₦airaland Forum

Atiku Abubakar @atiku

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.

Happy birthday and congratulations, Sir. -AA

Omoyele Sowore @YeleSowore

Happy 90th Birthday to the quintessential, fearless, inimitable, talented, intelligent, inspiring, resilient and revolutionary Prof. Wole Soyinka! #WoleSoyinka90

The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize

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.

Prince Dr. Dapo Abiodun CON @DapoAbiodunCON

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.

Happy 90th birthday, Professor Wole Soyinka!

Babajide Sanwo-Olu @jidesanwoolu

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.

Kingsley Moghalu @MoghaluKingsley

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.

Kayode Fayemi @kfayemi

TRIBUTE TO WOLE SOYINKA AT 90


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

Atiku don turn poet

How can u not celebrate our own WS

He's among the top 5 greatest Nigerian ever

Alongside that Moroccan Academy, the whole world celebrates him aside one inconsequential region in Nigeria

Just noticing how Handsome WS is

Man would easily pass for a poster boy of a top magazine in the U.S

Not even his hairline recedes at that age

Man is the last of its kind. He's almost without no blemish

Nice one from them

Happy birthday Professor Wole Soyinka.

Professor gbajue

Ah, see Atiku the showmaker, dey celebrate person wey pass him age, na wa o.

HBD WS.

But Baba fall my hand by speaking out against GEJ but became silent under the present Tinubulation.

US Mission Nigeria @USinNigeria

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? 

#HappyBirthday

He was smoking before but quit........ Now drinking 🤣🤣🤣🤣

........... Snoop Dogg 😂😂😂

Na only sir gbajue no greet the great Nobel laureate.... Na obidients dey dictate for sir gbajue....

Ino call anybody name oh.... Una mentor na sir gbajue?

Happy Birthday papa!

Thank you gbo gbo le

May he age with grace

The Agulu repackaged fraud will not dare salute Professor Wole Soyinka because the nuisance is afraid of his headless brainless mob.

THIS MAN IS THE MOST HYPOCRITICAL NIGERIAN MAN I'VE EVER SEEN IN LIFE.


FROM RIGHT ACTIVIST TO APC SUPPORTERS CLUB MEMBER.

TUFIAA!

Criminals can celebrate criminals. Elders that only know how to close road for their children so that it will look like they are wise.

The APC professor!


Live long, prof.

Does this one look like a responsible person? A person taking indian hemp publicly at that time people had some level morals unlike now? But since white man gave him award he is now special. Black man and inferiority complex.

Ha Birthday from PO

Our only Noble laureate...omore bi iyan

Happy Birthday KONGI

Ninety years no be gbajue oh, happy birthday great one.

Peter Obi nko

Baba has lived a fulfilled life.