16th June, 2022
The late Professor Femi Soyinka, the younger brother of Professor Wole Soyinka, in an interview, described his brother as a genius and an eccentric. He revealed how the two of them grew up, especially the childhood pranks they played, their fights and others.
The interview was first published on 17 July 2014 to mark Wole Soyinka’s 80th birthday.
According to Femi: “Wole is my elder brother. We grew up together. As children, we were always fighting. Another one was when the three of us, Wole, Tinu, and I used to drink our parents’ Dubonnet wine whenever they were not around. My father loved his Dubonnet and he kept it in the cupboard somewhere. We would then go and take one spoon, or two spoons, and we would go back to take another spoon. Later, our father noticed that the Dubonnet was lower than he left it. He started putting marks on the bottle, at the level of the content he left. When we knew that he was putting marks to know whether any of us got there or not, we outsmarted him. Whenever we drank out of it, we would top it up with water. Then the Dubonnet was getting thinner and thinner and losing its potency. But our father eventually caught us and we were punished for that. Our punishment was either we faced a corner with our legs up or stood down and raised our hands.
It came to a stage when we separated. He went his way; he went to the university, while I was in school. That was the middle part of our lives. Then when we came back to Nigeria and I was working at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, and he was working at OAU and we started growing old and that is the last phase of our lives. These are the three phases of our lives: when we were together as children when we grew up together, then when we went to school, I mean university and so on. Then we were apart. We grew up in different places, and when we came back to Nigeria, he was at the University of Ibadan, UI, and I was at the University of Ife Teaching Hospital.
Femi compared Wole Soyinka of then and now: “Of course, there was a change along the line. One gets older but significantly, in terms of character, and views about things, I think he has been very consistent. He was very brave, outspoken, sometimes very daring, very adventurous, very intelligent, a trouble maker (which he was at Government College), very passionate about his beliefs.”
“We started taking wine when we were children – palm wine and so on. I developed a good taste for wine again from him. Normally, I preferred white wine but he introduced me to red wine.”
Read the full interview HERE