuil, it was originally published in English two years prior by Pantheon Books. Soyinka dedicates the novel to the memory of two of his compatriots and friends, the investigative journalist Dele Giwa, and governor and lawyer Bola Ige. Both were assassinated in their homeland. He recalls his friend Giwa having immediately showed up at Soyinka’s sister’s home where he was staying in Lagos, clutching a bottle of Cognac XO, basically in his pajamas, when the news of his Nobel was announced. Giwa was blown up by a package bomb that was sent to him days after this celebratory reunion. As for Bola Ige, a former attorney-general and lawyer, he was assassinated in 2001 at his home on the eve of his departure for the United States to take up his new job as Africa’s representative on the United Nations international law commission. His wife used to call Soyinka and her husband twins, because of the way they were involved in so many political activities together.

This close circle dedicated to the service of humanity reflects Soyinka’s remarkable life and restless persona. His uncle, Oludotun Ransome-Kuti (musician Fela Kuti’s father) ought to be mentioned here. Soyinka wanted to write his biography and through him write on that first generation of nationalists to which his Kuti belonged. That was to remain an unaccomplished project; his uncle died soon after, Nigeria got its independence in 1960, and he gave up the idea. What happened then? “Well, you know, when you are in prison you have a lot of time on your hands,” he tells me with sly amusement. Deprived of paper and pen by the prison directorate, he found a way to create his own writing material from whatever outlet he could—Soyinka playfully calls himself “Soy-Ink”—and he proceeded to write on cigarette papers, rolls of toilet paper, and in between the lines of a book he had managed to have smuggled in. He envisioned those scraps as the outline of the first chapter of what would have been his uncle’s biography, but they turned out to be the groundwork for his own moving memoir Ak é : The Years of Childhood , one of the best books of 1982 according to The New York Times Book Review .

We meet on a Friday, in the hall of his hotel, located on a quiet street by Saint-Germain-des-Près. It’s unusually hot in Paris for the season. He has a lunch appointment he wishes to get to and he says his voice is tired, brushing off any attempt to extend the interview. Wearing a Mao collar shirt and a dark blue sleeveless vest, he has on his right wrist a silver watch and a light tote bag is kept close-by. He momentarily looks for his hat, which he thinks he has left at an event he spoke at the night before, and makes the point that he wants it back.

“What keeps you young, what’s your secret?” I ask, right off the bat, to ease the mood.

“I have no idea,” he sighs. “I should be slowing down, I know, but each time I try to slow down something happens, and I have to get on the trail again. You see, I am deprived of that sense of inner tranquility once I turn my back on a situation. Quite frankly, I think it’s a flaw, because I am depriving myself of something which I know I need profoundly. If I didn’t manage to have some quiet in my mind, I’d have gone crazy years ago, so it’s a question of extracting myself [from the world] whenever I can.”

Soyinka calls this being a closet masochist. “It means depriving oneself of what one feels is pleasurable,” he explains. “You have to battle for your creative space, battle for it! Extract yourself whenever you can and be thankful for it, and just carry on waiting for the next opportunity to gratify your innermost instinct to disappear, and do not sacrifice it. If you can manage to balance the two [the activism and the writing] that’s OK, but if you find that you are being tortured internally then be quiet, just close the shop, run and go.”

His strong sense of social justice caused him a lifetime of pressure and persecution; yet he persevered. “I know it’s unbelievable but I really just prefer my peace of mind; I like to sink myself in a truly tranquil environment, which I find mostly in the forest. But [he raises his voice pronouncing those three letters], but, if between getting out of your house and getting into the forest you encounter something unacceptable on the way then that becomes a problem, and you cannot just enjoy what you really want until you have dealt with what you just saw.”

Puzzled, I query him whether that means he never intended to become a writer engagé . “No! Never!” he replies, without skipping a beat. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “One shouldn’t expect literature to be committed. It is sufficient that a writer opens up possibilities. The fact is that something is being presented, a different view is presented, that’s what matters. The writer must be honest, if you have a bad temperament—of confrontation, of poking your finger in the eye of power—then by all means do so but if you do not don’t feel useless, don’t feel like you are betraying literature. You are writing, that’s your mission, that’s your m é tier ; exploit it in whatever direction it leads.”

The year is 1986: Wole Soyinka wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Elie Wiesel is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What was the promise of the world then and what is its state today? Wars and displacement, corrupted systems and dictators, religious fundamentalism and brutality linger. “Take Gabon for instance [in late August, the army seized power disputing the election results in which Ali Bongo was declared winner; he had been president since 2009 and his father for 41 years before him], one family dynasty in power for fifty years, manipulating elections consistently, it was asking to be toppled, it deserves to be toppled—but—is the military the answer? The military has shown itself to be just as decadent, just as corrupt as the rest. Its claim to be a cleansing broom has been detonated, the only defense they have is to legitimize their terror. They will leave eventually, but look at the setback, it is heartbreaking.”

Soyinka’s art has always found its genesis in the African continent’s myths and mystifications, and in his own life experiences—he has been jailed on two occasions, in 1965 and again from 1967-1969, tortured, condemned to death by dictator Sani Abacha, and forced repeatedly and for long periods into hiding for his own safety. What can literature do in the face of such chaos, injustice, and violence? “Well,” he says in a hoarse voice, “present a model of possibilities, and that is all. Beyond that, nothing. The fact that literature is not helpless is proven by the fact that it attracts power. Those who hold power use it to censor, to harass [writers] so literature is not as helpless or insignificant as some people think.”

We turn to the subject of his incarceration: how does prison change a man? “When I came out, I was very bitter, not bitter about being in prison, I was bitter about the treatment I received, but most importantly of all the statements that were attributed to me which were false. My immediate writing was bitter, then I settled on looking at society and looking at the human condition and creating microworlds which is what all writers do. One of the problems one has as a writer who writes about society is the danger of becoming pessimistic, resentful, and aggressively so.”

The immediate writing he refers to is Madmen and Specialists , a play about the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), considered the writer’s darkest dramatic work. He recounted his years behind bars in 1972’s The Man Died: Prison Notes , which the Nigerian government eventually banned in 1984. His play Death and the King ’ s Horseman , first performed in 1976, brings Soyinka worldwide acclaim.

Wole Soyinka does not regard himself as a novelist; he refers to his novels as “accidents.” His debut, The Interpreters , was published in 1965, followed by Season of Anomy in 1973. He swears that this one, his third, is his last. “Oh, I am not going that way again! I just know it intuitively. A novel is hard labor. A play is unfinished and on stage it gets finished, so you don’t really mind, because you know that on stage you will have an opportunity to change things here and there. Theater is a dynamic process. A novel is frozen, until maybe a filmmaker is foolish enough to attempt to put it on celluloid.”

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is set in an imaginary Nigeria and examines the unreasonable and unethical contemporary state of affairs there. In the US, it has been received by some as pessimistic, while others, particularly in Europe, have welcomed it as political satire. “Although it’s not for me to decide, some say it’s also a Whodunit, and I say: absolutely, why not? I love detective stories, I used to eat them up in my youth, and I always said, one of these days I will write a detective story.” He laughs. “It wasn’t my intent at the start, but along the writing process it came to me that I could tag on a mystery element.”

Soyinka can create a story out of anything and he can write anywhere, but distance can help. “I had to get out of Nigeria to write [ Chronicles ]. I had to wait year after year to feel completely detached from the physical environment I was writing about. I wrote some parts of it in Senegal and in Ghana. Then Covid happened, it was touch and go, and the world began to button down. I was in Los Angeles at my son’s wedding; it was the last social event for us as a family, people had come from all over. When I realized that the lockdown was fast approaching I knew I had to go back to Nigeria, which is the only home I consider home. So I said: Listen, I’m getting on that plane, the rest of you, wherever you are locked-down, good luck to you. I couldn’t get back into Lagos directly, I had to go to Ghana and then continue by road, but I made sure I arrived in the nick of time to Abeokuta. And that’s where I finished Chronicles .”

When Soyinka is not keen on something he makes sure the message gets through loud and clear. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump as the 46th President, he destroyed his U.S. Green Card. That same year, the Nobel committee’s literary laureate was Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Wole Soyinka’s discontent vibrates the room. “The prize for literature should have never gone that way!” he tells me, his fingers fidgeting in the air. “As a music lover, and a composer myself, I respect music, but there is something called literature, and we don’t have enough prizes as is. If they award this prize to one more musician, I am sending all my musical compositions to the Grammys. I know what I consider literature, and writing lyrics or certain songs, is not literature, it is music! You want to have a Nobel Prize for music, fine, I’ll be there, but don’t say that you are taking a prize away from this discipline and extending it to another!”

On that note, he grows impatient. He has an appointment, which means I have one last question: What has the Nobel meant for his life? “It has changed nothing at all for me. All it has done for me is that since then I have to fight for my anonymity.”

Wole Soyinka leaves not a minute later. It’s sunny out. And his hat is still missing.

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FAMOUS AUTHORS

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is an established African writer of Nigerian origin. He has produced his works in multitude of genres such as drama, novel and poetry. He was the first person to have been awarded the highest of an accolade, the 1986 Nobel Prize, for his contribution to literature.

Born on 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, he was raised in a Yoruba family and given the name Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka at his birth. His father was an Anglican minister and a school headmaster, while his mother was a political activist and a shop owner. He grew up in a region that followed Yorùbá religious tradition and attended church services like his fellow community members. However, he relinquished his faith and embraced atheism in his later life.

Soyinka received his early education from St. Peters Primary School and Abeokuta Grammar School, where he earned huge praise and prizes for his literary work. Afterwards, he attended the elite Government College in Ibadan. Subsequently, he went on to study at University College affiliated with the University of London, in 1952. Here he studied Western History, English Literature and Greek. He briefly worked for Nigerian Broadcasting Service for a radio play. Then he moved to England and got himself enrolled at the University of Leeds. He studied English literature there and was mentored by Wilson Knight.

Pursuing post-graduation, Wole Soyinka stayed in Leeds in order to experiment with drama writing. During this period he made his debut as a dramatist with his major work Swamp Dwellers (1958). Members of London’s Royal Court Theatre appreciated his light comedy play, The Lion and the Jewel , which encouraged him to relocate to London. These plays discuss the tension and correlation of Nigerian tradition with progress. After providing his services as a play reader, eventually he landed a chance to produce The Invention at Royal Court Theatre in 1957. Moreover, he published a few poems in a Nigerian magazine Black Orpehus , including “My Next Door Neighbour” and “The Immigrant”.

Subsequently, he returned to his homeland Nigeria, as he received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship from University College in Ibadan in 1960. While studying African drama after receiving bursary, he also taught literature and drama at a number of universities. Furthermore, he produced numerous satirical literary works which include his major contribution like The Trials of Brother Jero . It focused on the dynamics of elites’ politics in Nigeria. A Dance of The Forest (1960) one of the milestones in Soyinka’s literary career, as it became the official play for Nigerian Independence Day after winning the contest. Following the success of his works, he established theater groups with a gap of few years, known as “The 1960 Masks” and “Orisun Theatre Company”.

During 1960’s, the civil war broke out in Nigeria which severely affected the infrastructure of the country. Soyinka appealed to his nation for cease-fire through his article that resulted in his arrest for about two years. After his release he produced a re-imagination of Pentheus myth, The Bacchae of Euripides (1969) and a poetry collection Poems from Prison. Among others, one of the major influences on his work was an Irish writer, J.M. Synge. Moreover, he penned only two novels in his literary career. The Interpreters is considered to be a sophisticated narrative writing which is often compared to Faulkner’s and Joyce’s works. Another such complex novel, titled Season of Anomy , focused on the Greek and Yoruba mythology. Wole Soyinka won the 1993 Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award, besides other prestigious accolades.

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‘At long last, Idunit!’ Wole Soyinka on his first novel in nearly 50 years

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On the Shelf

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

By Wole Soyinka Pantheon: 464 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

A new work by a Nobel laureate is generally a cause for celebration, but in Wole Soyinka ’s case, it’s especially significant. It’s been nearly 50 years since he published his last novel, “ The Interpreters , ” and though his work has spanned multiple genres — poetry, plays, memoirs and essays — his new novel, “ Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth ,” manages to chart fresh territory. At 87, the first sub-Saharan author to be honored by Stockholm remains a brilliant thinker and tinkerer. “Chronicles” combines elements of a murder mystery, a searing political satire and an “Alice in Wonderland”-like modern allegory of power and deceit.

The novel picks up just as Nigeria — or the author’s stand-in for his home country — is gearing up to celebrate its annual Festival of the People of Happiness, yet another example of official doublespeak. The ruling People on the Move Party (“POMP”) have turned the country into a vast, innocuous reality show even as violence, fanaticism and ruthless plunder wreak havoc across the land. But when Dr. Kighare Menka, famous for tending to the mutilated victims of Boko Haram , stumbles upon a black market in human body parts, the nation’s ugly secrets begin to surface.

And that’s just the beginning of the conspiracies, which stretch from a charlatan preacher named Papa Divina to the president, Sir Godfrey O. Danfere. The mysterious death of Menka’s blood-brother, Duyole Pitan-Payne — who came of age with Menka during the hopeful early years of independence — tightens the web of intrigue. What did he know? Who wanted him dead? And when, exactly, did Nigeria sink so low? These and other questions — personal, moral, social and political — percolate through Soyinka’s acidly comic take on his country’s “grim contest in human desecration, physical and mental.” Soyinka spoke with The Times via email about the new book, his homeland and his own legacy.

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I’m curious how long this book has been germinating and what about this story demanded the form of a novel.

Quite a while, certainly close to two decades. However, the themes found release in other forms, mostly polemical. Let’s say it found temporary outlet in my local interventions, both literary and political. So it had been building up in the mind. With that kind of pressure — rather like a flood behind a retaining wall — only the prose cascade seemed empowered to bear the burden of release.

Were there unexpected challenges in writing a novel again after so long?

Mostly technical. I work — like most — directly from my laptop. I am not a sequential writer, so each session does not necessarily take up the story where it left off. Now, imagine resuming work where you thought you had left your characters. The oftener you click that “save” button, the deeper you dig yourself into a hole — no, into several tunnels.

You started writing during the early days of the pandemic, outside your home in Nigeria . Was that out of necessity or preference?

No, I started work just before the pandemic. Needed to physically distance myself from the provoking environment to be able to address it, and in full isolation. Two sessions of about eight days each — one in Dakar, the other in Ghana — I needed those, to even begin. Then the pandemic locked me down in my own forested home, with just my characters for company. The heavy stuff took over, for some three or four months. Not a recommended regimen.

The title is meant facetiously, but it was inspired by an actual news report on Nigeria’s high rating on a global survey of optimism.

Sometimes, I even propose that the novel wrote itself, with the overpowering gamut of occurrences in manic vein. To encounter a report that this land, clinging to a marginal survival index, is rated high on the “happiness” scale — that scatters your brain! But, then, you also understand. Just recently, a carnival wedding party was staged. The bride was the president’s daughter, and over a hundred private jets flew in guests from every corner of the nation. I had foolishly imagined that the nation was in mourning, what with a thousand or so students still held captive by religious fundamentalist loonies and other homicidal maniacs.

This novel can be read in many ways, but, ultimately, it moves with the pace of a whodunit. Was that something you’ve wanted to try your hand at?

Always longed to write a mystery, no question about that. In secondary school, I ate up detective novels. Well, as “Chronicles” progressed, my long-repressed antennae sniffed an opening and that was it. Backtracked and did some lateral adjustments. So it’s been gratifying to receive comments of it being a kind of whodunit. At long last: Idunnit!

World & Nation

Nobel winner assails religious intolerance

Wole Soyinka of Nigeria calls faith this century’s defining issue and says fundamentalism is the greatest threat to world peace and democracy.

Jan. 27, 2007

How closely did you want to stick to the realities of present-day Nigeria and how much artistic license did you allow yourself?

Would be pointless to deny that I wanted Nigerians to recognize themselves in the work. Yes, it is consciously a J’Accuse of both power and the disempowered. And I drove my African publisher to distraction just so the work could emerge in time for Nigeria’s 60th independence anniversary last year. And guess what? The government announced that the celebrations would be spectacular and would run a full year! Mind you, the anniversary project was simply abandoned . Left to sink quietly in government sump.

You’ve been an outspoken critic of abuses of authority. You tore up your U.S. Green Card when Trump was elected in 2016. I’m interested in how you viewed the Black Lives Matter protests of this past year.

Black Lives Matter was long in coming, its tempo was merely crudely accelerated with the entry of Donald Trump and what he represented. It was psychic release. Trump was the revenge of American racism to the shock of unforgivable Obama. I hope, by the way, that “Chronicles” is seen as not simply a critique of one’s own government. It is meant to indict us also, the governed, as a people who have jettisoned the humane values that that same society impressed on my upbringing. Yes, I would give much to bludgeon Nigeria into accepting that Black Lives do Matter!

You’ve said before that winning the 1986 Nobel Prize brought with it a heavy burden — in a word, it was “hell.” But it has also given you a powerful platform. Is this something you’ve learned to embrace?

Do recall, I did have a “platform” even before the Nobel. I had and routinely exercised that voice. The Nobel, however, began to render the voice hoarse and brittle from expectations and demands. Worst of all was that I lost even my remnant shreds of anonymity. That’s the unrecognized part, and one to which I am yet to be reconciled.

As the first Black African Nobelist, you’ve also had an enormous impact on contemporary African writing. How do you think it’s changed in the past half-century?

Yes, the prize did instigate literary emulation — not imitation, thank goodness — manifested in bolder, self-assured writing among the younger African generation. That alone was gratifying. The young female writers especially.

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When you look back at your oeuvre, what works do you feel represent your greatest legacy?

No, no, I never think in terms of legacy. And I can truthfully claim that I am quite at home in any genre — from poetry to polemics. The theme calls to the medium, and one can only aspire to be a faithful conduit!

Tepper has written for the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair and Air Mail, among other places.

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