Nigerian sage and literary genius Professor Wole Soyinka turns 88 today. He was born on the 13th of july 1934 in Abeokuta near Ibadan, old western Nigeria.
After his studies in government college Ibadan (now university of Ibadan) in 1954, he continued at the university of Leeds where in 1973 he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist 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.
He is the author of many renowned plays including: swamp dwellers, the Lion and the Jewel, the trial of brother Jero etc. Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work which has been compared to Joyce’s and Faulkner’s, in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is based on the writer’s thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba.
Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké ( 1981), in which the parents’ warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).
in 1986, he won the coveted Nobel prize in Literature, becoming the first African to win the award.
Professor Soyinka is celebrated as a literacy genius, a pan-African and an avid campaigner for good governance. Many people including the Nobel association have taken to their social media accounts to celebrate the Nigerian writer on his 88th birthday