Lives of Spirit and Dedication

By Paul Gray

Despite its tendency to distribute awards along geopolitical lines, the Swedish Academy of Letters waited 85 years before bestowing the Nobel Prize for Literature on a black African. Yet when the laurel finally passed last week to Wole Soyinka, 52, a Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, essayist and indefatigable polemicist, the justice seemed more than demographic. Discriminating theatergoers in London and New York City, as well as in Africa, have known for two decades that Soyinka is a writer worth watching and hearing. An evening in the presence of his words might bring anything: A Dance of the Forests (1960), a dreamlike, ritualistic celebration of Nigerian independence edged with satire; Kongi's Harvest (1965), a biting attack on an Nkrumah-like dictator. Soyinka has found widespread favor without ever courting it. His writings have charged the West with soulless materialism and his fellow Africans with barbarisms and corruption. He has staked his art in a no-man's-land between conflicting cultures.

This troubled area was Soyinka's birthright. His parents, members of the Yoruba tribe in southwestern Nigeria, were also Christians and thus at some remove from the native life around them. In his memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981), Soyinka portrays the divided realms of his early impressions: the beliefs handed down by his mother and father vs. the animism of village rituals, particularly the tradition of the egungun, the ancestral spirits who can be summoned whenever their masks are displayed at local festivals. For a time, the boy had the best of both worlds: the sensuous, + imaginative life of Africa and a Western education, first at college in Ibadan near his village and then at the University of Leeds in Britain, where he earned a B.A. in English literature in 1957. After graduation he worked as a teacher and scriptwriter for London's Royal Court Theater, where some of his early sketches and short plays were performed.

But he returned to Nigeria in 1960, the same year his homeland gained independence from British colonial rule. Soyinka's adult career coincides almost exactly with the brushfire of nationalism that swept across Africa, a phenomenon that filled his writings with bursts of hope and despair. He eloquently expressed the ideals of black nationalism and spoke out harshly whenever they seemed in danger of being compromised or betrayed. In 1967 he was arrested by the Nigerian government, charged with assisting the Biafran rebels in their struggle for a separate state and held for 22 months. Soyinka later recounted this ordeal in the scathing prison memoir The Man Died (1972).

Although he has become a folk hero in his native country, controversies have attended his career. Noting his fondness for Western literary forms (all of Soyinka's work is written in English), some African critics have accused him of shunning his ethnic origins. Such complaints may continue, but the Nobel Prize is likely to make Soyinka an even more formidable spokesman on his continent. The day after it was announced, Nigeria awarded him its highest national honor.