Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet, author, teacher and political activist who was the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He has published hundreds of works over his career and has been a visiting professor at several universities. Soyinka is also known for his political activism in Nigeria and was imprisoned for 22 months for criticizing the government.

1. “The greatest threat to freedom is
the absence of criticism.”
-Wole Soyinka

2. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
A Nigerian playwright, poet, author,
teacher and political activist who
received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1986.

3. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Wole Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, in Nigeria
and educated in England. In 1986, the playwright and
political activist became the first African to receive the Nobel
Prize for Literature. He dedicated his Nobel acceptance
speech to Nelson Mandela. Soyinka has published hundreds
of works, including drama, novels, essays and poetry, and
colleges all over the world seek him out as a visiting
professor.

4. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Early Life
Wole Soyinka was born Akinwande Oluwole
"Wole" Babatunde Soyinka on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta,
near Ibadan in western Nigeria. His father, Samuel Ayodele
Soyinka, was a prominent Anglican minister and headmaster.
His mother, Grace Eniola Soyinka, who was called "Wild
Christian," was a shopkeeper and local activist. As a child, he
lived in an Anglican mission compound, learning the
Christian teachings of his parents, as well as the Yoruba
spiritualism and tribal customs of his grandfather. A
precocious and inquisitive child, Wole prompted the adults in
his life to warn one another: “He will kill you with his
questions.”

5. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
After finishing preparatory university studies in 1954
at Government College in Ibadan, Soyinka moved to England
and continued his education at the University of Leeds,
where he served as the editor of the school's magazine, The
Eagle. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in English
literature in 1958. (In 1972 the university awarded him an
honorary doctorate).

6. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Plays & Political Activism
In the late 1950s Soyinka wrote his first important
play, A Dance of the Forests, which satirized the Nigerian
political elite. From 1958 to 1959, Soyinka was a
dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1960,
he was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship and returned to
Nigeria to study African drama.
In 1960, he founded the theater group, The 1960
Masks, and in 1964, the Orisun Theatre Company, in which
he produced his own plays and performed as an actor. He
has periodically been a visiting professor at the universities of
Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

7. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Soyinka is also a political activist, and during the civil
war in Nigeria he appealed in an article for a cease-fire. He
was arrested for this in 1967, and held as a political prisoner
for 22 months until 1969.

8. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Nobel Prize and Later Career
In 1986, upon awarding Soyinka with the Nobel
Prize for Literature, the committee said the playwright "in a
wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions
the drama of existence." Soyinka sometimes writes of
modern West Africa in a satirical style, but his serious intent
and his belief in the evils inherent in the exercise of power
are usually present in his work. To date, Soyinka has
published hundreds of works.

9. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Nobel Prize and Later Career
In addition to drama and poetry, he has written two
novels, The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy
(1973), as well as autobiographical works including The Man
Died: Prison Notes (1972), a gripping account of his prison
experience, and Aké ( 1981), a memoir about his childhood.
Myth, Literature and the African World (1975) is a
collection of Soyinka’s literary essays.

10. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Now considered Nigeria’s foremost man of letters,
Soyinka is still politically active and spent the 2015 election
day in Africa’s biggest democracy working the phones to
monitor reports of voting irregularities, technical issues and
violence, according to The Guardian. After the election on
March 28, 2015, he said that Nigerians must show a Nelson
Mandela–like ability to forgive president-elect Muhammadu
Buhari’s past as an iron-fisted military ruler, according to
Bloomberg.com.

11. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Soyinka has been married three times. He married
British writer Barbara Dixon in 1958; Olaide Idowu, a
Nigerian librarian, in 1963; and Folake Doherty, his current
wife, in 1989. In 2014, Soyinka revealed he was diagnosed
with prostate cancer and cured 10 months after treatment.

12. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
Wole Soyinka's Works
•1958 The Swamp Dwellers, drama
•1959 The Lion and the Jewel, drama
•1960 The Trials of Brother Jero, drama
•1965 The Interpreters, fiction (discussion)
•1965 Before the Blackout, drama
•1965 Kongi's Harvest, drama
•1965 The Detainee, (BBC Radio Play)
•1967, "The Writer in a Modern African State"
•1967 Idanre and Other Poems
•1969 Poems from Prison
•1969 The Road, drama
•1970 Madmen and Specialists,
•1972 The Man Died, (notes from prison)

13. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
•1972 A Shuttle in the Crypt Discussions of individual poems
•1972 Ogun Abibiman, poems
•1976 Death and the King's Horseman
•1979 Season of Anomy, fiction
•1981 Aké: The Years of Childhood, autobiography
•1981 "The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy, and Other
Mythologies"
•1981 Opera Wonyosi, an adaptation of Brecht's Three
Penny Opera
•1982 "Cross Currents: The 'New African' after Cultural
Encounters"
•1983 "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist"
•1985 "Climates of Art"

14. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
•1986 "The External Encounter: Ambivalence in African Arts
and Literature"
•1987 Six Plays
•1989 Isara: A Voyage around Essay, autobiography
•1989 Mandela's Earth and Other Poems
•1992 From Zia With Love
•1995 The Beatification of Area Boy
•1996 The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of
the Nigerian Crisis

15. Wole Soyinka
Activist, Playwright (1934–)
References
•Wole Soyinka. In Wikipedia. Retrieved from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wole_Soyinka
•Wole Soyinka Biography. In Bio. Retrieved from:
http://www.biography.com/people/wole-soyinka-
9489566#synopsis
Photos:
•Wole Soyinka Photos. In Grimot Nane Zine. Retrieved from:
https://grimotnanezine.com/category/ecocide-2/