November 11, 2013
Brelaun Douglas
News Writer
Metro Scene
Poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate Akinwande Oluwole “Wole” Soyinka, the first African to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, visited Howard University on November 5 to discuss the African diaspora and his literary work, “Of Africa,” an examination of African history, culture, and racial issues. It was a timely visit for the writer, whose text is used for several courses in the College of Arts & Sciences (COAS), which sponsored Soyinka’s visit.
Soyinka also spoke of his African experiences, particularly Nigeria’s civil war and the responsibilities of leadership in Nigeria. Known for his political activism, he was arrested in 1967 and jailed during the Nigerian civil war for 22 months after he called for a cease-fire in one of his articles, according to the Nobel Foundation.
A native son of Nigeria, Soyinka knows the struggles of Africa all too well. He was born in Nigeria in 1934 to an Anglican minister father and a political activist mother. While in school, he won several prizes for literary composition and in 1946 was accepted into the Government College in Ibadan.
He received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship from the University College in Ibadan and returned to Nigeria, traveling through the country, writing and producing plays, and publishing poems and essays about Nigerian politics and culture. He participated in Nigeria’s struggle for independence from Britain, and was arrested during the Nigerian civil war. During and after his imprisonment, he continued to write and in 1986, he became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since that time, he has escaped from war-torn Nigeria and has been a professor at multiple universities throughout America, Britain and Africa.
In his lectures in the U.S. and abroad, Soyinka continues to discuss the struggles of his homeland. “They want to enslave us and we refuse it,” Soyinka said of attempts to overtake Nigeria. As the event at the university came to a close, an older man rose to his feet and asked if Soyinka would come and produce one of his plays at Howard University. Soyinka responded with a laugh and said he would try.
Wendy Thompson contributed to this article.
