Abstract

Wole Soyinka was born at Abeokuto in Nigeria on 13 July, 1934. He awakened African people against British Tyranny by his plays and writings. He was sent in jail for many times. Wole Soyinka was influenced by the brilliant Shakespearen scholar G. Wilson Knight. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In I960, he founded the theatre group, “The 1960 Masks” and in 1964, the “Orisun Theatre Company”, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale. Wole Soyinka has always been a political figure. At the time of the Nigerian Civil war, 1966-1970, he tried to broke a ceasefire between the federal government and the Biafran rebels who wanted to secede from the Nigerian nation state. Soyinka was placed in solitary confinement for two years for not being anti-Biafran enough to suit the leaders of Nigeria. He was released only after a lot of international campaigning against his arrest. His experience in solitary confinement is recounted in his autobiography The Man Died (1972), which is packed with conversations, interviews, interrogations and other exchanges between the author and military personnel. After release from solitary confinement, he went into voluntary 6 exile in 1972. He then worked as a lecturer, held a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, and wrote three important plays, Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973), The Bacchae (1973), and Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). In 1975 Soyinka moved to Accra, Ghana, becoming an editor of Africas leading intellectual journal Transition. After a coup deposed President Gowon in 1975, Soyinka returned to Nigeria and was appointed professor of English at the University of Ife. His soul left his body in 2014.