Wole Soyinka was said by the 1986 Nobel prize judges to be "one of the finest poetical playwrights to have written in English," and in his report on the award, the Los Angeles Times critic, Stanley Meisler, wrote: "His drama and fiction have challenged the West to broaden its aesthetic and accept African standards of art and literature."

But his work has not been to the taste of all. The poet and critic Chinweizu described the Nobel award as "the undesirable honouring the unreadable," and a number of his African contemporaries have criticised the linguistic complexity and obscurity of his work. Soyinka has responded to these critics by saying "There's great variety in my work," and "I come from a culture which uses language in a very dense way." Yet, although Soyinka insists that the artist has no special responsibility and that not all artists are temperamentally suited to the writing of political protest, there is no doubt that in his own case, self-consciously intellectual and linguistically complex as his work may be, his writing is also strongly political, serving his perpetual quest for the dignity of all people in the face of cruelty and viciousness.

He has been an outspoken critic of all forms of atrocity, not allowing his experience of imprisonment to deter him, and not holding back out of fear of causing particular religious offence. For example, in distancing himself from the northern states of Nigeria that have adopted Islamic fundamentalism, he has said, "I cannot belong to a nation which permits such barbarities as stoning to death and amputation - I don't care what religion it is." His drive is to challenge cruelty and inequality, wherever it may lie. In his Nobel lecture, delivered on 8th December 1986, he said:

'And of those imperatives that challenge our being, our presence, and humane definition at this time, none can be considered more pervasive than the end of racism, the eradication of human inequality, and the dismantling of all their structures. The Prize is the consequent enthronement of its complement: universal suffrage and peace.'

In his first lecture of this series, Soyinka referred to the effect that fear has on the stability of the self. Inequalities of all kind challenge human dignity, and, as Soyinka makes clear, the significance of this goes beyond the effect on the individual. The nation, he has argued, relies on the self-esteem and agency of its citizens for its own proper identity. In The Open Sore of a Continent (1996) he writes: "Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer-space." Only through the strength and independence of individuals can the life of the nation progress. As Eldred Durosimi Jones says, for Soyinka "suppression of the individual will is thus a suppression of the very forces of life."

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Content last updated: 07/07/2004

About the author

Lynda Morgan completed her Ph.D thesis on South African settler fiction at the School of Oriental and African Studies (the University of London), and her main literary interests continue to be in African literature and colonial/postcolonial studies. She publishes papers in these areas, and regularly contributes to national and international conferences. In August she will deliver a paper on South African and Australian settler fiction at the ICLA Congress in Hong Kong. She is also a published poet.