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  • The Atlantic

    A Nigerian Nobel Winner Exits Trump’s America

    “Trump’s wall is already under construction,” Wole Soyinka says. “Walls are built in the mind.”
    by Uri Friedman Jan 17, 2017 4 minutes
    Source: Akintunde Akinleye / Reuters

    Wole Soyinka, the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, once fled to the United States from Nigeria. Now the fickle winds of politics are pushing him in the opposite direction.

    Back in the 1960s, for alleged associations with rebels amid the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War, Soyinka protest poems on toilet paper in solitary confinement. “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny,” Soyinka in the collection of prison notes he later published. In the 1990s, the Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha Soyinka’s passport after the playwright urged Nigerians to stop paying taxes in defiance of military rule in the country. Soyinka of his homelandAbacha sentenced Soyinka to death in absentia. Soyinka’s crime was said to be treason.

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