ABSTRACT
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka or simply as W. S. is a dramatist, poet, novelist, literary critic, theatre director, and sometime actor; a political activist par excellence; the first black Nobel Prize winner for literature; and arguably the most prolific and most distinguished African writer writing in the English language. Four rather untraditional autobiographies to date (one political, three literary) conveniently introduce the reader to the author’s cultural background and strong political commitments. Born in colonial Nigeria of well-educated Nigerian parentage, Wole Soyinka has strong-willed and activist roots in his Yoruba lineage and culture that have gestated and informed much of his work in postcolonial Nigeria. He was a precociously individual child whose curiosity for knowledge and acute sensibilities as to the nature of things took him to various schools in his early education, beginning with St. Peter’s Primary School in Ake Abeokuta (1938–43), where his father was headmaster, to Abeokuta Grammar School (1944–45), where his maternal uncle, the most revered Rev. A. O. Ransome-Kuti (“Daodu” in Ake), was principal, and away from home to Governent College in Ibadan (1946–50). He then proceeded to postsecondary education at University College, Ibadan (now the University of Ibadan), the premier institution for higher education in Nigeria under colonial administration; there he spent two years before going on to complete his bachelor’s degree in England, majoring with honors in English at the University of Leeds. He was a loner (certainly not in the sense of aloofness or elitist snobbery), bold, self-confident, stubborn, rebellious, yet generous almost to a fault; his individualist traits, many of which were not uncommon in his family, would not only get him into trouble several times in his life, but also create and influence most of the main characters in his works.
