FAMOUS CHARACTERS OF NIGERIA

Wole Soyinka:

Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka was born on July 13, e1934 in Abeokuta, Nigeria. This playwright and Nigerian political activist received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He sometimes wrote of modern Western Africa in a satirical style, but his serious intention and his belief in the evils inherent in the exercise of power are usually evident in your work.

A member of the Yoruba community, Soyinka attended the Government College and the University College of Ibadan before graduating in 1958 with a degree in English from the University of Leeds, in England.

Upon his return to Nigeria, he founded a theater company and wrote his first major work, UA Dance of the Forests (published in 1963), for the celebration of Nigeria's independence. The work satirizes the budingnation by stripping it of the romantic legend and demonstrating that the present was no longer the golden age it had been in the past.

He wrote several plays in a lighter tone, mocking both the pompous masters westernized in The Lion and the Jewel (first shown in Ibadan in 1959 and published in 1963) and the clever preachers of upstart churches who fattened their profits thanks to the credulity of his parishioners, in the essays of brother Jero (represented in 1960, published in 1963) and the metamorphosis of Jero (1973).