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Portrait of Wole Soyinka

Literature · Playwrights

Wole Soyinka

born 1934 · Nigerian

Modern African drama

Wole Soyinka is Nigeria's foremost dramatist and, in 1986, became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His plays fuse Yoruba ritual, masquerade and the god Ogun with English verse drama and biting political satire. A lifelong opponent of military rule, he was held in solitary confinement for over two years during the Nigerian civil war and has repeatedly gone into exile.

How to spot them

  • ▸First African, and first Black writer, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986
  • ▸Yoruba cosmology, especially Ogun, god of iron, war and creativity
  • ▸Born at Abeokuta; studied at Ibadan and Leeds; worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London
  • ▸Imprisoned 1967–69, mostly in solitary confinement, during the Biafran war
  • ▸His attack on "Negritude": a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude

Key works

The Swamp Dwellers (1958)

Early one-act play of delta village life, first staged in London

The Lion and the Jewel (1959)

Comedy in which the village belle Sidi is courted by the schoolteacher Lakunle and the old chief Baroka

A Dance of the Forests (1960)

Written for Nigerian independence, it summoned ancestors who turn out to be anything but glorious

The Trials of Brother Jero (1960)

Satirical comedy about a fraudulent beach prophet on Bar Beach in Lagos

The Road (1965)

The Professor hunts the Word among lorry drivers and touts at a roadside shack; it won a prize at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar

The Man Died (1972)

Prison notes from his detention during the civil war; the title comes from his line that the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny

Death and the King's Horseman (1975)

Based on a real 1946 incident at Oyo: a British officer prevents a ritual suicide that the king's horseman is bound to perform

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021)

His first novel in nearly half a century, a satire on Nigerian corruption and body-part trafficking

Key ideas

  • The Yoruba "fourth stage": the abyss of transition between the living, the dead and the unborn, crossed by Ogun
  • Tragedy as ritual sacrifice rather than individual psychology
  • The writer's duty to speak: "The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny"

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, Ogun State
  • •He studied at University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds, and was a play reader at the Royal Court Theatre
  • •In 1965 he was accused of seizing a radio station in Ibadan to substitute a tape denouncing rigged election results
  • •Detained by the federal government from 1967 to 1969 for attempting to broker a ceasefire in the Biafran war
  • •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African laureate in literature
  • •His memoir Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981) recalls his Abeokuta boyhood
  • •Sentenced to death in absentia by the Abacha regime in 1997; the sentence lapsed with Abacha's death
  • •He publicly destroyed his United States permanent residency card after the 2016 presidential election
  • •His novels include The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973)

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources