Nigeria’s first literature Nobel still writes as witness
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, born 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, is Nigeria’s playwright-poet who has issued novels, story collections, verse, some twenty-five plays, and memoirs. Yoruba Anglican childhood, Ibadan colleges, and the Pyrates Confraternity he co-founded shaped a career of satire aimed at dictatorships.
His father Samuel, an Anglican minister and headmaster, descended from the royal family of Isara-Remo; his mother Grace, a shopkeeper and activist, belonged to the Ransome-Kutis, a dynasty sometimes likened to the Kennedys, whose patriarch helped pioneer Nigerian music recording in the 1920s. He attended his father's primary school, then Abeokuta Grammar, and studied English, Greek and Western history at Ibadan, where the radio play Keffi's Birthday Treat went out in 1954. With classmates he founded the National Association of Seadogs, the country's first confraternity.
A reference from his teacher Joyce Green took him to Leeds in 1954 to study under G. Wilson Knight. He edited the satirical magazine The Eagle, recorded for the BBC, won the university oratory prize and graduated in 1957, the year he began The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel and saw The Invention staged at the Royal Court, where he also worked as a play reader. His poems appeared in Black Orpheus, which he later co-edited.
A Rockefeller fellowship to research African theatre brought him home in 1959. The Trials of Brother Jero premiered in an Ibadan hall of residence, and A Dance of the Forests became the official play for independence day, opening in Lagos on 1 October 1960. He formed the 1960s Masks and later the Orisun Theatre Company, and in 1964 resigned a lecturing post at Ife in protest against pressure to back the Akintola government.
In 1965 came Kongi's Harvest, The Road at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in London, and the novel The Interpreters. That year he was arrested, accused of holding up a radio station at gunpoint and swapping the Western Region premier's taped speech for one alleging electoral fraud; protests by writers abroad won his release. In 2024 the National Arts Theatre was renamed in his honour at ninety.
Source: Wole Soyinka
