At 90, Wole Soyinka Revisits His Younger, More Optimistic Self

New York Times

08-04-2025

We are living, all of us, in an exhausting world, and the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is not immune. You don't become as profoundly invested in art and politics as he has been over his long life unless you care to your core about the path that we as a species are charting.
'I'm a fundamentalist of human freedom,' he said one morning last week in Brooklyn. 'It's as elementary as that.'
In the late 1960s, during Nigeria's civil war, he was held for two years as a political prisoner, having agitated against the conflict. Three decades later, he was charged in absentia with treason, bringing the possibility of a death sentence, but he remained abroad until the dictator who had persecuted him died and was succeeded by a leader who promised reform. In between, cementing Soyinka's status as a global intellectual, he won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Academy lauding his 'vivid, often harrowing' works and their 'evocative, poetically intensified diction.'
As his 90th birthday approached last summer, though, he decided to give himself an unusual gift — in reaction to what he called 'the double whammy of Ukraine and Gaza,' which made him so pessimistic that his impulse was to withdraw completely.
'I remember going months saying to myself, I don't want to read any newspapers, I don't want to watch television news, I just want to get out, stay out and enjoy what it feels like,' he said, sitting in a greenroom at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where Theater for a New Audience is giving his 1958 play 'The Swamp Dwellers' its Off Broadway premiere.
In a deep, strong, mellifluous voice, its lilt sounding of both Nigeria and Britain, Soyinka immediately quibbled with his own choice of language: 'Enjoy is the wrong word, of course, because you never enjoy it. You know you're missing something, and sooner or later it's going to catch up with you. But I pursued that experiment anyway, where for six months I just did not read any newspapers. Occasionally somebody would send me a link, you know, 'You must read this,' and I would, yes.' But otherwise, 'I just put my eyes away, even to avoid headlines.'
It was difficult to sustain, and he said he was dogged by the feeling that 'I'm going to wake up and find that the world is gone and I'm the only one left. And what am I going to do with myself?'
Yet his attempt at disengagement ended for another reason altogether, which Soyinka — a raconteur par excellence, crowned with a dashing billow of white hair — mentioned almost as a punchline when I asked. His present to himself, it turns out, had come with conditions.
'Well, my gift was up at the end of six months. So I had no choice,' he said, and laughed.
Adrienne Kennedy, whose play 'He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box' had its world premiere in 2018 at Theater for a New Audience, introduced the company's artistic director, Jeffrey Horowitz, to 'The Swamp Dwellers.'
Now 93, Kennedy has taught Soyinka's play repeatedly, and when Horowitz asked her for a statement about it, she responded in emphatic verse, extolling Soyinka's fight for human rights for people of color and calling him the 'greatest living playwright.'
She added:
There. Is no one. Else who. Sees into. The thousands
Of. Elements. Man. Faces.
And he is willing. To. Be imprisoned
For. His. Beliefs
He. Is. A. Giant. .
Soyinka was about 24 — out of his country for the first time, living in England — when he wrote 'The Swamp Dwellers.' Even though he was a British colonial, and would be until Nigeria gained its independence in 1960, he felt as if he was in 'alien territory' in England.
'Let's just say that my mind was very much on home,' he said. 'The politics, the realities, the climate, the food and so on. It was sort of the cusp of independence.'
A 70-minute one-act, the play is set in the home of Alu and Makuri, perched on stilts above a swamp in the Niger Delta. Their grown son Igwezu has just returned from the city where he lives, only to find that the crops he planted near the village have been lost to floods.
Awoye Timpo, the production's director, sees even in this early work a hallmark of Soyinka's writing: his ability 'to capture a sense of the epic inside the very, very personal.'
'Some of his other plays — 'Death and the King's Horseman,' 'The Road' — they have lots of scenes, they move in lots of different ways, but this play is compact,' she said.
Soyinka said he had forgotten the existence of 'The Swamp Dwellers,' which is seldom produced these days, until he got the inquiry about this production. 'It's been done on television in a few countries, but it's been sort of overtaken by more contemporary plays and concerns,' he said.
Re-encountering the work, he is painfully struck by his young self's optimistic depiction of 'a kind of hybrid community made up from different parts of the country.'
'That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,' he said.
In conversation, Soyinka gives the impression of thriving on batting around ideas, arguing and re-evaluating. But he is adroit at brushing aside praise, as when I suggested that his outspokenness throughout his life was brave.
'I don't consider it bravery,' he said. 'I always explain that it's a question of being able to live with oneself. You know, it's either one believes in something or one doesn't. If you don't believe in a thing and you go along with it, I find it impossible to be at peace with myself. And I always say, I love being at peace with myself. It's true! It's true. I like to feel comfortable inside, deep inside. From that point I can do anything.'
Art and politics are for him intrinsically entwined, though he does not indulge the romantic notion that turmoil is beneficial to artists. Professing himself 'a glutton for tranquillity,' he said that creating is a way of 'extracting something positive' while resisting the 'limpet gene attached to human evolution, which spells destruction, cruelty, abominations of different kinds.'
He is distressed by recent events in the United States, where he once lived in self-imposed exile. He was here, too, during what he calls 'the Black struggle,' and it angers him to see the erasure of gains that his peers fought for in the civil rights movement: 'all this fervor just being rubbished.' He remembers recognizing the reversal of that progress — 'both subtly and overtly, openly as is happening right now,' he said — when it began in reaction to Barack Obama's presidency.
'Maybe as an outsider and involved very deeply with my own circumstances on the African continent — the fight against dictators, greed, the lust for power — maybe because I could stand sort of outside it, I could look inside,' he said. 'Because most of my [American] colleagues said, 'No, it couldn't happen.' I said, 'OK.''
After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, Soyinka took a pair of shears to his green card, determined to no longer 'be even a partial member of this society.' Now, he says, he looks at the United States and sees 'MAGA land.'
'It's one of the saddest developing phenomena that I know of,' Soyinka said. 'I just feel very, very sad that what's happening in the States should be happening in such a potentially progressive country.'
Given the current political atmosphere in which foreign governments — including Britain, Germany and Canada — have warned their citizens about traveling to the United States, I asked if he felt safe visiting.
'Oh, I've lived in a constant state of nonsafety,' he said, with a small laugh. 'So I'm used to that. If I'm walking through the street and they pick me up, I have no problem whatsoever. You know, my laptop is where it is. It's up in the clouds.'
Time and experience have shaped the hopeful young man who wrote 'The Swamp Dwellers' into a worldly old man with a dented sense of possibility. But if he regards humans as being entrenched in perpetual conflict, with 'power on the one side, freedom on the other,' he has not abandoned the battlefield.
'I've lost that sense of achievable idealism,' he said. 'But it's always there. One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That's what hurts.'