The Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka (born 1935) was one of the few African writers to denounce the slogan of Negritude as a tool of autocracy. He also was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Wole Soyinka was born July...

Until he became, in October 1986, the first black African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka was probably best known within his own country, Nigeria, as a political activist with a fierce commitment to individual liberty...

Fifty-three Nobel laureates are calling on Turkey and Armenia to open their border and resolve their differences over the mass killings of Armenians by Turks in the early 20th century.In a letter released Monday by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the group urged Turkey...

When Olusegun Obasanjo was elected Nigeria's president in 1999, Nigerians hoped long years of military misrule were behind them and stable democracy was ahead.As he leaves office Tuesday, Nigeria's democracy is in doubt, and its people seem uncertain of their future. But Obasanjo, a 70-year-old...

Young boys scamper along weed-entangled pipes, transforming an oil-pumping station marked "Not In Use" into a jungle gym in the heart of Nigeria's lawless oil region. Nearby wells rust under the palm trees, and gas-flaring chimneys have gone cold.The scene in Ogoniland, where villagers ousted...

When Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka contemplates the role of a writer in society, he defines it in terms of political and social action.In 1965, upset that a politician who had rigged the vote was about to claim victory in a radio broadcast, Soyinka,...

In the following essay, Adu-Gyamfi evaluates Soyinka's use of African oral traditions in Ogun Abibiman, noting that the collection's vocabulary “reflects a highly conscious sense of African oral poetics.”

In the following review, Rieff chronicles recent Nigerian history and discusses Soyinka's outlook in The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis toward the repressive Nigerian regime and the relative indifference of the West.

In the following essay, Wright explores the major themes of Soyinka's later “shotgun” satires, focusing on the political elements in such plays as A Play of Giants and Requiem for a Futurologist.

The poem "The Telephone Conversation", written by the African poet Wole Soyinka, depicts a West African man's attempt to rent an apartment from a white landlady and the landlady's refusal to grant his request based on his skin color. Three instances -- the speaker's "self-confession" about his skin color, the description of the landlady, and the speaker's use of high diction in making the landlady appear foolish -- exemplify Soyinka's use of irony to depict the absurdity of racism and c