Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation

About the Author

Bola Dauda is a retired scholar based in the UK who currently serves as Executive Director of the Pan-African University Press. He is co-author, with Toyin Falola, of Representative Bureaucracy, Meritocracy, and Nation-Building in Nigeria (2015), Decolonizing Nigeria 1945-1960 (2017), and Nigerian Bureaucracy in an African Democracy (2017), among other publications.

Toyin Falola is Professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He has served as the General Secretary of the Historical Society of Nigeria, the President of the African Studies Association, Vice-President of UNESCO Slave Route Project, and the Kluge Chair of the Countries of the South, Library of Congress. He is a member of the Scholars' Council, Kluge Center, the Library of Congress. He has received over 30 lifetime career awards and 14 honorary doctorates. He has written extensively on Nigeria, including A History of Nigeria (1989), Nigerian Political Modernity and Postcolonial Predicaments (2016), Violence in Nigeria (1998), and Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (1998).

Abimbola Adelakun is Assistant Professor in the Department of African/African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is co-editor, with Toyin Falola, of Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora (2018). She is also the author of Under the Brown Rusted Roofs (2008) and writes a weekly column for PUNCH Newspapers.

Product Description

This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent.

Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

Review

“Wole Soyinka's imprimatur on African literature was before his laureateship. This is an Exhibit A of his secular and scared creations whose cessation should come in his wishes, when Obatala, the Yoruba god of creations, calls him home.” ―Ivor Agyeman-Duah, Associate Director, Wole Soyinka Foundation (2017-2020), University of Johannesburg, South Africa

“This book dares to unearth new truths about Wole Soyinka-and more importantly to ask new questions-and by so doing, unmasks the man, his politics, and his art.” ―E.C. Osondu, Professor of English, Providence College, USA, and Winner of the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing

“This book is yet another worthy addition to scholarship on Wole Soyinka's massive oeuvre, written by profoundly genial, cerebral and authoritative voices on African and global Humanities. It is a must-read for all scholars, intellectuals, and change agents committed to the deployment of cultural and literary superstructure, through the example of the literary patriot Wole Soyinka.” ―Olufemi Obafemi, Professor of English and Dramatic Literature, University of Ilorin, Nigeria, and President of the Association of Nigerian Authors