Nigeria’s Larger-Than-Life Nobel Laureate Chronicles A Fascinating Life

Some of his political actions can, in retrospect, seem quixotic, but they speak to an admirable courage of conviction. He complains about the cost of his politics on his creativity, the obligations that numb his ability to write for long stretches of time, but only half-heartedly; he does not seem to think that he truly has a choice. There is no pause to interrogate his own immersive activism. Even his instincts seem aligned with his ideology. He is, in the accounting of his own life, an actor more often and more completely in a political space than in any other.

In You Must Set Forth At Dawn, he writes that his constituency “was always wide – in the creative industry, in home politics and those of the continent, in issues of human rights — which for me includes the right to life, a commitment that led to my creation of a national road safety corps and the unglamorous labour of hounding homicidal maniacs off the Nigerian highways and educating them the hard way.” Writing of this sort can easily become arid, but undergirding — and redeeming— Soyinka’s account is a purity of purpose. Between a secular moralist and an ideologue, there is a softer, more human middle that Soyinka occupies.

The first time I met Wole Soyinka, at an American literary event dinner, he offered me a small vial of hot pepper.

“You know their food is tasteless. So I always carry pepper with me,” he said. Surprised and utterly charmed, I said, “Thank you sir.”

Soyinka has just turned 80. He is a striking man, slender, sprightly, supple-skinned. He has a lean, crackling energy about him, a sense of dramatic flourish, a resonant voice that is not unaware of its own music. In Lagos, street artists display sketches of him. He is recognizable to the average Nigerian, mostly because of his glorious hair, a big effervescent halo, which in his own words is “a landmark of luxuriant moss that passes for a head of hair.”

That description is from his account of his complete loss of anonymity after winning the Nobel Prize in 1986. (“I was set up in a luxurious hotel where if I chanced to sneeze, the management came running. I was provided with an escort who was extremely pleasant and charming but talked my head into a coma.”)

Nigerians stopped him on the streets. They invited him to their events. They assumed he was now a close friend of Bill Gates.