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Nigerian Police Arrest Nobel Laureate

Sat May 15, 3:48 PM ET  

By DULUE MBACHU, Associated Press Writer

LAGOS, Nigeria - Police fired tear gas and arrested dozens, including the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, during an anti-government protest Saturday in Nigeria's commercial capital.

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Nigerian university students protest admist tear gas shots in Lagos, Nigeria, Saturday, May 15, 2004. The Nigerian police fired live gun shots and tear gas into the air to disperse former nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka and other protesters who staged a mass protest against the government of Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo. (AP Photo/George Osodi)

 

Soyinka, an outspoken opponent of previous military regimes, is also a vocal critic of President Olusegun Obasanjo's civilian government, describing Nigeria as an anarchic state in which normal government functions have been upended.


The writer was among 500 demonstrators at a protest in central Lagos organized by human rights and other civic groups calling for the government's resignation. Some of the demonstrators waved signs reading "Obasanjo is a civilian dictator."


Police fired tear gas to break up the demonstration after 15 minutes, arresting dozens including Soyinka and bundling them into police vans.


"We were very deliberately tear-gassed," Soyinka told The Associated Press by telephone after his release from police custody. He described the police action as a "mindless and unproductive attack."


Soyinka, 69, won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature for his autobiographical books, poems and plays depicting the brutality and chaos of life under military rule.


He fled Nigeria's then-ruling military in 1994 and currently lives in Atlanta, where he teaches at Emory University.


Soyinka was released without charge after being detained for an hour, police assistant superintendent Yinka Adeleke said. Police also released an unknown number of other activists from a Lagos police station.


Soyinka said he and others planned further demonstrations to press sweeping demands including election reforms and a new constitution.


"I was out with others to protest the increasing dictatorship in this country," the writer said. He accused Obasanjo's government of stifling opposition with repressive policies.


Authorities earlier this month announced a ban on public demonstrations following a reported "breach of security" that some army officials termed a plot to overthrow Obasanjo, whose election in 1999 ended 15 years of military rule.


Obasanjo, a retired general whose 1999 election ended 15 years of junta dictatorship, won re-election in April last year in a ballot dismissed by his main opponent, another former military leader Muhammadu Buhari, as rigged.

Wole Soyinka – Biography
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Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, "The 1960 Masks" and in 1964, the "Orisun Theatre Company", in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months untill 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.

As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge, but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance, music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre. He wrote his first plays during his time in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963. Later, satirical comedies are The Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, publ. 1963) with its sequel, Jero's Metamorphosis (performed 1974, publ. 1973), A Dance of the Forests (performed 1960, publ.1963), Kongi's Harvest (performed 1965, publ. 1967) and Madmen and Specialists (performed 1970, publ. 1971). Among Soyinka's serious philosophic plays are (apart from "The Swamp Dwellers") The Strong Breed (performed 1966, publ. 1963), The Road ( 1965) and Death and the King's Horseman (performed 1976, publ. 1975). In The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), he has rewritten the Bacchae for the African stage and in Opera Wonyosi (performed 1977, publ. 1981), bases himself on John Gay's Beggar's Opera and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. Soyinka's latest dramatic works are A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985).

Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work which has been compared to Joyce's and Faulkner's, in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is based on the writer's thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba. Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké ( 1981), in which the parents' warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).

Soyinka's poems, which show a close connection to his plays, are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) the long poem Ogun Abibiman (1976) and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988) .