Wole Soyinka, Africa's first Nobel Laureate in literature, will visit the College on 1-3 April 2001, under the auspices of the AADS Program and the department of Foreign Languages.

    Soyinka is a Yoruba, proud, patriotic, and progressive,  But he is not exclusivist, not pompous, not xenophobic.  It is those very qualities, which one could call humanism, that have propelled the Laurate to the forefront of myriad struggles on behalf of the oppressed, within and outside his native Africa.     

     Soyinka's plays are replete with the multifaceted, multiracial tragedy of reality. The list is endless, and it keeps growing. "Dance of the Forests", "The Road Kongi's Harvest", The Trials of Brother Jero", "Madmen and Specialists", "Death and the King's Horseman". His novel, "The Interpreters" remains one of the most poignant narratives expposing the rotten underbelly of the Nigerian neo-colonized intellectual class. It is no wonder that Soyinka resigned from his professorship at the once famed Obafemi Awolowo Universiity, Ile-Ife, out of disgust with the decadent institution.

     He continues to live a life marked by adventures and adversities, without becoming a pessimist.  He could have easily fled the ghetto of the colonized for the gilded skyscrapers of the civilized.  But he is too much of a human being to fall into such a trap.  that is why he accepted the Noble, not for himself, but for the "world that nurishes [his] being.," for  blacks, "locked into an unambiguous condition" whose humanity is not recognized by "a suicidal anachronistic present" and for creative artists who insist on making the workd a better place.

Taken from Femi Ojjo-Ade's article in the River Gazette of 16 March.