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Wole Soyinka

1.jpg 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 until 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 JewelThe Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, publ. 1963) with its sequel, Jero's Metamorphosis (performed 1974, publ. 1973), A Dance of the ForestsKongi'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'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) and in the long poem, Ogun Abibiman (1976).
Though he considered himself primarily a playwright, Soyinka also wrote novels — The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973) — and several volumes of poetry. He wrote 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

His poetry includes Idanre, and Other Poems (1967) and Poems from Prison (1969; republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972), published together as Early Poems (1998); Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988); and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). His verse is characterized by a precise command of language and a mastery of lyric, dramatic, and meditative poetic forms. He wrote a good deal of Poems from Prison while he was jailed in 1967–69 for speaking out against the war brought on by the attempted secession of Biafra from Nigeria. The Man Died (1972) is his prose account of his arrest and 22-month imprisonment. Soyinka's principal critical work is Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), a collection of essays in which he examines the role of the artist in the light of Yoruba mythology and symbolism. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage (1988) is a work on similar themes of art, culture, and society. He continued to address Africa's ills and Western responsibility in The Open Sore of a Continent (1996) and The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1999).
From 1960 to 1964 Soyinka was coeditor of Black Orpheus, an important literary journal. From 1960 onward he taught literature and drama and headed theatre groups at various Nigerian universities, including those of Ibadan, Ife, and Lagos.
Soyinka was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986. After winning the Nobel Prize, he also was sought after as a lecturer, and many of his lectures were published—notably the Reith Lectures of 2004, as Climate of Fear (2004). In 2005 Soyinka became a member of the Encyclopædia Britannica Editorial Board of Advisors.   

Works of Soyinka published in Hungarian:

  • A fékevesztettség évada (ford. Szentmihályi Szabó Péter, Magvető Kiadó, 1980)
  • Aké: A gyermekkor évei (ford. Garaczi László, utószó: Göncz Árpád, Európa Kiadó, 1987)
  • Drámák (válogatta: Karig Sára, ford.: Garai Gábor et al., Európa Kiadó, 1978)

Chinua Achebe

2.jpgAlbert Chinualumogu Achebe was born the son of Isaiah Okafo, a Christian churchman, and Janet N. Achebe November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria. He married Christie Chinwe Okoli, September 10, 1961, and now has four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi, and Nwando. He attended Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947 and University College in Ibadan from 1948 to 1953. He then received a B.A. from London University in 1953 and studied broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corp. in London in 1956.
Since the 1950's, Nigeria has witnessed "the flourishing of a new literature which has drawn sustenance from both traditional oral literature and from the present and rapidly changing society," writes Margaret Laurence in her book Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists. Thirty years ago Chinua Achebe was one of the founders of this new literature, and over the years many critics have come to consider him the finest of the Nigerian novelists. His achievement, however, has not been limited to his continent. He is considered by many to be one of the best novelists now writing in the English language.
Unlike some African writers struggling for acceptance among contemporary English-language novelists, Achebe has been able to avoid imitating the trends in English literature. Rejecting the European notion "that art should be accountable to no one, and [needs] to justify itself to nobody," as he puts it in his book of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day, Achebe has embraced instead the idea at the heart of the African oral tradition: that "art is, and always was, at the service of man. Our ancestors created their myths and told their stories for a human purpose." For this reason, Achebe believes that "any good story, any good novel, should have a message, should have a purpose."
Achebe's feel for the African context has influenced his aesthetic of the novel as well as the technical aspects of his work. As Bruce King comments in Introduction to Nigerian Literature: "Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into African literature." In an Achebe novel, King notes, "European character study is subordinated to the portrayal of communal life; European economy of form is replaced by an aesthetic appropriate to the rhythms of traditional tribal life."

Chinua Achebe’s works published in Hungarian:
  • Széthulló világ (ford. Béres Mária, Európa Kiadó, 1983)
  • A nép fia (ford. Karig Sára, Magvető Kiadó, 1974)
  • Örökké nyugtalanul (ford. Borbás Mária, Európa Kiadó, 1964)

Ken Saro-Wiwa
(1941-1996)


3.jpg"What Paris is to Balzac, and Dublin is to James Joyce, Dukana is to Ken Saro-Wiwa." Dukana is the all-important semi-mythical town of the Khana people of the Niger Delta, whose governmental administration is called BOLGA (Bori Local Government Area of Rivers State of Nigeria). Ken Saro-Wiwa – born Kenule Benson Tsaro-Wiwa – was born at Bori on 10 October, 1941. Whether a student of the Government College Umuahia (which also produced, in addition to Chinua Achebe and Elechi Amadi, his classmate I.N.C. Aniebo), or at University College Ibadan (which became a full-fledged university only after his second year), he was always proud of his cultural roots, drawing a direct line of descent from ancient Ghana to semi-modern Khana. Although he only emerged as a major writer in his mid-forties with his first three major works--Songs in a Time of War (1985), Sozaboy (1985), and A Forest of Flowers, short stories (1986)--his literary style began to develop over twenty years earlier when he was editor of the Obadan English Department's student magazine The Horizon and the president of its dramatic society.
Though his early goals were for an academic career in drama, his very first publications were in fiction (eg. the short sketch "High Life," which appeared in The Horizon). By the time "High Life" was published (in the anthology Africa in Prose, edited by O.R. Dathorne and Willfried Feuser), history placed itself in the immediate path of Saro-Wiwa's purely academic pursuits and placed him in the midst of the Biafran War, first as the Federal Administrator for Bonny and then as Civil Commisioner in the Rivers State Government (1968-1973).   

Ken Saro-Wiwa then abandoned academia but not his love for the arts. He took part in the Second BBC African Service Competition in October, 1971 and the jury (consisting of Martin Esslin, Lewis Nkosi and Wole Soyinka) awarded him joint fourth place.
Even from the start, language and its use emerged as the heart of Saro-Wiwa's concern. In private accounts, he expressed his censure of some of the best known African novelists and short-story writers. According to him, "their narrative proficiency and their plot construction are rarely matched by an appropriate style." A look at his own prose style reveals the almost total absence of what Femi Osofisan has quite derogatorily called "proverbialisation: the excessive larding of the English narrative with more or less felicitously translated proverbs that reduces the writer's world view to the trado-mythical level and his linguistic universe to the proportions of a museum, if not a prison, thus tying him to the apron strings of his linguistic substratum." Even though other modern African writers (namely Obi Wali, a friend of Saro-Wiwa's) have begun to write in an African language, Saro-Wiwa does not have the resources of a major Nigerian language to fall back upon (apart from a translation of the Bible, there is no other noteworthy literary work written in his native Khana). Therefore, he may tinker with proper name in his own language, for example, "Dukana, “a "market in Khana," but that is as far as his connection to linguistics goes. The rest is an "intense dedication to the medium of English." Ken Saro-Wiwa continues to write, operating on two distinct levels: that of pure English and that of which he calls "rotten English," a local, pidginised Nigerian variety of limited communication.