By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK | 16 July 2024 (IDN) — Poet, playwright, essayist, memoirist, activist and novelist, Nigerian Wole Soyinka is known not only for his many books and book prizes, time spent in jail, and knowledge of African history, but for the wisdom he crafted in a simple phrase: “Wake up Every Day Armed with Your Convictions.”
“I don’t know any other way to live,” he wrote, “but to wake up every day armed with my convictions—Not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.”
Soyinka, who turned 90 this month, was honored, by, among many, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu who announced the renaming of the National Theatre in Lagos—henceforth to be known as the Wole Soyinka Center for Culture and the Creative Arts.
Nigeria’s literary colossus and global icon, Professor Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, famously known as Wole Soyinka, is also a foremost advocate of good governance and of a fair and just society.
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986 for his “wide cultural perspective and… for the poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence. Soyinka was the first African to win the Prize in that category.
Beyond his writing, he has also been consistent with speaking truth to power, and making sure that successive governments do what they were elected to do.
After university studies at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959.
In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller scholarship and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature.
Great scope and richness of words
The Swedish Academy, announcing the Nobel prize, questioned Soyinka:
“You talk in some of your writings and in your Nobel Lecture about the very young experience of your mother participating in a tax agitation against what was perceived as a very unfair tax. Did this political agitation influence you from a very early age?”
Soyinka: There’s no question at all, I grew up with a very strong sense of what is just and what is not or, to put it this way, I grew up with a keen sense of a division, the reality of a division of perception in people’s lives between those who govern and those who govern.”
Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Photo: Wole Soyinka, recipient of 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature. Source: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR).
