It's like a relay race. One comes, fails and hands the baton to another. The other comes, fails and hands the baton to a third.
None of what they write ever makes sense. In fact you can clearly see that they just want a reaction by the fact that there is no logic or sense in their posts.
I'm basically just going to be ignoring them from now on and handing the extra ones to the fish basket.
GeneralPula: You shouldn’t have created the thread like this bro. You stated Atiku, Sowore as headline, only to find more notable people throwing their birthday wishes..
You should have done them simultaneously. Soyinka is a rare breed. He’s worth every celebration..
Atiku, Sowore, Others Celebrate Wole Soyinka On His 90th Birthday
emmyN: naptu2, stop spamming the forum with unnecessary links and articles.
As for Soyinka, it was better if he had never been born. Being the pioneer of cultism and a part architect of the present political and economic upheaval is enough misdemeanour for one person.
I'd really like to see how you'll stop me and what you'd do about it.
Happy 90th birthday to Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka!
Join us in celebrating the life and remarkable accomplishments of this cultural icon whose work continues to transcend borders and inspire generations.
Did you know that Professor Soyinka taught at U.S. Universities including @EmoryUniversity, @Cornell, @Harvard, @nyuniversity and @Yale?
The name Wole Soyinka, aka WS, evokes sundry emotions across the spectrum. Regardless of where one stands on the spectrum, we can all agree that Wole Soyinka is one of Nigeria’s most celebrated personalities, certainly Africa’s most iconic literary maestro, and one of the world’s most influential citizens. Even though I know him to treat public celebrations of his birthdays with studied indifference and a hunter’s disdain, it is still almost unbelievable that WS is 90, given his frenetic pace of work and travels. And whether he likes it or not, this is one celebration he cannot stop!
For me, WS is not the unfathomable mystery that many perceive from a distance, and he is not the mythological pantheon that exists in the realm of the gods in the imagination of many. He is a mentor, a role model, a father figure, and a thought leader with whom I have had the rare privilege of communing and sharing great moments of significant historic importance in my life.
My first physical encounter with Professor Wole Soyinka was in 1994 in the course of the struggle to return Nigeria to democratic order. My familiarity with WS, however, preceded our opportune encounter. My first interaction with him was in his prison notes, The Man Died, which I first struggled to grasp in 1975. While the motif of the book was a seductive topic of interest, the inscrutably elevated language and discursive point of view of the book made it a hard nut for me to crack at such a young age. Since then, I have not only read all his other writings I have come across – particularly the autobiographical series – Ake, Isara, Ibadan: the Penkelemes Years and You Must Set Forth at Dawn, I have gobbled them with obsessive enthusiasm. His writings and public advocacy for good governance, social justice, democracy and freedom had always made him a godfather and mentor whose association I had deeply coveted.
Consequently, when the opportunity to meet Prof happily came my way through his son, Olaokun, in 1994, it was a dream come true. Professor Soyinka (who was already familiar with my work as a democracy activist in the UK through the activities of the New Nigeria Forum and its journal, Nigeria Now, which I edited and regularly sent to him in Nigeria), seized the opportunity of our meeting to invite me to be part of his newly established National Liberation Council of Nigeria (NALICON) as Director of Communications.
Without giving it much thought, I enthusiastically jumped at the rare opportunity to work closely with Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in literature. I had reasoned that his international reputation, connection and clout would greatly enhance our struggle for the return of democratic order in Nigeria. And I reasoned right! As I indicated in my memoir of the exile years, “I came close to being labelled a passionate enthusiast and defender of the Soyinka mystique, especially having shared his worldview of the Nigerian struggle as one between authoritarianism and democracy, and not purely an ideological fixation between socialism and capitalism” (Fayemi, 2005:210). Throughout his time in exile in the 1990s, I worked closely with him on numerous projects in NALICON and the United Democratic Front of Nigeria(UDFN) along with several other patriots – the most popular of which was the underground opposition radio – Radio Freedom, later Radio Kudirat.
There is no doubt that I have always shared an ecumenical ideology & kindred spirit with Kongi. His natural spur to resist oppression, instinctive spontaneity to defy authoritarianism, and his impregnable commitment to civil liberty make him a natural inspirational mentor. In both the youthful and sagely Soyinka, there has been a consistent resurgence against brutality & inordinate absolutism. As he often opines, “justice is the first condition of humanity”. His resentment against state terror and abuse of power burns like the inferno of the mythical Hades.
For WS, humanity and its happiness are the tunnels through which he travels his mind in the visualisation of social problems. Anything that denies man his inalienable rights is, for Soyinka, an abhorrent act that must be condemned in the strongest terms. He is predictably obdurate and conscientiously unapologetic for his repetitive fidelity to the triumph of human freedom, the primacy of his liberty and the elevation of his essence as the sole creed that all gods must serve.
His temperament rejects every iota of practices that suborn human happiness. Even in his old age, he continues to prick the conscience of the nation with penetrating homilies that poke a revelatory finger in the nose of public decadence. WS is that bitter remedy that purges a poisoned belly of its troubling constipation. His corrective words are like the surgical knife that cuts out the malignancy of a petulant lesion. He refuses to suffer fools gladly and would rather be misunderstood by people too thick to decode his angst against all governmental decadence.
He is classical in all aspects of his artistry. For some and for his obscurantism, he is the African Homer; some others say he is the ultimate Aristophanes; some even think he is the rebirth of Socrates and not just for the accident of initials, WS is our own William Shakespeare and John Milton rolled into one. He is the agglutination of literary reincarnation of the best that history can recall.
Like his ancestral forebears, WS untiringly rages against the foibles of governmental chieftains and their foreboding delinquencies. He has spoken vehemently against the cowardice of intellectual ambiguity that continues to indulge venal characters in public places. For him, no space must be yielded to the debauchers who gorge the nation’s wealth and fritter its assets in the realisation of their gluttonous hedonism.
Soyinka is impatient with the loud silence that punctuates clear cases that should strike a thunder of mass anger. For him, until the obscurity of silence gives way to the visibility of voices, any unexplained figuration about Nigeria's existence will remain an empty indoctrination that serves the hypocritical cowardice of the nation’s power barons.
Soyinka is a patriot who has used his innate talent to serve humanity at every opportunity. His radical posture has come in handy in dangerous times when only persons of sterner stuff could stand. In 1967, he was imprisoned because of his audacious antagonism to the genocidal assault that the civil war represented. Before then, he had intruded on a radio station in Ibadan in 1965 to frustrate the broadcast of an electoral heist meant to entrench an unpopular government. The “Man” lives in Soyinka like the ageless Olumo Rock. His stout courage, broad repository and undeniable conviction radiate his writing in plays, fiction, poetry, essays and public interventions. He uses the power of words to carry out corrective surgery and as a righting atonement for the transgressed. When he chooses his object for critical scrutiny, he deploys the elegance of humour and the pettiness of satire to disrobe the social psychopaths wherever they might be.
Soyinka is spiritual but not religious, ideological but not bigoted; for, he could not submit his intellect to the whimsical machinations of another being. He acknowledges, as he found out through his teacher, Bonany Dombree, that all spirituality sprouts from the relationship between nature and man and that the quest to create a meaning for its inscrutable foundation gave expression to the concept of deity. Thus, Soyinka’s spirituality is in the primacy of humanity and the pursuit of universal egalitarianism; this, I think, is the basis upon which his ideas of the ideal is anchored. No wonder he remains a respectable voice for human advancement in the global arena.
Even though Professor Soyinka has been an “unsuccessful” politician in the narrow manner success in politics is defined in our clime, his contribution to the political development of Nigeria is undeniable and inspiring. Apart from constantly being in the trenches for the enthronement of democracy and the rule of law, he has floated a political party in the past to advocate a set of political ideas that he believed could provide an alternative answer to Nigeria’s predicament. More importantly, Professor Soyinka has been one of the moral giants who continue to point the nation to the path of rectitude in politics, constitutionalism, justice, equality and good governance. His life has been a watershed and a blessing in every aspect.
I have been a beneficiary of WS’s generosity in innumerable ways for which I owe him a great deal of gratitude, not just for writing a rare Foreword to my 2005 exile memoirs, Out of the Shadows, but also for his unflinching support when I chose the partisan political route. He kept a regular watch on my political journey and was quick to commend my edifying strides in office whilst also upbraiding me whenever he found any untoward development difficult to fathom. He honoured me with the commissioning of the iconic Ekiti Government House in 2014.
At 90, WS reminds me of those unforgettable lines in Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses:
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
On behalf of myself and my wife, Bisi, who adores him, here is wishing our timeless Nobel Laureate, an esteemed mentor and a humanist extraordinaire, a happy 90th birthday. Long live, Eniogun!
Dr. Kayode Fayemi, CON Visiting Professor, School of Global Affairs, King’s College, London July 13, 2024
Happy 90th birthday to the global literary icon and Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka! I join the world in celebrating Africa’s greatest living creative personality and a pride of the black race.
On behalf of my family, the government, and the people of Lagos State, I extend warm felicitations to Nobel Laureate Prof. Oluwole Soyinka on his 90th birthday.
Prof. Soyinka is a literary giant who has excelled across various genres of literature, with his extensive body of work serving as a touchstone in academic spheres worldwide.
He is a source of immense pride for Nigeria, Africa, and the entire black community. A staunch champion of truth, justice, and fairness, Prof. Soyinka has been a vocal advocate for democracy and accountable governance in Africa.
As Prof. Soyinka enters his tenth decade, I offer my best wishes for his continued good health and many more years of dedicated service to Nigeria, Africa, and the world.
May we also continue to draw from his profound wisdom and inspirational leadership.
Celebrating Professor Wole Soyinka on His 90th Birthday
Dear Professor Wole Soyinka,
It is with immense joy and heartfelt admiration that I, on behalf of the people of Ogun State, extend our warmest congratulations to you on the occasion of your 90th birthday.
Your life and career have been a beacon of inspiration, not just for Nigerians but for the entire world. As a Nobel laureate, playwright, poet, and relentless advocate for human rights and justice, your contributions to literature, culture, and social progress are immeasurable. You have consistently used your profound intellect and boundless creativity to challenge the status quo and champion the cause of the oppressed, embodying the very essence of courage and integrity.
Ogun State is immensely proud to call you one of its own. Your achievements and your enduring commitment to the betterment of society continue to inspire generations of writers, scholars, and activists. Your legacy is a testament to the power of words and the impact they can have on shaping a just and equitable world.
As you celebrate this remarkable milestone, we wish you continued good health, joy, and peace. May your days be filled with the same passion and vigour that have characterised your illustrious journey thus far.
Literature laureate Wole Soyinka is known for his plays, poems and novels rooted in his native Nigeria. Soyinka draws upon the Yoruba culture's legends, tales and traditions to make observations about the world.
Happy 90th Birthday to the quintessential, fearless, inimitable, talented, intelligent, inspiring, resilient and revolutionary Prof. Wole Soyinka! #WoleSoyinka90
To truly celebrate Prof Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. And that would be after a Telephone Conversation. The man of Ake, despite all the Trials of Brother Jero, and at a prime age of 90, remains a virile hunter in our Forest of a Thousand Daemons. Neither Death nor the King’s Horseman has stopped The Interpreter from his bountiful Kongi’s Harvest and the Chronicles of his happy life on Earth. Yet, The Man Lives, even in this Season of Anomy.
Photo) Professor Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There are two things from this video that I need to flesh out. These are two things that Wole Soyinka is known for.
1) Onyeka Nwelue asked Professor Soyinka who he should give the thing that he brought to.
Soyinka is a known wine connoisseur. He said he often takes his own wine when going to see Obasanjo because what they serve is rubbish.
2) Soyinka built his house in the forest, away from people. Over time the city has gotten closer to his house. He has a gallery of deities in his house. Most importantly, he is known for going into the forest to hunt.
Many people have written about how they visited Soyinka unanounced and they had to wait because he had gone hunting.
He is known for hunting partridges and guinea fowls.
If you look at the surroundings in the video, you'll know what I mean.
Soyinka - The Village Mourners - A Must-read Bombshell
Nigerians who are old enough will surely recall the source of the above title. For others, I ought to narrate its origin. Fortunately, early this year, I delivered a lecture at the University of Ibadan, where I made a passing reference to the true owners of that copyright. Here is the relevant section:
“At the passing of a short-lived dictator, his successor decreed two weeks of mourning, two weeks during which the nation went into a coma. Even the television and radio stations closed down – nothing but martial and funereal music was played, while churches and mosques took over the abandoned air-waves to drown the nation in suras and canticles of lachrymose outpouring. A very sharp group quickly formed something that was called the National Mourners Association – clever lot! While the nation was quarantined and bogged down in the orgy of lamentation, they were touring the world, sponsored by government, to take the gospel of anguish to every corner of the world that boasted a Nigerian diplomatic mission.”
Yes, that was at the death of General Murtala Mohammed. But now, we turn to address the latest progenies of that association, operating in a different clime and context, but cacophonously enmeshed in variations on that ancient tune.
When that day comes that individuals 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 civilization, 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. Once again we are confronted with the Nigerian phenomenon of the egregious appropriation of what is not on offer and thus, is not subject to dispute. Where frustrated, these claimants reel out chapters from their Book of Imprecations.
Let it be stated here, for the avoidance of doubt, that I am a solid believer in the collective rites of Farewell. I believe in Ritual. Humanity is often assisted to reconcile with loss in a collective, and even spectacular mode. The choice to participate or not, however, belongs to each individual, including even those who arrogate to themselves the mission of imposing on others their own preferred mode of bidding farewell. 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.
I do not pander to the expectations of the sanctimonious. I can absent myself from any event, for reasons that are personal to me. I can absent myself as the result of a mundane domestic situation, as legitimately as from a visceral rejection of occupancy of the same space, at the same time, in the same cause, with certain other participants. I may absent myself for the very reason of my disdain for that breed which is certain to cavil at the very fact of my absence. Such specimens pollute the very space they claim to honour. Sputter and rage they may, but even the most illustrious of that ilk cannot control that choice, neither will they be permitted free passage to encroach upon, and abuse the private spaces of human responsiveness.
I shall speak to them directly: your psychological profile is commonplace. It is not the honour to Chinua that agitates you, no, it is your own self-regarding that seeks to be reflected in the homage to a departed colleague. It does not take a psycho-analyst to recognize this phenomenon of greedy acquisitiveness, even of immaterial products. Like emotional parasites, you feed off others, but you have never learnt to value what others give, or be thereby nourished. I recognize you, atavistic minds – was it not your type that once disseminated an unbelievably primitive accounting for Chinua Achebe’s motor accident? Here goes the story, for those who seek light relief from ponderous unctuousness:
What happened was that I found myself unable to return to Nigeria for a Colloquium in honour of Chinua’s sixtieth birthday. My dramatic mind immediately scrambled for some striking manner of compensation. So I telephoned a business friend who had some agricultural connections in Delta State and told him: find the chunkiest, spotless ram in Delta State – all white or all black, but a thoroughbred of striking physique. Find a leather pouch, tie it to its neck with the following message and deliver it at the venue of the Colloquium. I no longer recall the exact dictated wording, nothing inspirational, just the usual felicitations and injunctions to turn that ram into asun for general feasting.
Those who attended the event will recall the grand entry of the gift - as reported by one and all, including the foreign visitors, and Chinua’s reported reaction, seated on the podium. He shook head and said, “Typical of Wole”. The ram was then led off to meet its destiny at the hands of the gathered. (As a side note, it was I who took a gift away from his seventieth at Bard University – a sobering flash of time past that resulted in my ELEGY FOR A NATION. I had that poem re-published to mark the day of his funeral.)
Our story is only beginning. On the way back from that celebration, Chinua had his accident and was flown to the United Kingdom. At the first opportunity, I made my way there and called up the High Commissioner, Dove-Edwin, who was certain to know the hospital location. It turned out that he also planned a visit that afternoon, and he agreed to give me a ride. We waited – I was joined by two others – waited, and waited, then a phone call came from him that the visit had been called off. The High Commissioner would explain why, on arrival – over a promised dinner, as compensation.
That explanation was this: Dove-Edwin had received communication that some of “Chinua’s people” – a university professor among them, who was named – had pronounced publicly that “Chinua should have known better than to accept a spotless ram from his enemy” – yes, that was the word used – “enemy”. I verified this report from various other sources. Later, an alternative diagnosis surfaced: “Chinua had been too long away from the chieftaincy politics of his hometown, otherwise he would have realized that the title that he took was coveted by some others – and these were deeply steeped in traditional psychic combat”. In short, those rivals “did him in”. Both diagnoses competed for dominance for a while, petering out eventually.
Before the promotion of that alternative cause-and-effect however, Dove-Edwin had re-scheduled, and we had a most bracing, optimistic afternoon with Chinua. Yes, our patient was eventually told the cause of the earlier postponement, and he had a good laugh. On my return to Nigeria, I could not wait to take the opportunity of a public lecture to invite all desperate enemies to please send me their rams of choice – spotless, spotted, piebald, striped or nondescript – so I could treat starving writers to free meals in my home for the rest of the year. And I promised to taste a piece of each ram before serving.
Yes, it is that same breed that continues to sow poison in the minds of the susceptible. Alas for you, it so happens that some of us insist on our own way of commemorating, of being there, even when absent. You, by contrast were never there, however ostentatiously you position yourselves at the event, or at vicarious gatherings to denounce, attribute sinister motivations, and inseminate hate against those whom your pedestrian vision cannot see. Your very loudness proclaims your absence. You were always absent. You will always be absent. So, this communication is not really meant for you but for those potential almajiri – whose minds you corrupt daily with your jeremiads in that accomodating madrassa known as Internet. As a teacher, 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.
You are beyond pity. Kindly absent your selves from my funeral, when that event finally intrudes.
membranus: This shows your level of intelligence. You should have checked my posts before making this comment.
Please don't argue with that guy. You might notice that I have not responded to him. He usually posts nonsense with multiple accounts (he is using two accounts on this thread) and he knows what will happen to him very soon.
He lies so much that nobody cares about his posts and he is simply looking for attention. I don't want you to be caught in the crossfire.
naptu2: The moment of arrest. I'll paraphrase, but try and get the book, "You must set forth at dawn: Memoirs" by Wole Soyinka (Bookcraft, 2006).
Wole Soyinka was on his way to safety, when he realised that some of his followers might not have gotten the message that they should disband and close down their base (in Ibadan). He became worried that some of them might either proceed on some hare-brained action of their own, or get arrested.
He drove back towards the base, saw a young collaborator and got her to act as a courier.
However, there was an armed policeman waiting near the base. Although he arrested Soyinka, he told the professor that he would escort him wherever Soyinka wanted to go, "in case there are urgent things you wish to take care of-sensitive documents and things like that. They will come and search your house, you know. It's the least I can do for you Mr Soyinka."
Literature › Re: Atiku, Sowore, Others Celebrate Wole Soyinka On His 90th Birthday by naptu2(op): 4:45pm On Jul 13, 2024*. Modified: 5:00pm On Jul 13, 2024
