Prof Wole Soyinka

Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has condemned acts that are deliberately aimed at negatively influencing the minds of the people to act badly.

Soyinka, in a statement titled: ‘The Village Mourners Association,’ wednesday lampooned whoever that used his privileged position to
instigate others to take actions against their conscience.

While recalling that his gesture to honour the late literary icon, Prof. Chinua Achebe, with a ram gift during his 60th birthday, which
he could not attend, was tagged as responsible for the late author of Things Fall Apart’s eventual accident and his categorisation as
Achebe’s ‘enemy’, Soyinka described whoever was responsible for the unfounded rumours as “dangerous.”

“These self-righteous clerics are dangerous beings, especially where they flaunt the credentials of secular learning and gather in caucuses of presumed humanities. From the herd, the mindless Internet fiddlers for whom the landing of a planetary probe, or a medical breakthrough is simply distraction from fraudulent internet mailing, nothing less is expected.

What menaces the collective health of society is when the deserving highs of intellectual application of the former, become
indistinguishable from the loutish low of the latter,” he noted.

According to him, it was these breed of people continue to sow poison in the minds of the susceptible and that as teachers, they cultivate hatred in the minds of their students.

“I lament your failure to use the opportunity of the passing of a revered writer to turn your younger generation in enlightened
directions. You have chosen instead to coarsen their sensibilities and breed in their minds misunderstanding, suspicion and above all – hate!
“You will have understood by now how I have come to view you as no different from the homicidal clerics who arm youths with kerosene and match, cudgel and knife, a few naira in their beggars’ bowls, and dispatch them to set fire to structures of comradely cohabitation, of reflection, of mind enlargement, and destroy communities of learning.
Your gospel of separatism goes beyond the geographical – in which I have not the slightest interest! – but the humanistic.

“The difference is in the weapon – in your case, poison, mind corrosion. The means – Internet, and its wide open, undiscriminating
generosity. That is where you lay spores of poison, and doom future generations to a confinement of human relationships within the darkest corners of the mind,” he said.

He also underscored the needlessness of making the people suffer over the death of someone, stressing that when people “encounter hostility over their sensibilities in dealing with loss in their own way, privately, away from public eye, with or without symbolic public gestures, then we are witnessing the end, not simply of plain civility, but of civilisation, and the enthronement of Fascism.”

“It is not the intolerance and excess of a moment’s excitation, but of a cultivated arrogance and will to imposition, one that attempts to
dictate the private responses of others to shared events,” he lamented.

www.thisdaylive.com/articles/soyinka-warns-against-instigating-younger-generation/150981/

It's unfortunate that the purpose of his write-up has been misunderstood by few of his kinsmen who ignorantly invoke the spirit of tribalism in their "Must Read Thread"

The Prof is calling for restrain and re-orientation.

Simple

.

The power to decipher the words of the wise-man seems to live with the aged. A situation where we have career barrier creators instead of unifier is becoming pathetic and embarrassing.

The erudite scholar and professor laments the inherent prejudice living with our so called intellectuals and is warning of the dangers in transmitting such to the new generation by the use of internet and social media.

Deep words of wisdom is only advantageous to the wise of this world not necessarily in the books.

My candid advice to the Prof is to speak in plain words as the days of reasoning and power to interpret words are gone with the our fore-fathers.

This is a duplication .....I will suggest that this thread be locked and linked to the first thread on the subject...