Conversation with Wole Soyinka
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Elberg/Soyinka/soyinka-con0.html
Here you will find a transcript to a 1998 interview with the playwright.

Wole Soyinka: An Overview
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/soyinka/soyinkaov.html
The life and work of Wole Soyinka, examined by various themes and topics.

Wole Soyinka Study Guide
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/anglophone/soyinka.html
Details on Soyinka's life and his works.

BIOGRAPHY
Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) is one of several important Nigerian writers who have achieved international fame. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. His work includes novels, poems, and plays, but he admits that "there is no question at all that I think the Nobel Prize is for my drama."

Soyinka studied at University College, Ibadan, Nigeria, and began his literary career as an undergraduate, publishing poetry in the distinguished African literary magazine Black Orpheus. His work, especially his drama, has been an investigation of political, religious, and other forces in Nigerian culture. The Swamp Dwellers (1958) is a powerful play condemning African superstition. The Lion and the Jewel (1959) offers a comic view of Nigerian attitudes toward European values left over from the colonial period. Among his other plays are The Trials of Brother Jero (1960), about a corrupt evangelist, and Kongi's Harvest (1964). A Dance of the Forests (1960) was written to celebrate Nigerian independence, but it also alerted people to Nigeria's past violence and warned against its return.

Soyinka studied at the University of Leeds after his schooling in Ibadan. Most of his writing is in English, but he still writes some of his poetry in his tribal language, Yoruba. He has recommended Swahili as the national language of Nigeria. Soyinka has spoken out against cultural parochialism, including its manifestation in the negritude movement, which rejects white culture as a form of pollution. He expressed his philosophy to another great African writer, Leopold Senghor: "A tiger is not forever shouting about his tigritude"; a duiker antelope does not have to "prove his duikertude; you will know him by his elegant leap."

Soyinka has been chair of the drama department at Ife University as well as of his own University College, Ibadan. He has also lectured at Cambridge University and in universities in North America. One of his most recent works, A Play of Giants (1984), is a scathing attack on abuse of power, indicting African tyrants as Idi Amin, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and others.

For all of his criticism of Nigerian politics, Soyinka has rooted his work in the religion and folklore of the Yoruba people. Ifa, the Yoruba religion, depends on a complex cosmology that sees experience as layered in interactive animal, mineral, and vegetable spheres. African critic Femi Osofisan has described Yoruba cosmology as holding "coeval the three historical, actual and prospective planes of entity; . . . the animal and vegetable essences are correspondent; . . . the acknowledged deities are both anthropomorphic and symbiotic, each fusing in his personality a series of antinomies." Osofisan also notes "the comprehensive union of religious and secular intuition in the traditional Yoruba." Ifa plays a role in The Strong Breed, but the play is nonetheless understandable to those unfamiliar with the religion. Soyinka must be thought of as a traditional dramatist, writing in the tradition of his Yoruba people but reaching a worldwide audience.