Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka (13 July 1934) is a Nigerian author, best known as a playwright and poet. He has written three novels, ten collections of short stories, seven poetry collection, twenty five plays and five memoirs. He also wrote two translated works and many articles and short stories for many newspapers and periodicals. He is widely regarded as one of Africa's greatest writers and one of the world's most important dramatists. 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 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. At UK he started writing short stories and making records for the BBC lecture. He wrote many plays which were performed in radios and theatres in Nigeria and UK especially the Royal Court Theatre. In 1958 he married a British woman whom he had met in Leeds. In 1963, after the divorce of the first wife, he married a Nigerian librarian, and subsequently, Folake Doherty in 1989.
Many of Soyinka's novels and plays are set in Nigeria. He also wrote many satirical pieces, which he used to appeal to a wide public and sold in large numbers. He is also a poet; he did well in the writing poems and poetry collections. He achieved successes with his plays including The Swamp Dwellers (1958), The Lion and the Jewel (1959), and The Invention, which was one his early plays to be produced at the Royal Court Theatre. Soyinka wrote many works including The Interpreters (1965), Season of Anomy (1973), 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.
Soyinka was the son of Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, an Anglican minister and headmaster at St Peter's Primary School, and Grace Soyinka (née Jenkins-Harrison), a shopkeeper and activist, who was a member of the Ransome-Kuti family. He was born in Ake, Abeokuta, where he was raised as a Christian. He was born on 13 July 1934, and was the second of seven children: Atinuke Aina, Femi, Yeside, Omofolabo Ajayi, and Kayode.
Soyinka was educated at St. Peters Primary School, where his father was the headmaster, from 1940 to 1946. He had his secondary education at Abeokuta Grammar School and 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 Keffi's Birthday Treat, a short radio play for the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, which was broadcast in July 1954. Along with his classmates including Olumuyiwa Awẹ, Ralph Opara, Aig-Imoukhuede, and Pius Olegbe, Soyinka founded the National Association of Seadogs, the first confraternity in Nigeria. .
Soyinka relocated from Nigeria to England and continued his studies in English literature at University of Leeds from 1954 to 1957 under the supervision of under G. Wilson Knight. He graduated in 1958. At Leeds, he served as the editor of the university's satirical magazine, The Eagle, which he wrote a column on academic life and often criticised his university peers. In August 1955 he had started recording for BBC lecture. He also wrote many short stories, which in 1957, he won the annual oratory competition run by the University.
Soyinka remained in Leeds working for his MA degree. He wrote and published his first play The Swamp Dwellers in 1958. A year later, he published another play The Lion and the Jewel. The play is a comedy and because it attracted interest from many members of London's Royal Court Theatre, Soyinka had to move to London. He worked as a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre. During that period, his two plays were performed in Ibadan, Nigeria since they explored the difficult relationship between progress and tradition in Nigeria. In 1957, his play The Invention was produced at the Royal Court Theatre, and was his first work to achieve that fame. He wrote poems including "The Immigrant" and "My Next Door Neighbour", which appeared in Black Orpheus. Soyinka returned to Nigeria after he received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship for his research on African theatre. In November 1959, he replaced Janheinz Jahn as the co-editor of Black Orpheus as well as produced The Trials of Brother Jero, which premiere in the Mellanby Hall of University College Ibadan, in April 1960. In the same year, his work A Dance of The Forest, became the official play for the Nigerian Independence Day and on 1 October 1960, it premiered in Lagos.
Soyinka wrote his first full-length play entitled My Father's Burden. It was directed by Olusegun Olusola and featured on Western Nigeria Television on 6 August 1960. With the Rockefeller grant, Soyinka bought a Land Rover, and he began travelling throughout Nigeria as a researcher from the English Language department the University College Ibadan. In a 1960 essay by Soyinka, he criticised Leopold Senghor's Négritude movement as "a nostalgic and indiscriminate glorification of black African's past that ignores the potential benefits of modernisation". He wrote essays that defended Nigerian literacy, among them, "Death and the King's Horsemen", and "Towards a True Theater" (1962), which was published by Transition Magazine.
A lecturer at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ifẹ, Soyinka discussed current affairs with negrophiles and on several occasions, openly condemned the government censorship. At the end of 1963, his first feature-length movie, Culture in Transition, was released. In 1965 his book, The Interpreters, was published in London by André Deutsch. Along other professionals, Soyinka founded the Drama Association of Nigeria. In 1964 he resigned from his university post, as a protest against imposed pro-government behaviour by the authorities. In 1965, he was arrested for the first time, charged with holding up a radio station at gunpoint, which he would later write in his 2006 memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, 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. In same year he wrote two more dramatic pieces Before the Blackout and Kongi's Harvest. He also wrote The Detainee, a radio play for BBC in London. His play The Road premiered in London at the Commonwealth Arts Festival on 14 September 1965, at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Soyinka was promoted to senior lecturer in the department of English language of University of Lagos.
In 1958 Soyinka married British writer Barbara Dixon, whom he met while studying at the University of Leeds in the 1950s. The couple gave birth to a male and female child; Olaokun and Morenike respectively. After they separated, he married in 1963 to a Nigerian librarian Olaide Idowu. They had three daughters: Moremi, Iyetade (1965–2013), Peyibomi and a son, Ilemakin. Soyinka also married Folake Doherty in 1989 and had three sons: Tunlewa, Bojode and Eniara.
From 1975 to 1999, Soyinka served as a Professor of Comparative literature at Obafemi Awolowo University. In the US, he taught at Cornell University as the Goldwin Smith professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts from 1988 to 1991. At Emory University, he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts in 1996 and has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Soyinka served as scholar-in-residence at New York University's Institute of African American Affairs and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He has also taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale. He was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University in 2008.
In December 2017, Soyinka received the Europe Theatre Prize in the "Special Prize" category, awarded to someone who has "contributed to the realization of cultural events that promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples".
After becoming Chair of Drama at the University of Ibadan, Soyinka became more politically active. Following the military coup of January 1966, he secretly met with Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military governor in the Southeastern Nigeria in an effort to avert the Nigerian civil war.
Soyinka was subsequently arrested by federal authorities and imprisoned for 22 months, as civil war ensued between the Federal government of Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra. He wrote a significant body of poems and notes criticising the Nigerian government while in prison.
Despite his imprisonment, his play The Lion and The Jewel was produced in Accra, Ghana, in September 1967. In November that year, The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed were produced in the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. Soyinka also published a collection of his poetry, Idanre and Other Poems, which was inspired by his visit to the sanctuary of the Yorùbá deity Ogun, whom he regards as his "companion" deity, kindred spirit, and protector.
In 1968, the Negro Ensemble Company in New York produced Kongi's Harvest. While still imprisoned, Soyinka translated from Yoruba a fantastical novel by his compatriot D. O. Fagunwa, entitled The Forest of a Thousand Demons: A Hunter's Saga.
Two films about this period of his life have been announced: The Man Died, directed by Awam Amkpa, a feature film based on a fictionalized form of Soyinka's 1973 prison memoirs of the same name; and Ebrohimie Road, written and directed by Kola Tubosun, which takes a look at the house where Soyinka lived between 1967 – when he arrived back in Ibadan to take on the directorship of the School of Drama – and 1972, when he left for exile after being released from prison.
In October 1969, when 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 (1969), a reworking of the Pentheus myth. He soon 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. It gave them all experience with theatrical production in another English-speaking country.
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 (1973–74) 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 for some time. He used his columns in the magazine to criticise the "negrophiles" (for instance, his article "Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition") 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.
In 1976, he published his poetry collection Ogun Abibiman, as well as a collection of essays entitled Myth, Literature and the African World. In these, Soyinka explores the genesis of mysticism in African theatre and, using examples from both European and African literature, compares and contrasts the cultures. He delivered a series of guest lectures at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in Legon. In October, the French version of The Dance of The Forests was performed in Dakar, while in Ife, his play Death and The King's Horseman premièred.
In 1977, Opera Wọnyọsi, his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, was staged in Ibadan. In 1979 he both directed and acted in Jon Blair and Norman Fenton's drama The Biko Inquest, a work based on the life of Steve Biko, a South African student and human rights activist who was beaten to death by apartheid police forces. In 1981 Soyinka published his autobiographical work Aké: The Years of Childhood, which won a 1983 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Soyinka founded another theatrical group called the Guerrilla Unit. Its goal was to work with local communities in analysing their problems and to express some of their grievances in dramatic sketches. In 1983 his play Requiem for a Futurologist had its first performance at the University of Ife. In July, one of his musical projects, the Unlimited Liability Company, issued a long-playing record entitled I Love My Country, on which several prominent Nigerian musicians played songs composed by Soyinka. In 1984, he directed the film Blues for a Prodigal, which was screened at the University of Ife. His A Play of Giants was produced the same year.
During the years 1975–84, Soyinka was more politically active. At the University of Ife, his administrative duties included the security of public roads. He criticized the corruption in the government of the democratically elected President Shehu Shagari. When Shagari was replaced by the army general Muhammadu Buhari, Soyinka was often at odds with the military. In 1984, a Nigerian court banned his 1972 book The Man Died: Prison Notes. In 1985, his play Requiem for a Futurologist was published in London by Rex Collings.
Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, becoming the first African laureate. He was described as one "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence". Reed Way Dasenbrock writes that the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Soyinka is "likely to prove quite controversial and thoroughly deserved". He also notes that "it is the first Nobel Prize awarded to an African writer or to any writer from the 'new literatures' in English that have emerged in the former colonies of the British Empire." His Nobel acceptance speech, "This Past Must Address Its Present", was devoted to South African freedom-fighter Nelson Mandela. Soyinka's speech was an outspoken criticism of apartheid and the politics of racial segregation imposed on the majority by the National South African government. In 1986, he received the Agip Prize for Literature.
In 1988, his collection of poems Mandela's Earth, and Other Poems was published, while in Nigeria another collection of essays, entitled Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, appeared. In the same year, Soyinka accepted the position of Professor of African Studies and Theatre at Cornell University. In 1989, a third novel, inspired by his father's intellectual circle, Ìsarà: A Voyage Around Essay, appeared. In July 1991 the BBC African Service transmitted his radio play A Scourge of Hyacinths, and the next year (1992) in Siena (Italy), his play From Zia with Love had its premiere. Both works are very bitter political parodies, based on events that took place in Nigeria in the 1980s. In 1993 Soyinka was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. The following year, another part of his autobiography appeared: Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (A Memoir: 1946–1965). In 1995, his play, The Beatification of Area Boy, was published. In October 1994, he was appointed UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Promotion of African culture, human rights, freedom of expression, media and communication.
In November 1994, Soyinka fled from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the border with Benin, and then went to the United States. In 1996, his book The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, was first published. In 1997, he was charged with treason by the government of General Sani Abacha. The International Parliament of Writers (IPW) was established in 1993 to provide support for writers victimized by persecution. Soyinka became the organization's second president from 1997 to 2000. In 1999 a new volume of poems by Soyinka, entitled Outsiders, was released. That same year, a BBC-commissioned play called Document of Identity aired on BBC Radio 3, telling the lightly-fictionalized story of the problems his daughter's family encountered during a stopover in Britain when they fled Nigeria for the US in 1996; her son, Oseoba Airewele was born in Luton and became a stateless person.
Soyinka's play King Baabu premièred in Lagos in 2001, a political satire on the theme of African dictatorship. In 2002, a collection of his poems entitled Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known was published by Methuen. In April 2006, his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn was published by Random House. In 2006 he cancelled his keynote speech for the annual S.E.A. Write Awards Ceremony in Bangkok to protest the Thai military's successful coup against the government.
In April 2007, Soyinka called for the cancellation of the Nigerian presidential elections held two weeks earlier, beset by widespread fraud and violence. In the wake of the attempting bombing on a Northwest Airlines flight to the United States by a Nigerian student who had become radicalised in Britain, Soyinka questioned the British government's social logic in allowing every religion to openly proselytise their faith, asserting that it was being abused by religious fundamentalists, thereby turning England into, in his view, a cesspit for the breeding of extremism. He supported the freedom of worship but warned against the consequence of the illogic of allowing religions to preach apocalyptic violence.
In August 2014, Soyinka delivered a recording of his speech "From Chibok with Love" to the World Humanist Congress in Oxford, hosted by the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the British Humanist Association. The Congress theme was Freedom of thought and expression: Forging a 21st Century Enlightenment. He was awarded the 2014 International Humanist Award. He served as scholar-in-residence at NYU's Institute of African American Affairs.
Soyinka opposes allowing Fulani herdsmen the ability to graze their cattle on open land in southern, Christian-dominated Nigeria and believes these herdsmen should be declared terrorists to enable the restriction of their movements.
In December 2020, Soyinka described 2020 as the most challenging year in the nation's history, saying: "With the turbulence that characterised year 2020, and as activities wind down, the mood has been repugnant and very negative. I don't want to sound pessimistic but this is one of the most pessimistic years I have known in this nation and it wasn't just because of COVID-19. Natural disasters had happened elsewhere, but how have you managed to take such in their strides?"
September 2021 saw the publication of Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, Soyinka's first novel in almost 50 years, described in the Financial Times as "a brutally satirical look at power and corruption in Nigeria, told in the form of a whodunnit involving three university friends." Reviewing the book in The Guardian, Ben Okri said: "It is Soyinka's greatest novel, his revenge against the insanities of the nation's ruling class and one of the most shocking chronicles of an African nation in the 21st century. It ought to be widely read."
The film adaptation by Biyi Bandele of Soyinka's 1975 stage play Death and the King's Horseman, co-produced by Netflix and Ebonylife TV, titled Elesin Oba, The King's Horseman, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2022. It is Soyinka's first work to be made into a feature film, and the first Yoruba-language film to premiere at TIFF.
In November 2022, during a public presentation of his two-volume collection of essays, Soyinka said in relation to religion:
Around July 2023, Soyinka came under severe criticism, after writing an open letter to the Emir of Ilorin, Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari, over the cancellation of the Isese festival proposed by an Osun priestess, Omolara Olatunji.
In a book published in 2020, University College London academic Caroline Davis examined archival evidence of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funding of African authors in the post-independence period. One chapter of the book, titled "Wole Soyinka, the Transcription Centre, and the CIA", focused specifically on Soyinka's receipt of funding from CIA front organisations such as the Farfield Foundation and the Transcription Centre. The funding supported Soyinka's publishing and the global production of some of his theatre plays. The book states that even after the CIA's covert role in some of these initiatives was revealed in the 1960s, Soyinka had "unusually close ties to the US government even to the point of frequently meeting with US intelligence in the late 1970s".
When the book was published Soyinka vociferously denied having been a CIA agent and stated that he would "[follow the authors] to the end of the earth and to the pit of hell until I get a retraction".
Nigerian academic Adekeye Adebajo has argued in the Johannesburg Review of Books that Davis does not directly accuse Soyinka of being a CIA agent and as a result Soyinka's denials are also misdirected. Adebajo states that, "Any suggestion that Soyinka was also a pro-American agent would not be borne out by his political activism, which frequently condemned US-supported Cold War clients." However he also suggests that "for all his eloquent fervour, Soyinka has not rebutted these allegations in the detailed, evidence-based manner that could have put an end to this debate".
Scholars, including Adeniran, has noted that Soyinka’s writings reflect his life.
The Wole Soyinka Annual Lecture Series was founded in 1994. It is dedicated "to honouring one of Nigeria and Africa's most outstanding and enduring literary icons: Wole Soyinka". It is organised by the National Association of Seadogs. In 2011, the African Heritage Research Library and Cultural Centre built a writers' enclave in his honour. It is located in Adeyipo Village, Lagelu Local Government Area, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. The enclave includes a Writer-in-Residence Programme that enables writers to stay for a period of two, three or six months, engaging in serious creative writing. In 2013, he visited the Benin Moat as the representative of UNESCO in recognition of the Naija seven Wonders project. He is currently the consultant for the Lagos Black Heritage Festival, with the Lagos State deeming him as the only person who could bring out the aims and objectives of the Festival to the people. He was appointed a patron of Humanists UK in 2020.
In 2014, the collection Crucible of the Ages: Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80, edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah and Ogochwuku Promise, was published by Bookcraft in Nigeria and Ayebia Clarke Publishing in the UK, with tributes and contributions from Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Margaret Busby, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ali Mazrui, Sefi Atta, and others.
In 2018, Henry Louis Gates, Jr tweeted that Nigerian filmmaker and writer Onyeka Nwelue visited him in Harvard and was making a documentary film on Wole Soyinka. As part of efforts to mark his 84th birthday, a collection of poems titled 84 Delicious Bottles of Wine was published for Wole Soyinka, edited by Onyeka Nwelue and Odega Shawa. Among the notable contributors was Adamu Usman Garko, award-winning teenage essayist, poet and writer.
Soyinka won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1983 and 2013. He rejected an honorary degree from the University of Ibadan. In 1986 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Agip Prize for Literature. He was also confered the Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic by the military head of state, Ibrahim Babangida. Soyinka is a tribal aristocrat; one vested with the right to use the Yoruba title Oloye as a pre-nominal honorific. In 2005, he was given a chieftaincy title as the "Akinlatun" of Egbaland. He was honored with the Golden Plate Award by the American Academy of Achievement. It was presented to him by the Awards Council member, Archbishop Desmond Tutu at St. George's Cathedral, Cape Town.
In 2018 his almamater, University of Ibadan, renamed her arts theatre as Wole Soyinka Theatre. In 2017, he received the Special Prize category of the Europe Theatre Prize, in Rome. In August 2024, the President of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, honoured the Soyinka with the Haydée Santamaría medal.