He wrote some of his prison notes on toilet paper and between the lines of books. Wole Soyinka spent almost two years in detention during the Nigerian Civil War, much of it in solitary confinement, and the book that came out of it, The Man Died, remains one of the most furious pieces of writing by any African author. Nearly two decades later, he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Abeokuta
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, in what is now Ogun State, Nigeria. His father was a headmaster and his mother ran a shop. He wrote about his childhood in Aké: The Years of Childhood. He studied at the University College Ibadan and then at the University of Leeds in England, and worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
A playwright first
Soyinka is a poet, novelist and essayist, but theatre came first. He returned to Nigeria in 1960, the year of independence, and wrote A Dance of the Forests for the celebrations. The play warned the new nation against romanticising its past, which was not what officials wanted to hear.
Prison
In 1967, as Nigeria slid into civil war, Soyinka travelled to meet the Biafran leader Odumegwu Ojukwu in an attempt to prevent the conflict. The federal government arrested him and held him without trial from 1967 to 1969. The Man Died, published in 1972, came from that experience. Its title comes from his line: “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
Death and the King’s Horseman
His best-known play, Death and the King’s Horseman, was published in 1975. It is based on a real event in colonial Oyo, when a British officer intervened to stop the ritual suicide of the king’s horseman. Soyinka insisted the play was not a simple clash of cultures but a metaphysical drama, and it has been staged around the world.
The Nobel, 1986
In October 1986, the Swedish Academy awarded Soyinka the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first time an African writer had won. He used his acceptance lecture to speak about apartheid in South Africa and dedicated it to Nelson Mandela, who was still in prison.
Exile and Abacha
Soyinka’s quarrel with military rulers did not end with the war. Under General Sani Abacha in the 1990s he fled Nigeria and was charged with treason in absentia. He returned after Abacha’s death in 1998.
Still arguing
Well into his eighties, Soyinka remains a public voice in Nigeria and beyond. In 2016, he said he had destroyed his American green card after Donald Trump’s election. He has continued to publish, including the novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth in 2021.
The prisoner who wrote on scraps of paper in a federal cell became the first African Nobel laureate in literature. He has spent the rest of his life refusing to keep silent.
