Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka (b 1934), born Akínwándé Olúwolé Babátúndé Sóyíinká, is a Nigerian writer, dramatist, poet, novelist, essayist and translator received Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. He is known for his innovative writing focusing on difficulties arising from clash between tradition and modernism in Africa. The Interpreters was his first novel that is also considered as first truly modern African novel. His other famous works are - The Trial of Brother Jeno (a play), Kongi's Harvest (a play) and Season of Anomy (a novel).

Wisdom & Quotes

• No man beholds his mother's womb -

Yet who denies it's there? Coiled
To the navel of the world is that
Endless cord that links us all
To the great Origin. If I lose my way
The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.
- Death and the King's Horseman

• These men are not merely evil, I thought. They are the mindlessness of evil made flesh. One should never stumble into their hands but seek the power to destroy them. ... To seek the power to destroy them is to fulfill a moral task.

- The Man Died

• Come, let us

With the mangled kind
Make pact, no less
Against the lesser
Leagues of death, and mutilations
of the mind.
Take justice
In your hands who can
Or dare.
- Flowers for My Land, A Shuttle in the Crypt

• I have one abiding religion - human liberty.
• If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?

- Ogun Abibiman

• A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
• We do not burn the woods to trap a squirrel -

We do not ask the mountain's aid to crack a walnut.

• Sadness is twilight's kiss on earth.

Itamar Yaoz Kest