Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, playwright, and poet. He has written three novels, ten collections of short stories, seven poetry collections, twenty-five plays and five memoirs. He also wrote two translated works and many articles and short stories for many newspapers and periodicals. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "wide cultural perspective and poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence".
Born into an Anglican Yoruba family in Aké, Abeokuta, Soyinka had a preparatory education at Government College, Ibadan and proceeded to the University College Ibadan. During his education, he co-founded the Pyrate Confraternity. Soyinka left Nigeria for England to study at the University of Leeds. During that period, he was the editor of the university's magazine, The Eagle, before becoming a full-time author in the 1950s. In the UK, he started writing short stories and making records for the BBC Lecture series. He wrote many plays which were performed on radios and in theatres in Nigeria and the UK, especially the Royal Court Theatre.
Many of Soyinka's novels and plays are set in Nigeria, reflecting the country's history, culture, and political struggles. Alongside these works, he produced a wide range of satirical writings that reached a broad audience and enjoyed considerable popularity. He is also an accomplished poet, with numerous individual poems and several published collections to his name. He achieved successes with his plays including The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and the Jewel, and The Invention, which was one of his early plays to be produced at the Royal Court Theatre. Soyinka wrote a number of other works, including The Interpreters, Season of Anomy, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, and Harmattan Haze on an African Spring. In July 2024, Bola Tinubu renamed the National Arts Theatre after Soyinka during his 90th birthday.
Early life and education
Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 in Ake, Abeokuta, Nigeria into a Christian family of Yoruba descent. He was the second out of seven children of Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, an Anglican minister and headmaster from the royal family of Isara-Remo and Grace Soyinka, a shopkeeper and activist from the Ransome-Kuti family.His mother Grace's extended family, the Ransome-Kutis, were a powerful Nigerian dynasty that has been described as Nigeria's answer to the Kennedy family in the United States. Their founding patriarch, the Anglican priest J.J. Ransome-Kuti, was a pioneering figure in his country's music recording industry in the 1920s.
From 1940 to 1946, Soyinka attended St. Peters Primary School, where his father was the headmaster. He had his secondary education at Abeokuta Grammar School and his university preparatory studies at Government College, Ibadan from 1946 to 1951. He was admitted into the University College Ibadan, where he studied English literature, Greek, and Western history from 1952 to 1954. During his final years in the university, he wrote a short radio play, Keffi's Birthday Treat, which was broadcast in July 1954 by the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria. Along with his classmates including Olumuyiwa Awẹ, Ralph Opara, Aig-Imoukhuede, and Pius Olegbe, he founded the National Association of Seadogs, the first confraternity in Nigeria.
Soyinka relocated from Nigeria to England in 1954 to continue his studies in English literature at the University of Leeds under the supervision of G. Wilson Knight. The decision to study abroad at that time when a master degree study was not available in Ibadan, was through Joyce M. Green, an English woman who joined the University College, Ibadan from Cambridge in 1950, and who had been one of Soyinka's teachers and had provided him with a well-worded reference to Leeds. At Leeds University, he served as the editor of the university's satirical magazine, The Eagle, in which he wrote a column on academic life. In August 1955, he started recording for BBC Lecture and wrote many short stories. In 1957, he won the annual oratory competition run by the University.
Career
1957–1967: Early career
Soyinka remained in Leeds after getting his BA honours in English in 1957. In 1957, he began writing his first play, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel. Soyinka moved to London and worked as a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre. He led the Nigerian Drama Group that performed The Swamp Dwellers in 1958. During that period, his two plays were performed in Ibadan, Nigeria. In 1957, his play, The Invention, was produced at London's Royal Court Theatre, and was his first work to be produced there. During this period, he wrote poems, including "The Immigrant" and "My Next Door Neighbour", which appeared in Black Orpheus. In 1959, Soyinka returned to Nigeria after receiving a Rockefeller Research Fellowship for his research on African theatre. In November of the same year, he replaced Janheinz Jahn as the co-editor of Black Orpheus. In 1960, he completed his radio play, Camwood on the Leaves, and his play The Trials of Brother Jero premiered in the Mellanby Hall residence of University College Ibadan in April 1960. He formed the 1960s Mask, a theatre group. His play, A Dance of The Forest, became the official play for the Nigerian Independence Day and on 1 October 1960, it premiered in Lagos.Soyinka's first full-length play, My Father's Burden, was directed by Olusegun Olusola and it was featured on the Western Nigeria Television on 6 August 1960. In 1962, Soyinka wrote essays that defended Nigerian literacy during that period including "Death and the King's Horsemen" and "Towards a True Theater", which were published in Transition Magazine. In the same year, he was appointed lecturer at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ifẹ. In 1963, his first feature-length movie, Culture in Transition, was released. Soyinka resigned from his university post in 1964, as a protest against imposed pro-government behaviour by the authorities. He claimed the university's authorities aligned the institution with the unpopular government of Samuel Ladoke Akintola. During that period, he produced The Lion and the Jewel in a season of plays in English and Yoruba as well as formed The Orisun Theatre Company, a theatre group.
In 1965, he produced satirical play, Before the Blackout. His play, Kongi's Harvest, premiered in August in Lagos. On 14 September 1965, his play The Road premiered in London at the Commonwealth Arts Festival and at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Soyinka was appointed as the senior lecturer at the University of Lagos. Soon, his novel, The Interpreters, was published in London by André Deutsch. In the same year, he was arrested for the first time, charged with holding up a radio station at gunpoint and replacing the tape of a recorded speech by the premier of Western Region with a different tape containing accusations of electoral malpractice. He was released after some months of confinement as a result of protests by the international community of writers. He also wrote The Detainee, a radio play for BBC in London.
1966–1968: Nigerian Civil War
After becoming Chair of Drama at the University of Ibadan, Soyinka became politically active. Following the military coup of January 1966, he secretly met with Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military governor of the Southeastern Nigeria in an effort to avert the Nigerian Civil War. He also went to Ẹnugu, where he met his fellow Yoruba man, Victor Banjọ, who works with the Biafran government. Soyinka, who sought the support of Western Region military leaders, delivered Banjo's message to Lieutenant Colonel Olusegun Obasanjo, who had recently been appointed as commanding officer for the Western Region. Four evenings after Soyinka returned to the West, Biafran forces invaded the Midwest region. Following the occupation of the Midwest, Soyinka met Obasanjo to tell him the aim of Biafrans since Obasanjo had already decided to align with the Nigerian government. However Biafra's invasion of the Midwest resulted in retaliation by the federal government forces, and the civil war began. Obasanjo disclosed his meeting with Soyinka to the Nigerian government, who declared Soyinka as a betrayal, hence he was arrested by federal authorities and imprisoned for 22 months. He wrote a significant body of poems and notes criticising the Nigerian government while in prison.In early 1967, his works, Kongi’s Harvest and Idanre and Other Poems were published. With Tom Stoppard, he received the John Whiting Award in London. He was also appointed Head of the School of Drama, University of Ibadan but unable to take up the position because of his imprisonment in August. Despite his imprisonment, his play The Lion and The Jewel was produced in Accra, Ghana in September 1967. In November, The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed were produced in the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City by Off-Broadway.
In 1968, Soyinka received the Jock Campbell-New Statesman Award. The Negro Ensemble Company produced Kongi's Harvest at St. Mark's Theatre, New York. He translated D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale from Yoruba to English. It was published as The Forest of a Thousand Demons: A Hunter's Saga.
Release and literary production
In October 1969, few months before the Civil war came to an end, amnesty was proclaimed, and Soyinka and other political prisoners were freed. For the first few months after his release, Soyinka stayed at a friend's farm in southern France, where he sought solitude. He wrote The Bacchae of Euripides, a reworking of the Pentheus myth. He also published in London a book of poetry, Poems from Prison. At the end of the year, he returned to his office as Chair of Drama at Ibadan.In 1970, he produced the play Kongi's Harvest, while simultaneously adapting it as a film of the same title. In June 1970, he finished another play, called Madmen and Specialists. Together with the group of 15 actors of Ibadan University Theatre Art Company, he went on a trip to the United States, to the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where his latest play premiered.
In 1971, his poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt was published. Madmen and Specialists was produced in Ibadan that year. In April 1971, concerned about the political situation in Nigeria, Soyinka resigned from his duties at the University in Ibadan, and began years of voluntary exile.
Soyinka travelled to Paris, France, to take the lead role as Patrice Lumumba, the murdered first Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, in Joan Littlewood's May 1971 production of Murderous Angels, Conor Cruise O'Brien's play about the Congo Crisis. In July in Paris, excerpts from Soyinka's well-known play The Dance of The Forests were performed.
In 1972, his novel Season of Anomy and his Collected Plays were both published by Oxford University Press. His powerful autobiographical work The Man Died, a collection of notes from prison, was also published that year. He was awarded an Honoris Causa doctorate by the University of Leeds in 1973. In the same year the National Theatre, London, commissioned and premiered the play The Bacchae of Euripides, and his plays Camwood on the Leaves and Jero's Metamorphosis were also first published. From 1973 to 1975, Soyinka spent time on scientific studies. He spent a year as a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge and wrote Death and the King's Horseman, which had its first reading at Churchill College.
In 1974, Oxford University Press issued his Collected Plays, Volume II. In 1975, Soyinka was promoted to the position of editor for Transition Magazine, which was based in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, where he moved. He used his columns in the magazine to criticise the "negrophiles" and military regimes. He protested against the military junta of Idi Amin in Uganda. After the political turnover in Nigeria and the subversion of Gowon's military regime in 1975, Soyinka returned to his homeland and resumed his position as Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Ife.