Who is Wole Soyinka?

Wole Soyinka is the first black African to win international fame as a dramatist. He is also the first black African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Soyinka’s popularity rests not only on his successful drama, he has also excelled in poetry and fiction. In addition to this, he is also an autobiographer, a critic, an editor and a translator. As a creative writer, Soynika has mastered many modes and genres in literature, and has made for himself a very significant place in the realm of world literature other than his literary pursuits; he has been engaged in many cultural and political activities. He has been a public figure, holding the offices of secretary general of the Union of Writers of African Peoples (1975), chairman of the council of the Oyo State Road Safety Corps (1979) and President of the Paris-based International Theatre Institute (1986). Soyinka is a man of such multifarious identities yet, in spite of the worldwide influences, he has stayed well-rooted and fed by the distinctive currents of the Yoruba culture (the prominent ethnolinguistic group in Nigeria). His sincerity for his homeland is constant and he has made it his mission to examine the traditional structures of his society, to probe the past of his country and to glean out whatever is relevant and useful from the African past, which he hopes to make use of with the intention of suggesting a prosperous future course for his society. This has led him to get closely involved with the political issues of his country. As a writer he has taken on a serious responsibility to make a thorough analysis of the Nigerian society and suggest ways to overcome the evils plaguing it. Other than this sincerity, which is a marked feature of his personality, what goes unnoticed as one goes through his achievements, is the fact, that whatever his inclinations, he is basically a humanist, a human being above all. He has been drawn into the theatres of entertainment and politics by the same fundamental commitment to human freedom and justice which has led him to resist all regimes that deny them and a belief that the exemplary individual can and must influence the course of public events, the belief than “the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” So what occupies Soyinka the most is his deep-rooted relationship with his native land and his concern for humanity.

His multifaceted activities have not hampered the unifying force in Soyinka. His activities at home and abroad, may have been diverse, yet all his work is guided by the Yoruba view of things, that all experiences flow into one another. He has always successfully resisted the rigidity of division between one experience and the other. What significantly marks his output is the compatible force of both the Yoruba and the European influence on Soyinka. As a writer, he is an electic, whose works are artistic hybrids of mixed Yoruba and European background, subtly blending the African themes, imagery and performance idioms with Western techniques and stylized influences. To understand the impact of these diverse influences on Soyinka, it is essential, to go through his biography and to take note of his innovative creativity.

Akinwande Oluwole (Wole) Soyinka was born on 13th July, 1934, in Ijebu-Isara in Western Nigeria, and grew up in the nearby city of Abeokuta. His father, Samuel Ayedale was a school inspector, and his mother, Grace Eniola Syinka was a teacher, trader and shopkeeper. His primary education was received at the local Christian missions school headed by his father. For his secondary education, he went to the Abeokuta Grammar School and the Government College, Ibadan. After studying at the University of Ibadan, he went to the University of Leeds in Great Britain, where his studies also included a course in world drama, taught by no other than the eminent Shakespearean critic, G. Wilson Knight. His creativity as a dramatist developed under such an esteemed guidance, and after he graduated, with a degree in English in 1957. He spent eighteen months as a play reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Here he had a close contact with the dramatic revival of the late 1950s. Two of his early plays, “The Swamp Dwellers” and “The Lion and the Jewel” were performed in London at this time. This study of theatre in England was a prelude to his active interest in Nigerian theatre. He returned to Nigeria in 1960, the year of the Independence. Hereafter, through a period of seven years of dramatic cultural and political activity, Soyinka established himself as a significant personality of the new nation. He held various academic appointments at the universities; Soyinka founded the Orisun Theatre and also established the 1960 masks. By doing so he revitalized the Nigerian English language theatre, and by working closely with traveling theatre groups, he developed links between the performance idioms of festival masquerade dramaturgy and traveling folk theatre on one hand and more sophisticated literary dialogue drama of the European tradition on the other. During 1960 to 1967 Soyinka’s creativity resulted in prodigious production. He published seven plays, one novel and a volume of poems. Other than this, he also became the co-editor of the literary magazine, Black Orpheus from 1961 to 1964. He also wrote a weekly radio series called Broke-Time, Bar, and broadcast two radio plays, and conducted research on ritual dramaturgy and folk opera. At the October 1960 independence celebrations, he acted in the play “A Dance of the Forests”, which he had himself produced and directed. “Trials of Brother Zero” was directed in the same year and 1965 and 1966 witnessed his production of “Satori Revue”. Before the Blackout and his play “Kongi’s Harvest. Thus engrossed in his literary accomplishments, Soyinka took a step ahead in his personal life. He married Olayide Idowa in 1968, and they had three daughters and a son.

On the political front, his literary campaign against the political intimidation, repression and corruption prevailing under the civilian administration of the first Nigerian Republic won him the wrath of the authorities in power. He used his theatre group to produce satiric political revues against the appreciation of the political leaders. Such activities ended him up in the prison, where he spent about twenty six months. These years of confinement, were the years of literary productivity. Writing on any material available to him (may it be the inside of the cigarette wrapper or a paper napkin), Soynika wrote constantly. After his release from the prison in 1970, when General Yakatu Gowan’s federal regime came into power, Soyinka preferred to take self exile. He did not want to live in Nigeria, under genocide, consolidated dictatorship, as he addressed it in “The Man Died”. He left for Ghana and spent the following years in England and USA. After Gowan’s fall, he returned to Nigeria in 1975. During his years of exile and following his return to Nigeria, Soyinka continued with his political stand against Africa’s military dictatorships. In Ghana, as an editor of the journal Transition, in 1974-76, he used his position to express his views against the military leadership in Africa. Later, in Lagos, he used his newly formed University of Ife Guerella Theatre unit to improvise revue performances in market places and parking lots, thus exposing and excoriating the corrupt malpractices of the second Nigerian republic under President Alhaji Shehu Shagan. Soyinka’s discontentment with the repressions of the military regime, could never find a reconciliation with the ruling authorities. However, from 1976 until his retirement in 1985, Soyinka was a professor of comparative literature and dramatic arts at the University of Ife. In 1986, after the production of more than twenty stage plays, radio revues, four volumes of poetry, two successful novels, many critical essays, and above all an autobiography, Soyinka deservingly received the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that has brought him the reputation of a literary stalwart.

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