By Nehru Odeh
Professor Wole Soyinka has not only been in the public space for seven decades but his interventions in the global political and literary landscapes is etched in our consciousness.
So many things, both truths and untruths, have been said about this global citizen who turns 89 today.
In order not to fall into the trap of sounding repetitive as we celebrate a literary icon and the first black man to win the Nobel Prize in literature, we are veering away from the obvious facts that are almost becoming cliches.
Here we are limiting ourselves to those facts that border on the extraordinary, even though his life, laced with hardwork, is a gamut of superlative achievements too numerous to mention .
Below are 12 astonishing facts on Soyinka, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1986.
1. Soyinka’s first major play, He Swamp Dwellers was published in 1958 at 24.
2. Two of his works, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Woke Soyinka and Poems from prisosn were written on a sheet of toilet paper and smugglesd out of prison.
3. He was raised in a religious family, attending church services and singing in the choir from an early age; however, Soyinka himself became an atheist later in life.
4. In 1965, at the age of 31, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections.
5. He has taught in some of the best universities in the world, including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Harvard.
6. Soyinka’s relentless activism often exposes to grave risks. During the regime of Nigeria’s military dictator, General Sami Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the ‘Nadeco Route’ on a motorcycle, after the dictator had issued a death sentence on him in absentia.
7. In 1952 at the age of 18 Soyinka alongside six friends founded the Pyrates Confraternity at the University College, Ibadan.
8 . In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, Soyinka was accused of supporting the Biafra. And he was imprisoned for 22 months.
9 . In 2014, Soyinka revealed he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and cured 10 months after treatment.
10. He resigned from his university position twice in protest. First in 1964 and second, in 1971.
11. Soyinka has received several honorary degrees, from such prestigious universities as Harvard (1993), Princeton (2005) and the Franklin Humanities Institute of Duke University, where he was appointed Distinguished Scholar in Residence in 2008.
12. Even at 89 Soyinka still exudes brilliance, mental alertness and intervenes in national and global politics. He still writes. His latest novel, “Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth” was published to critical aclaim in 2021 at the age of 87. Booker Prize award-writer Ben Okri described the book as “Soyinka’s greatest novel, his revenge against the insanities of the nation’s ruling class and one of the most shocking chronicles of an African nation in the 21st century.”