Wole Soyinka @ 89: A Tribute To The Fortress of African Literature

It’s the 13th of July, 2023, as Soyinka takes another powerful leap. Name any major literary genre, you can be sure Soyinka has his imprints there. But his legacy is most amplified in the theatrical hemisphere, where he made a name for himself as Africa’s most acclaimed playwright and became the apple of the Swedish Academy’s eye as the first Black African Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1986.

Born on July 13 1934, in Aké, Abeokuta, a town in Southwestern Nigeria, Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka had an eventful childhood. His father was an Anglican priest and school principal. His mother was a trader and political activist in a local women’s movement. Soyinka attended Government College in Ibadan in 1954 before moving to the University of Leeds in England, around 1973, where he continued his education. During his six-year stay in England, he was a member of the Royal Court Theatre in London (1958-1959). In 1960, he received a Rockefeller bursary and left for Nigeria to study African drama. The same year, he pioneered the theatre group, The 1960 Masks. In 1964, Soyinka created the Orisun Theatre Company, under which he produced his own plays and also performed on stage as an actor. While in Nigeria, he took up lecturing jobs in Ibadan, Lagos and Ife, and became a professor of comparative literature in 1975. In-between his academic career, he has been a visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield and Yale, among others.

If literary works were weapons, Soyinka would be a skillful soldier who wielded them against forces of internal and external oppression. A national hero, defined not only by his literary prolificity but also his social consciousness, his biting representation of real-life, Afrocentric concerns through poetry and drama has helped shape the sociopolitical trajectory of his motherland and Africa as a whole. Early in his playwriting career, he proved to be a custodian of African tradition and treated Western civilization with suspicion. This is evident in The Swamp Dwellers (1958) where he amplifies the village life of a simple Nigerian family and their treacherous twin son whose permanent migration to the city is interpreted as total severance from one’s cultural roots. In The Lion and The Jewel (1959), the conflict between traditional and modern values is presented, with the former overcoming the latter, as seen in the symbolic move of Baroka to outsmart his Westernized rival Lakunle and his eventual conquest of the village belle.

Other notable plays of Soyinka are The Invention (1957) TheTrials of Brother Jero (1960), A Dance of the Forests (1960), The Strong Breed (1964), Kongi’s Harvest, The Road (1965), Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973), Death and the King’s Horsemen (1975), Opera Wonyosi (1977) A Play of Giants (1984), Child Internationale (1967), Madmen and the Specialists (1970) Requiem for a Futurologist (1983) The Beatification of the Area Boy (1996), King Baabu (2001), and Alapata Apata: A Play for Yorubafonia, Class for Xeniphiles (2011). While a number of his plays were staged, and have been performed by different theatrical groups across the globe, he also wrote radio plays such as The Detainee (1965), A Scourge of Hyacinths and Document of Identity (1999).

Soyinka has three novels to his name: The Interpreters (1965), Season of Anomy (1973), and his most recent fictional work, Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021). Amongst his works are memoirs, The Man Died (1972), a record of his 27 months in prison; Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981), a documentation of his early years in life; Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir 1945–1965 (1989) a sequel to Ake; Isara: A Voyage Around Essay (1990) and You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006).

In poetry, Soyinka has produced six collections. One of his famous poems, Ogun Abibiman, which focuses on the liberation of South Africa from British Apartheid rule, calls for a military alliance of  Ogun (god of iron and war in Yorubaland) and Shaka (a deified ancient king of Zulu Kingdom) as the solution to ending the oppression of Black people in South Africa. Generally, Soyinka’s poetry takes on similar themes as his plays and is written in highly stylized language.

There are also essay collections written by Soyinka, some of which are Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (1996), The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (2000), New Imperialism (2009), Of Africa (2012) and Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions (2019). 

Easily one of the most successful writers in the continent and the world at large, Soyinka will always be remembered as a rare gem and warrior who, through his works and vocal contributions, fuelled the spirit of nationalism in ordinary Nigerians and awakened different African governments to their responsibilities. 

Happy 89th birthday to the Fortress of African Literature!