I can only do 1 chapter at a time, since I get angry
I know the feeling. That was exactly how I felt when I read:
The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, by
Wole SoyinkaDuring the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), Prof.
Soyinka was imprisoned by the military government, without trial, for 22 months. He spent most of that time in solitary confinement, tortured almost every day, and banned by the government from access to books, pens, and paper. Despite this great privation,
Soyinka was somehow able to produce this prison memoir, largely on pieces of toilet paper with homemade ink, and have it smuggled out of his jail cell.
"In October 1969, when the civil war came to an end, amnesty was proclaimed, and
Soyinka and other political prisoners were freed. For the first few months after his release,
Soyinka stayed at a friend’s farm in southern France, where he sought solitude. He wrote
The Bacchae of Euripides (1969), a reworking of the Pentheus myth. He soon published in London a book of poetry,
Poems from Prison. At the end of the year, he returned to his office as Headmaster of Cathedral of Drama in [the University of Ibadan]."
In 1971,
The Man Died was published.
In 1986,
Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African to achieve the honor. The citiation described him as one
"who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence." His Nobel acceptance speech,
"This Past Must Address Its Present", was devoted to South African freedom-fighter
Nelson Mandela, and was an outspoken criticism of apartheid and the politics of racial segregation imposed on the majority by the Nationalist South African government.
Even all these decades later, Prof.
Soyinka has never received a formal apology for his imprisonment and torture by the Nigerian government. Nor has anyone ever explained why exactly he was jailed.
Like I said, I can only take one chapter at a go of
The Man Died. In fact, I don't think I've ever read the entire book, so infuriated does it make me.