Nobel winner Soyinka charms, chased for autographs

NEW DELHI: Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka calls himself a "Jack of all trades." The 75-year-old Nigerian playwright, poet and occasional novelist,who became the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, is also an academician, activist, politician with a newly-registered party and a wine connoisseur.
At the Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday, he read excerpts from his works, talked about his days in jail and Nigerian literature and was chased for autographs by bedazzled school kids set at ease by his easy humour and warmth.
During the hour-long reading session, attended by several hundreds, he read sections from his plays, The Road and Death and the King's Horseman as well as his poem, Death in the Dawn. Asked to read -- he doesn't really sing - a song in his own language, he happily obliges. The audience doesn't get a word but later, drifting away from the stage in groups, they talk about his voice.
A doctorate in English literature from the University of Leeds, Soyinka had studied African theatre on a Rockefeller bursary in 1963 and his plays make generous use of devices from popular African theatre including dance and music. Traditional beliefs and roles of deities too will remain relevant, he argues.
Like the Hindu one, the Yoruba - his tribe - too has a rich pantheon that changes with time to accommodate modern discoveries. Gods of metallurgy and thunder become, with time and scientific progress, also gods of engineering and electricity. "They expand their portfolios as the mysteries are penetrated," he jokes.
Life in Nigeria is far from quiet. During the Nigerian Civil War of 1967, Soyinka was arrested by the government of the General Yakubu Gowon. He spent two years in solitary confinement "inventing games," mainly knotty mathematical ones of permutation-combination to keep himself busy. Reading and writing materials weren't allowed but Soyinka found a way.
Kenyan author, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o had written Devil on the Cross from jail on a toilet roll; Soyinka, held in the executioner's yard, made ink from coffee, pens from bones and wrote between the lines of books he managed to smuggle in. "You create an interior life of your own," he says, but there are dangers to that too, "Even meditation can take you to strange places."
Nigeria has had its political troubles not least for an abundance of oil. Soyinka would rather go back to the pre-oil era when a string of military rulers hadn't tried to take charge. "Oil need not be a curse but it is for Nigeria," he says, jokingly suggesting that India is free to drain it out.
He's also seen politics of another kind catching on and fast - a "question of identity" that is "closely tied together with politics." And it's spreading like an "epidemic." But he has a solution for that. "This is where the rocket scientists come in.... if they are so pure they can't cohabit with others, fire them into space... and leave us sinners. Something drastic has to be done."