Wole Soyinka (b. 1934)

Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, western Nigeria, the son of a school headmaster and a market trader known as "the Wild Christian." He studied literature at the University of Leeds, returned to Nigeria, and spent the rest of his life moving between theatre and prison and exile — sometimes rapidly.

He writes in English because Nigeria gave him English as the language of education and power. He uses it to dismantle the colonial self-image that built the schools that taught it. His plays draw on Yoruba myth and ritual as structures that Western drama had no framework to contain, and he does not apologise for the difficulty this creates.

He was imprisoned for two years during the Nigerian civil war — by the military government of independent Nigeria — for attempting to negotiate peace. He wrote poems in prison on toilet paper with a homemade pen. The rhetoric of civilisation and order did not leave with the colonisers: examined closely enough, it reveals itself in a state that imprisoned a man for trying to stop a war.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1986, the first African to do so. The prize was awarded to a writer "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence."

His Nobel Lecture (1986), "This Past Must Address Its Present", is an attack on apartheid South Africa, given while Nelson Mandela was still in prison. Read it at NobelPrize.org.