Wole Soyinka Immortalized

Governor Ibikunle Amosun of  Ogun State, has congratulated the Nobel prize winner for Literature, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on the event of his 81st birthday.

Amosun’s congratulatory message was contained in a press statement signed by the Secretary to the State Government, Taiwo Adeoluwa, describing Soyinka as “a quintessential scholar who bestrides the literary world like a colossus.”

He said “Soyinka excels in all of the genres of literature and his prodigious works have continued to be a reference level in educational circles everywhere in the world.”

The Governor added that the primary winner of the distinguished Awo Prize for Leadership “has continued to be a supply of inspiration to youths throughout the globe on prime-notch scholarship, values of business and public spiritedness.”

READ ALSO: 7 Facts You Need To Know About Wole Soyinka As He Turns 81 Today

He wished Soyinka strong well being and lots of extra years of meritorious service to the nation.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of felicitation and pen brotherhood, one of Africa’s foremost poets and essayists, Niyi Osundare, had alot to say about Soyinka.

The distinguished professor of the University of New Orleans, wrote an astonishing essay on Soyinka, a man who to many is know as an enigma.

In his paper titled Soyinka: The Lion and His Many Jewels,  Osundare reveals a great deal into the life of one of the world’s greatest interpreters of language.

Osundare said: “Some writers are content to be mere witnesses to their age; some would rather be faithful chroniclers of events as they unfold; others have chosen to be praise singers, and suborned griots in the courtyard of transient power. But Soyinka is as much part of the reality of his age as he is a possibility of its dream

READ ALSO: El-Rufai To Speak At Annual Wole Soyinka Lecture

He added that “there is certainly so much to say about Africa’s first Nobel Laureate, poet, dramatist, biographer, actor, director, composer, essayist, Human Rights activist, road safety marshall …. and hunter who once lost his way while hunting in the Nigerian bush, resurfacing later on the temperate shores of a bewildered Europe!”

“Soyinka is an exceptionally lucky person. This may sound like a rather bizarre statement about a man who has snatched success, sometimes bare-handed, from the furnace of social and political adversity.

But it is true: Soyinka is a lucky man: lucky enough to have come out of nearly three years of solitary confinement in a Nigerian prison system notorious for its dehumanising condition and high mortality rate, his head still standing complete on his shoulders; lucky ― and fast ― enough to have outsmarted Abacha’s hitmen, and wandered into that bush where he lost his way!; lucky to be still here, his beard on his chin, his patented silver mane still in full bloom.”

The Nigeria National Merit Award holder went on to say: “I know of no other African writer today that embodies and typifies the ideals of the aesthetic and social accountability of art the way Soyinka so impressively does.

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And apart from Christopher Okigbo and Ken Saro Wiwa who paid the supreme sacrifice, no other Nigerian writer has risked so much, suffered so repeatedly in daring the behemoth of evil and misrule in Nigeria, that promising but cruelly misgoverned country.

No Nigerian writer’s works capture more sensitively, more audaciously, the vicissitudes of Nigerian, nay African existence.”

He concluded with a mantra in praise to Kongi, saying: “Here, then, is the machete-handed one; pathfinder who dares the forbidding jungle; Arole Ogun whose prowess confounds the gods, and whose frailty is just as human; Atunda whose boulder shatters a monolithic godhead into a thousand legends…

Here, our own W.S.”

In some related news, Madmen and Specialists a stage play by Wole Soyinka on the aftermath of the civil war and the resultant debilitating effect on the citizenry as civilians or military, will be performed at Terra Kulture, on the 19th and 26th of July, 2015.

 

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