Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation

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This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the authors early years influence his lifes work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinkas 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 Africas most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinkas 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.

Reviews

This book is without any doubt well researched and offer very useful insight into the works and the environments that contributed to making Soyinka what he is today. The duo of Dauda and Falola have through this effort added their own to the body of rich and well-documented works that have come out to interpret Soyinka to his readers and make his work more accessible and understandable ... [T]he duo has contributed in no small way to advancing the frontiers of knowledge and understanding of Soyinkas complex world. It is a book that should adorn bookshelves of libraries and institutions where serious intellectual work is done. Kudos to Dauda and Falola for this. * Naija Times *
Wole Soyinkas 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 Soyinkaand more importantly to ask new questionsand 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 *

Author Bio

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 the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair Professor in the Humanities and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Texas at Austin, USA. His publications include A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt: An African Memoir (2004), Counting the Tigers Teeth: A Memoir (2014), and In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation (2019).