Monday, July 13, 2015

Professor Wole Soyinka is 81 today!


Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka is a year older!. The playwright and poet turned 81 years old today July 13th. 

Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years.

Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the "NADECO Route" on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale.

From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US. 

For lovers of stage plays, this July, Performing Arts Workshop and Studios (PAWS); a theatre production outfit, with outstanding performances such as Camwood on the Leaves, The Wives, Rubiewe, Shattered, and Death and the King’s Horseman, amongst others brings to stage one of Wole Soyinka’s powerful dramatic statement titled ‘Madmen and Specialist’ to TerraKulture.


Madmen & Specialists is set in the aftermath of the civil war and the resultant debilitating effect on the citizenry as civilians or military.

The stage play is directed by Kenneth Uphopho (Director of Saro the Musical and Single in Gidi), and features Patrick Diabuah, Bolanle Haastrup-Atitebi, Jeniffer Osammor, Austin Onuoha, and Kelvinmary Ndukwe, amongst others.

Venue: TerraKulture, Tiamiyu Savage Street, Victoria Island, Lagos.
Date: 19 and 26 July 2015
Time: 3pm and 6pm. 




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