In 1967 the Nigerian federal government, accusing him of meeting Biafran leaders to broker a settlement of the war, detained the playwright Wole Soyinka without trial. He spent most of the next twenty-two months in solitary confinement, much of it at Kaduna prison, and he was denied books and writing materials for long stretches of it. He wrote anyway, on whatever paper reached him, including toilet paper and the margins of cigarette packets, and the work from those months fed the poems of A Shuttle in the Crypt and the prison memoir The Man Died, both published in 1972. He was released in October 1969. Seventeen years later, in 1986, he became the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the cell was still audible in his sentences.
To read Soyinka is to read a writer for whom the political and the mythic are continuous, and for whom both answer to the same Yoruba pantheon. This guide is built for the reader who has heard the name, knows about the Nobel, and is uncertain where to enter a body of work that runs to dozens of books across plays, novels, memoirs, poetry and political essays.
Abeokuta, Leeds, and the playwright who came home
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka was born in Abeokuta in July 1934, in the western Yoruba country, into a household he would later describe with affectionate exactness in his childhood memoir Aké. His father was an Anglican school headmaster. His mother, whom the memoir calls Wild Christian, kept a shop and took part in the Abeokuta women’s protests against colonial taxation in the 1940s. He passed through Government College Ibadan and University College Ibadan before sailing for the University of Leeds in 1954, where he read English under the Shakespearean critic G. Wilson Knight and began writing the plays that would change the shape of Anglophone African theatre.
He returned to Nigeria in 1960, on the eve of independence. The Lion and the Jewel had already been staged in Ibadan the previous year and A Dance of the Forests was written for the independence celebrations. Instead of a flattering pageant he delivered a play that interrupted the new nation’s self-congratulation by hauling the ancestors back from the dead to argue that the past being celebrated had been no better than the present being inaugurated. The play borrows the structure of a Yoruba masquerade, and its point was not hard to read: the dead would not be quiet. This is the first thing to know about Soyinka. The Yoruba gods are not local colour in his work. They are the architecture. Ogun, god of iron, war, creation and the road, runs from A Dance of the Forests through to his version of The Bacchae of Euripides. The mythology is not used to explain Africa to the reader. It is used to explain the reader to himself.
The plays you actually need to read
The Soyinka shelf in the theatre is large, and three plays carry most of the weight. The Lion and the Jewel, first staged in 1959 and published in 1963, is the place to start. It is a village comedy about a beautiful young woman, Sidi, courted by the modernising schoolteacher Lakunle and the wily old chief Baroka. Lakunle wants Sidi to wear high heels and waive the bride price. Baroka wants Sidi for his household. The comedy is precise about which kind of modernity the village will choose, and why. It is funny in performance, quietly devastating on the page, and Soyinka at his most welcoming.
A Dance of the Forests, first staged in 1960 and published in 1963, is the masterpiece in the high register: dense, allegorical, and the play that established him as the writer who would not flatter the new state. It is hard to follow on a first reading and rewards rereading by accumulation rather than by translation. Most readers do better with it once the rest of the shelf is in place.
Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) is the play that most readers, and most directors outside Nigeria, treat as the central work. Based on an incident in colonial Oyo in 1946, it follows Elesin Oba, the king’s horseman who by custom must die so that he can accompany his dead king. A British colonial officer, believing he is preventing barbarism, intervenes. In a prefatory note Soyinka explicitly rejects the reading of the play as a clash of cultures, the phrase he says anthropologists reach for too easily. It is about a metaphysical contract broken from the inside. It has been staged at major theatres in Britain and the United States, including the National Theatre in London and Lincoln Center in New York. If you read only one Soyinka play, read this one.
The novels, and the long quarrel with the nation
Soyinka has published three novels, and they are less canonical than his plays. The first, The Interpreters (1965), is essential. It follows five young Nigerian intellectuals, among them a journalist, an engineer, a painter, a university teacher and a man in the foreign service, drifting through Lagos and Ibadan in the years just after independence. The book has the talky, satirical, jazz-inflected shape of a postwar novel about overeducated drinkers. Underneath, it is a furious portrait of a generation promised a country and handed a hangover. Season of Anomy (1973), the second novel, is darker and more schematic, written in the shadow of the civil war.
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021) arrived nearly five decades after Season of Anomy, when Soyinka was eighty-seven. It is a sprawling satire about a country where body parts are trafficked, religious charlatans move among the political class, and four old friends watch the place dissolve. As a novel it is overlong and sometimes confused. As a final argument with the nation he had spent six decades writing toward, it is hard to set aside.
The memoirs: where to find the man
Soyinka has written several volumes of autobiography, and they are the most approachable part of the shelf. Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981) is the first and the most readable: a portrait of his Abeokuta boyhood under the watch of Wild Christian, his headmaster father and the parsonage compound, closing with the Abeokuta women’s tax revolt of the 1940s and his mother’s part in it. Aké is the book to give a teenager who has been told that African literature is hard.
