The Nigerian playwright, poet, and essayist who in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — a writer who fused the Yoruba mythic imagination, above all the god Ogun, with the techniques of global modernism, and who paired a demanding body of drama and verse with a lifetime of political dissidence under successive Nigerian regimes, including imprisonment without trial during the civil war and exile under the Abacha dictatorship.
In 1967, as Nigeria slid into civil war, Wole Soyinka traveled to meet the leaders of the breakaway region of Biafra. He was trying to stop the killing before it spread. The federal government answered by arresting him. He spent most of the next two years locked in a cell, much of it in solitary, held without trial after being accused of conspiring with the Biafran side. Denied books and writing materials, he wrote anyway, scratching poems between the lines of smuggled scraps and onto cigarette packets and toilet paper. The state could jail the man. It could not reach the part of him that kept making sentences in the dark.