Wole Soyinka
Authors: Ricard Alain 
Published: February 2019

Wole Soyinka (1934–) is primarily a playwright but also a memorialist and a poet. He is also an activist and an accomplished playwright. The development of his work cannot be understood without reference to Nigeria’s history. Soyinka was born in Abeokuta in western Nigeria. He attended the University of Ibadan before being admitted to Leeds University where he earned a degree in drama. On graduation, he was offered a job at the Royal Court Theater as a dramatist and started producing his own plays. Soyinka returned to Nigeria on the eve of its independence and was commissioned to write the play, A Dance of the Forests, which was eventually pulled out of the official program. This was the beginning of his career as a playwright and as a public intellectual. Between 1960 and 1967 he produced several plays and won a prize at the Dakar Festival in 1966. Soyinka’s attempts at mediation and his appeals for peace and dialogue at the beginning of the civil war led to his arrest and imprisonment for twenty-six months (August 1967–October 1969). Soyinka was released at the end of the war and became a voice for African writers as editor of Transition—the liberal journal of arts and culture located in Accra, having moved from Kampala—and as general secretary of the Union of African Writers. In this capacity he was one of the promoters of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) held in Lagos in 1977. In the years following his return to Nigeria, Soyinka held several academic positions with the first starting in 1975. At the same time, he was very active in civic causes as an advocate of speech and academic freedom and also of road safety. In 1986 Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for literature. Soyinka’s work is organized around an anti-totalitarian theory of power, promoted in numerous essays and lectures, which structures his dramatic universe. His work is mainly a strong advocacy for a division between private and public domains, spiritual and temporal powers (i.e., the separation of church and state), and of religion and politics and a total refusal of what he calls theocratic intrusion into politics. As an activist, he campaigns for causes that are based on general principles of Kantian morality, secularism of the state, a sound use of the syncretic and satirical heritage of Yoruba culture, a good dose of lucidity and personal courage, and a capacity to take risks. Soyinka is not an intellectual total; that is, he does not provide a total world view with ready-made dialectical explanations. He is not Sartre, not even Senghor. He is much better: he is a poet citizen, a radical activist, who puts himself on the line but does not aspire to be king of the intellectual stage nor president. He claims to be “temperamentally unsuited” to politics but is nonetheless very often involved in political fights (Soyinka 2012b, p. 5, cited under Global Writer? (1998–)). Discussion of his career is divided into several sections: a Dramatist in Penkelemes Years (1956–1967), the War and Beyond (1967–1975); a Poet and a Citizen (1976–1986); an African Nobel (1986–1998), and Global Writer? (1998–). His works are distributed in these categories, which, of course, are overlapping and do not constitute a linear sequence. These topics cover his works and suggest the reading of his last book of memoirs to be the best introduction to his oeuvre.