People
Wole Soyinka – biography, wife, children, family, brief information
Professor Wole Soyinka, a great and brilliant Nigerian writer and political activist who became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The name Wole Soyinka is a household name in Africa and beyond, particularly in the field of literature. With over 50 works, he has written poems, novels, memoirs and a large number of essays. He is currently indisputably one of Africa’s best writers. Aside from literature, Soyinka is also known for his active role in Nigerian political history and fighting against British colonization and corrupt leadership across the African continent. However, these are general facts that almost everyone who has heard the name Wole Soyinka already knows. If you know the very interesting details of the life of this literary icon,
biography, family
Wole Soyinka was born Akinwande Oluwole BabatundeSoyinka, on Friday July 13, 1934 in the town of Abeokuta, Ogun, Nigeria. His native town is Isara Remo in the state of Ogun. He is the second of six children born to his father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, an Anglican minister and headmaster at St. Peter’s Primary School, Abeokuta, and his mother, Grace Eniola Soyinka, a market trader. He was born into a Christian home and a very rich Yoruba culture where he practiced indigenous Yoruba religious traditions. He therefore grew up in an environment of mixed traditions – Christian religion and traditional Yoruba religion.
education and career
All Soyinka went to school at the tender age of two and a half, due to his very inquisitive nature. He had both his kindergarten and elementary school education at St. Peter Elementary School in Abeokuta before going to Abeokuta High School. He later matriculated at Government College Ibadan at the age of 12 and graduated in 1952 at the age of 18. He then completed two years of pre-university training at New University College Ibadan before graduating in 1954 from the University of Leeds, England, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature. During his studies he worked as an editor for the satirical magazine The Eagle.
After graduating in 1958 and the attention he received for the two notable plays he was publishing at the time: The Spongy Denizens (1958) and The Lion and the Jewel (1959), he was hired as a screenwriter, actor and director of the Royal Court Theater in London. In 1960 he received a Rockefeller scholarship and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. During this period he founded the theater company ” The 1960s Masks “And in 1964, the” Orisun Theater Company “, through which he produced his own plays and also played acting roles. At the same time he taught theater and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos and Ife.
His work explores a wide range of subjects, from comedy to tragedy and political satire to indigenous power struggles and the theater of the absurd.
In 1957 his poems “The Immigrant” and “My nextDoor Neighbor” were published in the Nigerian magazine “Black Orpheus”. In the same year his play The Invention, which was his first play ever, was produced at the Royal Court Theater in London. His first major play was The Swamp Dweller (1958), followed by The Lion and the Jewel (1959) and then A Dance of the Forests (1960), his first major play.
From 1975 to 1999, Soyinka was Professor of Comparative Literature at Obafemi Awolowo University, then known as the University of Ife. Soyinka was a professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Soyinka has also served as a lecturer at other foreign universities, including Cornell University, Emory University, Oxford University, Harvard University and Yale University. In 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts while teaching at Cornell University.
He wrote a lot of poetry from prison when he was imprisoned in 1967-69 for speaking out against the war sparked by Biafra’s attempted secession from Nigeria.
In Madmen and Specialists (1970), written shortly after his release from prison, Soyinka’s protest becomes much more forceful, perhaps as a tribute to the playwright’s suffering as much as to his growth as an artist. Lunatics and specialists dramatize what the NEW YORK TIMES puts it: “A police state where only maniacs and spies can survive, where the losers are insane and the winners are paranoid about the possibility of another riot.” Man Died: Prison Notes (1972), a gripping account of his prison experience.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, particularly the country’s many military dictators, as well as other political autocrats, including Zimbabwe’s Mugabe regime. He played an active part in the political history of Africa and its struggle for independence from Britain, including the fight against South African apartheid. He unreservedly expressed this attitude in almost all of his works and criticized it many times from different points of view.
In addition to drama and poetry, he has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973), as well as a collection of his literary essays Myth, Literature and the African World (1975). autobiographical works, including and Aké (1981), a memoir of his childhood.
Some of his most recently published works include King Baabu (2001), a powerful political satire on African dictatorship, 2002 Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, a collection of his poetry printed and published by Methuen (2003), and his most recent book with Memories, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006).
Soyinka, who has lived and worked in US, was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, USA in the fall of 2007. That same year he called for the cancellation of the Nigerian presidential election held two weeks earlier, saying it was plagued by extensive fraud and violence.
Also Read: Fascinating Lesser-Known Facts About Nigerian Novelist Chimamanda Adichie
wife, children
The Nobel laureate was married three times and divorced twice: in 1958 he married the late British writer Barbara Dixon, whom he met while he was a student; Olaide Idowu, a Nigerian librarian, in 1963; and finally Folake Doherty, his former student whom he married in 1989. He had children with the earlier two and exactly three children with the later ones.
Brief facts about Wole Soyinka
1. Wole Soyinka was very inquisitive and inquisitive in his childhood, so he asked the adults around him to warn each other: “He will kill you with his questions.”
2. Although Soyinka was raised in a Christian family with his religious family living directly in an Anglican Mission Center, attending church services and participating fully in church activities such as Sunday school, singing in the choir etc., he grew up to be an atheist!
3. His mother was a descendant of the Ramsome-Kuti family of Abeokuta, known for her contributions to Nigerian art, religion, education, medicine and politics. His cousins therefore include activists Beko Ransome-Kuti and Yemisi Ransome-Kuti, Health Minister Olikoye Ransome-Kuti and legendary Afrobeat musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.
4. It’s not that surprising that Soyinka grew up to become an activist because activism in his family mostly comes from his mother’s side. While Fela’s mother was the leader of the Abeokuta Women Association, his own mother was an active member. His own non-conformist nature manifested itself early in life. This was seen in the depiction of an event he related in his childhood autobiography, Ake, when he refused to prostrate before a group of elders. And when confronted, he gave the following answer:
“If I don’t prostrate myself to God, why should I prostrate myself to you?”
5. The first publication of Wole Soyinka, a short radio show by the Nigerian Broadcasting Service National Program entitled “Keffi’s Birthday Threat”, was broadcast by the Nigerian Radio Times in July 1954.
6. It was from the “Pyrates Confraternity” founded by Soyinka during his university days in Ibadan that university cult groups and secret brotherhoods developed. However, Wole never formed a group that engaged himself and six of his friends in evil intentions. Their main goal was to fight corruption and seek justice for the students. This was of course the first brotherhood in Nigeria.
8. Imprisoned during the Civil War, he was not allowed access to writing materials. However, he found ways to sneak into such and was therefore able to produce several poems and other essays, still criticizing Nigeria’s oppressive government. While still imprisoned, Soyinka also translated from Yoruba a fantastic novel by his compatriot DO Fagunwa entitled The Forest of a Thousand Demons: A Hunter’s Saga.
9. He became the first African laureate when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986; with his acceptance speech entitled “This Past Must Address Its Present” dedicated to South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela. It was a major accomplishment that put him in the global spotlight. In the same year, Soyinka was also appointed Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and won the Agip Prize for Literature.
10. He has been married three times and divorced twice: in 1958 he married the late British writer Barbara Dixon, whom he met while he was a student. Olaide Idowu, a Nigerian librarian, in 1963; and finally Folake Doherty, his former student, in 1989. He had children with the former two and exactly three children with the later ones.
11. Soyinka’s relentless activism often exposed him soyinka fled Nigeria on the “NADECO route”, the border with Benin by motorbike, especially during the five-year exile from home during the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98) United States. General Sani Abacha later sentenced him to death “in absentia”.
12. He is called the conscience of the nation. This is due to his unremitting concern and voice against corruption and autocratic government in his country.
13. All Soyinka had once revealed that he breaks every rule about his personal health, including not drinking water, eating only when he wants to, and “not following the rules of cholesterol.”
