Happy birthday Prof Wole Soyinka! Continue to age gracefully Baba. You are an icon, a pride for Nigeria, Africa and the world at large.
It's abysmally appalling that many educated ones can't distinguish the pyrate confraternity and cultism. From the Oputa interview, he even dissociated pyrate confraternity from cultism. Honestly, for Nigeria to be better, ethno-religious sentiment has to be excluded for objectivity and sincerity.
This shows your level of intelligence. You should have checked my posts before making this comment.
Even the person you are trying to defend is not intelligent because he has been quoting me, even in his memo, mistaking my as an alternate for someone else.
Your problem is objectivity. U hv bn blindfolded by ur hatred for him. Is it that u failed to understand the write up above on the reason he took over the broadcasting station to speak up against the military oppressors or u didn't even read it at all? Don't allow ur hatred for someone who has achieved everything in his field to cause hypertension for u. U had better stop this unnecessary hatred for someone who has been blessed beyond ur understanding.
proprince:
Soyinka that can disrupt the government of Jonathan when things were better but canmot say a word under Tinubu when things have finally collapesd. Tribal bigot.
Your problem is objectivity. U hv bn blindfolded by ur hatred for him. Is it that u failed to understand the write up above on the reason he took over the broadcasting station to speak up against the military oppressors or u didn't even read it at all? Don't allow ur hatred for someone who has achieved everything in his field to cause hypertension for u. U had better stop this unnecessary hatred for someone who has been blessed beyond ur understanding.
When it comes to bigotry, every grammar is usually employed to try and appear intelligent and reasonable...
It is not easy defending ones father when he is popular for corruption.
Who gave him the gun?
Was it licensed?
Was that diplomacy you all have been yapping about?
naptu2:
Professor Wole Soyinka in conversation with Okey Ndibe in South Africa.[/b]
The full exchange on the 2023 elections (beginning at the 1:16:15 mark in the video).
All these your episode of long biography can't you summarize it?
We know he won the Noble Laureates which we all ire so much, but the one he criticized Goodluck Jonathan government and refused to do the same to Buhari and this current Tinubu is what we don't understand.
NOwazobia:
I am telling you what your supposed esteem Jonathan said.
or you want me to show you evidence of when he said it.
or is it not more than 1 year of Tinubu government already...
You still want to lie to yourself on a glaring truth because of tribalism.
You guys should be objective and not allow unnecessary hatred to affect ur submissions. Is it up to 2 years of his istration yet and he refuse to speak up? Allow this old man who has achieved everything in his chosen field to rest. He has been fighting oppressors of the common man on the street since his young age. He was imprisoned for 2 years plus for ing biafra agitation.
This one is for the novel readers, but me try small sha I just read some of the interesting part which I wanted to know about. Happy 90th Birthday to you sir. I believe we are from the same lineage where we live to see 90 in good health
You guys should be objective and not allow unnecessary hatred to affect ur submissions. Is it up to 2 years of his istration yet and he refuse to speak up? Allow this old man who has achieved everything in his chosen field to rest. He has been fighting oppressors of the common man on the street since his young age. He was imprisoned for 2 years plus for ing biafra agitation.
I challenge you to prove to me that your love for him is genuine, and not out of tribalism.
I challenge you to deeply look inward, and tell me that the professor is not corrupt with all recent event, down from the time of Jonathan.
You think I do blind .
I hate corruption with all my being, even when it comes to my tribe.
There is no one I haven't attack on this forum.
Igbos, Yorubas, Fulanis, and even the Obi I voted for.
I can confidently say that I am one of the most unbiased person on this forum.
Dude, I love your professor before recent politics exposed him,
I talked about him to people, and people even liken me to him.
When I say this same professor is a bigot, and very corrupt, and also introduced the type of cultism we are seeing today, believe me; I am right on this one.
Soyinka - The Village Mourners - A Must-read Bombshell
Nigerians who are old enough will surely recall the source of the above title. For others, I ought to narrate its origin. Fortunately, early this year, I delivered a lecture at the University of Ibadan, where I made a ing reference to the true owners of that copyright. Here is the relevant section:
“At the ing of a short-lived dictator, his successor decreed two weeks of mourning, two weeks during which the nation went into a coma. Even the television and radio stations closed down – nothing but martial and funereal music was played, while churches and mosques took over the abandoned air-waves to drown the nation in suras and canticles of lachrymose outpouring. A very sharp group quickly formed something that was called the National Mourners Association – clever lot! While the nation was quarantined and bogged down in the orgy of lamentation, they were touring the world, sponsored by government, to take the gospel of anguish to every corner of the world that boasted a Nigerian diplomatic mission.”
Yes, that was at the death of General Murtala Mohammed. But now, we turn to address the latest progenies of that association, operating in a different clime and context, but cacophonously enmeshed in variations on that ancient tune.
When that day comes that individuals encounter hostility over their sensibilities in dealing with loss in their own way, privately, away from public eye, with or without symbolic public gestures, then we are witnessing the end, not simply of plain civility, but of civilization, and the enthronement of Fascism. It is not the intolerance and excess of a moment’s excitation, but of a cultivated arrogance and will to imposition, one that attempts to dictate the private responses of others to shared events. Once again we are confronted with the Nigerian phenomenon of the egregious appropriation of what is not on offer and thus, is not subject to dispute. Where frustrated, these claimants reel out chapters from their Book of Imprecations.
Let it be stated here, for the avoidance of doubt, that I am a solid believer in the collective rites of Farewell. I believe in Ritual. Humanity is often assisted to reconcile with loss in a collective, and even spectacular mode. The choice to participate or not, however, belongs to each individual, including even those who arrogate to themselves the mission of imposing on others their own preferred mode of bidding farewell. These self-righteous clerics are dangerous beings, especially where they flaunt the credentials of secular learning and gather in caucuses of presumed Humanities. From the herd, the mindless Internet fiddlers for whom the landing of a planetary probe, or a medical breakthrough is simply distraction from fraudulent internet mailing, nothing less is expected. What menaces the collective health of society is when the deserving highs of intellectual application of the former, become indistinguishable from the loutish low of the latter.
I do not pander to the expectations of the sanctimonious. I can absent myself from any event, for reasons that are personal to me. I can absent myself as the result of a mundane domestic situation, as legitimately as from a visceral rejection of occupancy of the same space, at the same time, in the same cause, with certain other participants. I may absent myself for the very reason of my disdain for that breed which is certain to cavil at the very fact of my absence. Such specimens pollute the very space they claim to honour. Sputter and rage they may, but even the most illustrious of that ilk cannot control that choice, neither will they be permitted free age to encroach upon, and abuse the private spaces of human responsiveness.
I shall speak to them directly: your psychological profile is commonplace. It is not the honour to Chinua that agitates you, no, it is your own self-regarding that seeks to be reflected in the homage to a departed colleague. It does not take a psycho-analyst to recognize this phenomenon of greedy acquisitiveness, even of immaterial products. Like emotional parasites, you feed off others, but you have never learnt to value what others give, or be thereby nourished. I recognize you, atavistic minds – was it not your type that once disseminated an unbelievably primitive ing for Chinua Achebe’s motor accident? Here goes the story, for those who seek light relief from ponderous unctuousness:
What happened was that I found myself unable to return to Nigeria for a Colloquium in honour of Chinua’s sixtieth birthday. My dramatic mind immediately scrambled for some striking manner of compensation. So I telephoned a business friend who had some agricultural connections in Delta State and told him: find the chunkiest, spotless ram in Delta State – all white or all black, but a thoroughbred of striking physique. Find a leather pouch, tie it to its neck with the following message and deliver it at the venue of the Colloquium. I no longer recall the exact dictated wording, nothing inspirational, just the usual felicitations and injunctions to turn that ram into asun for general feasting.
Those who attended the event will recall the grand entry of the gift - as reported by one and all, including the foreign visitors, and Chinua’s reported reaction, seated on the podium. He shook head and said, “Typical of Wole”. The ram was then led off to meet its destiny at the hands of the gathered. (As a side note, it was I who took a gift away from his seventieth at Bard University – a sobering flash of time past that resulted in my ELEGY FOR A NATION. I had that poem re-published to mark the day of his funeral.)
Our story is only beginning. On the way back from that celebration, Chinua had his accident and was flown to the United Kingdom. At the first opportunity, I made my way there and called up the High Commissioner, Dove-Edwin, who was certain to know the hospital location. It turned out that he also planned a visit that afternoon, and he agreed to give me a ride. We waited – I was ed by two others – waited, and waited, then a phone call came from him that the visit had been called off. The High Commissioner would explain why, on arrival – over a promised dinner, as compensation.
That explanation was this: Dove-Edwin had received communication that some of “Chinua’s people” – a university professor among them, who was named – had pronounced publicly that “Chinua should have known better than to accept a spotless ram from his enemy” – yes, that was the word used – “enemy”. I verified this report from various other sources. Later, an alternative diagnosis surfaced: “Chinua had been too long away from the chieftaincy politics of his hometown, otherwise he would have realized that the title that he took was coveted by some others – and these were deeply steeped in traditional psychic combat”. In short, those rivals “did him in”. Both diagnoses competed for dominance for a while, petering out eventually.
Before the promotion of that alternative cause-and-effect however, Dove-Edwin had re-scheduled, and we had a most bracing, optimistic afternoon with Chinua. Yes, our patient was eventually told the cause of the earlier postponement, and he had a good laugh. On my return to Nigeria, I could not wait to take the opportunity of a public lecture to invite all desperate enemies to please send me their rams of choice – spotless, spotted, piebald, striped or nondescript – so I could treat starving writers to free meals in my home for the rest of the year. And I promised to taste a piece of each ram before serving.
Yes, it is that same breed that continues to sow poison in the minds of the susceptible. Alas for you, it so happens that some of us insist on our own way of commemorating, of being there, even when absent. You, by contrast were never there, however ostentatiously you position yourselves at the event, or at vicarious gatherings to denounce, attribute sinister motivations, and inseminate hate against those whom your pedestrian vision cannot see. Your very loudness proclaims your absence. You were always absent. You will always be absent. So, this communication is not really meant for you but for those potential almajiri – whose minds you corrupt daily with your jeremiads in that accomodating madrassa known as Internet. As a teacher, I lament your failure to use the opportunity of the ing of a revered writer to turn your younger generation in enlightened directions. You have chosen instead to coarsen their sensibilities and breed in their minds misunderstanding, suspicion and
above all – hate!
You will have understood by now how I have come to view you as no different from the homicidal clerics who arm youths with kerosene and match, cudgel and knife, a few Naira in their beggars’ bowls, and dispatch them to set fire to structures of comradely cohabitation, of reflection, of mind enlargement, and destroy communities of learning. Your gospel of separatism goes beyond the geographical – in which I have not the slightest interest! – but the humanistic. The difference is in the weapon – in your case, poison, mind corrosion. The means – Internet, and its wide open, undiscriminating generosity. That is where you lay spores of poison, and doom future generations to a confinement of human relationships within the darkest corners of the mind.
You are beyond pity. Kindly absent your selves from my funeral, when that event finally intrudes.
“They arrived as promised, armed with copies
of the WANTED notice that was now home to
my photograph. A charade ensued. Sam
accompanied them as they looked through the
rooms, one after the other, ed through
the living room where I was seated, looked
right through me as through a windowpane.
Content with the futility of their mission, they
sat down with the Aluko family in the same
living room. With a straight face, they
enquired of Sam Aluko if he had any news of
me. Sam shook his head in the negative. Well,
be sure to keep us informed if he makes
– we’ll leave this WANTED notice with
you in case you lay eyes on anyone
resembling him – again looking straight
through me as I sat sipping my coffee”.
Photo 2) 31 year old Wole Soyinka (and some unidentified people) at the Ibadan High Court premises where he was accused of holding up Radio Nigeria staff at gunpoint, removing tapes containing Premier (Samuel Akintola) of the Western Region's speech, and substituting them with an anti-government broadcast.
Michael Odesanya, one of the prominent lawyers of that period, served as Wole Soyinka's lead defence counsel while Chief Tanimose Bankole-Oki was the government prosecutor.
Date: November 1965
Source: Reuters
LOOK at the way he described the police insubordination and restraints in the event surrounding his proposed arrest without actually pointing directly to these deliberate overlook. He just call your imaginative attention and/or ingenuity to play all the time you read his works.
Photo) Professor Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There are two things from this video that I need to flesh out. These are two things that Wole Soyinka is known for.
1) Onyeka Nwelue asked Professor Soyinka who he should give the thing that he brought to.
Soyinka is a known wine connoisseur. He said he often takes his own wine when going to see Obasanjo because what they serve is rubbish.
2) Soyinka built his house in the forest, away from people. Over time the city has gotten closer to his house. He has a gallery of deities in his house. Most importantly, he is known for going into the forest to hunt.
Many people have written about how they visited Soyinka unanounced and they had to wait because he had gone hunting.
He is known for hunting partridges and guinea fowls.
If you look at the surroundings in the video, you'll know what I mean.
omoredia:
U mean the educated illiterate? A man without character. A man who's values depend on who is giving him bread to eat? Shame
Yet he could achieve so much in his lifetime and aged gracefully 😂,the fact that he doesn’t share your opinion all the time shouldn’t make him your enemy. He’s a living legend 😎 and less I forget,obedient I always remain ✌️
Racoon:
The ethnic bigot, hypocrite and chauvinist is adding a year today. Well, May the life your have lived predicate the future course of your remaining years sir.
No i.gbo man dead or alive can measure up to the great prof.
E pain you sha. And the pain will not depart from you
The prof of profs. Widely celebrated!!!!
Please help me tell your Agulu fraud to send condolence message to my neighbor whose dog just died
Also tell him there is a bore hole for commissioning
Also remind him there is a positive news that the FG under the Jagaban has won Autonomy for Local Government...the Local Government the Agulu fraud refused to recognize during his fraudulent rein.
Also tell him that the National Theater has been renamed after the the Prof of Profs..
Tell him that we are doing everything to make him and his headless mob sad and sad forever ♾️.
