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“... the period from independence in 1960 to the death of General Sani Abacha in 1998, the 64-year-old Wole Soyinka is preparing to infiltrate himself back into his native Nigeria to confront the latest manifestation of military adventurism. By 1998 he had been in exile for three years and was impatient with the failure of the opposition to mount a decent ...”

“... the prisoner to the Government. The book stands beside that other great African prison testimony, Wole Soyinka’s The man died. Soyinka’s Ake is a retreat from politics and present-day African reality to a lyrical description of a vanished childhood. Mr Soyinka writes as well as ...”

“... among Presidential candidates of General Muhammadu Buhari, a military ruler in the mid-1980s. Wole Soyinka memorably satirised the authoritarian ‘war against indiscipline’ launched by the General, supposedly in an attempt to improve civic standards; and an article published in April in Vanguard, one of Nigeria’s leading newspapers, reflected a ...”

“... that preaches an aggressive Afrocentricism. (Chinweizu has been unrelenting in his hatred of Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, whom he never tires of calling a Negrophobe – Soyinka, an English-language dramatist, admires the racist author of Othello and any writer who admires Shakespeare is also a ...”

“... turned out to be of particular interest in the 20th century (to Thomas Mann, Hans Werner Henze and Wole Soyinka, along with a good many others cited here). The Bacchae, in effect, came to replace the Iphigenia tragedies because of a new emphasis on the chaotic, orgiastic violence of the period. Hughes is at his most powerful in his discussions of this ...”

“... of Seven’s childhood in the magical, demon-haunted bush: the epigraph is a Jonsonian quatrain by Wole Soyinka about ‘the mind of hungered innocence’. The second tells of the boy’s English-style grammar-school education: the epigraph is a mournful verse by Ayi Kwei Armah about selective education, ‘a series of jumps through increasingly narrower ...”

“... policies. (His response was to write a new play in Yoruba, Otito Koro: ‘Truth Is Bitter’.) Wole Soyinka​ was another young luminary at the conference at Makerere, and by then an established dramatist. The Yoruba revival had set him on his path as a playwright. Not long after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 he was asked whether he ...”

“... Achebe’s stature is now greater even than that of his fellow Nigerian, the Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka. In fact, a tacit rivalry between the two is suggested in the mischievous title of a critical study by anoth er Nigerian, Kole Omotoso – Achebe or Soyinka? – which is bound to remind the read er of George ...”

“... great god was Baden-Powell and the principal recreation soccer’; the African playwright, Wole Soyinka, served under a Scoutmaster nicknamed ‘Activity’. So those Scout-like writers of the Commonwealth are not quite so exotic as they might seem to Little Englanders. But the Boy Scouts of America, by Paul Fussell’s account, represent more ...”

“... spite her. After a minute’s silence in Helena’s memory, nine poets, including Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and me, each read a poem by Paz and one of our own.Almost immediately after Marie-José died, bureaucrats and pettifoggers appeared, brandishing permits and credentials, anxious to rummage through the couple’s papers and possessions, to draw ...”

“... era, when writers on the continent had been introduced to the rest of the world as Team Africa: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Mongo Beti, Es’kia Mphahlele – the list went on. Wainaina himself was modest about his ascent: he saw himself as one of many young writers creating a pan-African literary idiom for the 21st ...”

“... artists, intellectuals and political rivals. ‘A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude,’ Wole Soyinka said. ‘He pounces.’ But négritude was the animating spirit of Fesman, which was a huge success.Senghor took power in 1960 on Senegal’s independence from France. Shortly afterwards, he accused Mamadou Dia, his prime minister and long-time ...”

“... of scholarship and letters. Contributors included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as a cohort of South African writers who were wrestling with apartheid, among them Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi.From the start, Transition had commissioned work from political ...”

“... and a great deal of its resources, is effectively a disaster after four decades of misrule. Wole Soyinka said recently that he sometimes wished he had been born into a tiny, impoverished African country of no strategic value to anyone. At the heart of the problem are the generals and their civilian collaborators who have run the country for all but ...”

“... the conference in 1968 and would stay in the role until 1999, developing plays by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, Wendy Wasserstein and many others.When they joined forces, Richards was 63 and Wilson was 37. Every live wire goes dead without connections, and Richards had them. So Wilson could quit his job as a short-order ...”