Memoir by the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner.

I have not read very far, but the exquisite writing fascinates me. I can see all of the images he paints with his words. My favorite excerpt so far. "Traveler, you must set forth At dawn I promise marvels of the holy hour..."

Just when it seems that the premise of the latest tell-all memoir can't get any thinner, this powerful exemplar of the genre arrives on bookshelves. Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature, delivers a book that is as much a history of a country as it is the story of his life. That Soyinka's story so closely aligns with the history of Nigeria testifies to his ongoing commitment to the cause of democracy, but the focus on politics leaves a few reviewers wishing for more of the personal stories found in Ak_

Biafra 1966 the worst famine in my early memories was a breakaway province of Nigeria with christian communities was the home province of Wole Soyinka. The the peace prize of the german booksellers he had seen his hometown destroyed and Africa behind him as he lived in upstate New York and Frankfurt for the lecture, Biafra is a nightmare.

I might suggest the text as preparatory lecture to princess Okojie-Fritz the lecturer on english on the Edo kingdom of Nigeria, she is a lecturer in communal college and as I am almost biligual, my vocal expression is poor, i still need some practice.

The afternoon I had a call on the blackberry and it is Schiller Schule, Lorch, 900 years of christianity, Heubach, the old silver factory and cathedral market cafeteria and I promise I was invited for conversation.

¿Se puede ser realmente un poeta comprometido con la liberación de su pueblo? ¿Combinar política, literatura, humor, ironía, sarcasmo incluso, con la solidaridad, la diplomacia, el trabajo teatral y comunitario? ¿El Premio Nobel de literatura con el exilio? ¿La poesía con la militancia? Wole Solinya nos muestra en este texto la valentía, la denuncia, las estrategias de resistencia civil, el enfrentamiento con la dictadura, en busca siempre de poder disfrutar de su jardín de cactus. Gracias por ello

Well written memoir by a heroic individual. I struggled with the many individual characters and choppy style though, and ended up skimming and skipping.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn: MEMOIRS, Wole Soyinka 
This is a tome that runs over fifty pages, but then it is Wole Soyinka's memoir. It is worth every page of it.
Soyinka is a literary phenomenon. He boasts the ultimate award in world literature, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African to attain this mean feat. Many other honors are on his mantelpiece too. You name a literary honor, he won it.
He is a prolific writer whose books span novels, drama, and non-fiction.
Soyinka is not only a literary world, he also stood up to the military men in his home country Nigeria who took and maintained power through coups, especially the terrible reign of Sani Abacha.
For his efforts, he was subjected to imprisonment and exile.
The memoir covers his massive literary oeuvre and also takes us through the twists and turns of Nigeria in modern times. It is as much a political history of his country, as it is his memoir. Besides the story of Soyinka in the context of Nigerian history, the book is well-written like all his works of literature.
One of my interesting moments in the book is about the Nobel Prize for Literature. After false alarms about the Nobel award, he is wary of further speculations of it coming his way. In the years it comes his way, he goes about his normal business up to the minute it is announced on television. Even then he is in denial, as it gradually sinks in.
There's more to the book than anecdotes or other pleasantries.
Soyinka only returned home in 1998, at the end of the Abacha regime. He had been in exile for five years. Like other exiles, he was skeptical of the new man Abdulsalami, who was part of the inner sanctum of the past regime. Soyinka and the delegation viewed Abdulsalami's peace broker as rather funny.
Following on from his much-acclaimed childhood memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood, You Must Set Off at Dawn covers his adult years candidly and comprehensively.
In the words of Ken SARO-WIWA, Jnr, "Beyond the intrigue of Nigeria's politics and history, there is still something for the literary aesthete, because when the muse descends and Soyinka flexes his literary wings, the writing soars."
His novels are The Interpreters and Season of Anomy. Besides Ake, Soyinka's expansive non-fiction includes The Man Die: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear, Art, Dialogue and Outrage. From his prolific keyboard came the following plays - The Lion and the Jewel, The Trial of Brother Jero, Death and the King's Horseman, Requiem for a Futurologist, Madmen and Specialists, and many more.
Soyinka is a mean poet too, with the following anthologies to his credit - Poems from Prison, Ogun Abibiman, Mandela's Earth and Other Poems and A Shuttle in the Crypt to mention a few.

A chronicle of the life of a great writer and his struggles

Eye-opening account of life in Nigeria.

"To all the fallen in our common cause,
and to the surviving, scars and all, clamorous or hidden.
. . . . .
To all my stoically resigned children.
. . . . .
And to my wife, Adefolake, who, during the
season of a deadly dictatorship, demoted me
from the designation of Visiting Professor to that
of Visiting Spouse, but was still left with only an
Invisible Spouse as I was swallowed by
my study even during visiting hours."

IBA -- For Those Who Went Before.
. . . . .
Outside myself at moments like this, heading home, I hesitate a moment to check if it is truly a living me. Perhaps I am just a disembodied self usurping my body, strapped into a business-class seat in the plane, being borne to my designated burial ground -- the cactus patch on the grounds of my home in Abeokuta, a mere hour's escape by road from the raucous heart of Lagos.
. . . . .
It must be, of course, the coincidence of the airline that triggers such a somber recollection, in the main -- that final homecoming for Femi was also on a Lufthansa flight.
. . . . .

I most confidently expected him to outlive the rest of us and would often say so. That was careless; I should have remembered the Nigerian killer factor. Simply defined, it is the stressful bane of the mere act of critical thought within a society where power and control remain the playthings of imbeciles, psychopaths, and predators.
. . . . .
One month after the death of Sani Abacha, in the presence of a delegation of US officials -- Thomas Pickering, a former ambassador to Nigeria; Susan Rice, President Bill Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs; and others -- Abiola was served the cup of tea that has now attained legendary status in the nation, for he suffered a seizure minutes after that cup, collapsed, and died.

Had polygamy survived? Maybe it could produce objective criteria for evaluation a social philosophy that contrasted so profoundly with serial polygamy, as practiced in the 'progressive' Western world.
. . . . .
How would one summarize Fela? Merely as a populist would be inadequate. Radical he certainly was, and often simplistically so. Lean as a runner bean, a head that sometimes struck me as a death mask that came to life only onstage or in an argument -- more accurately described as a serial peroration, since he was incapable of a sustained exchange of viewpoints, especially in politics. Only Fela would wax a record according heroic virtues to such an incompatible trio as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea, and oh yes, indeed -- Idi Amin Dad, the terror of Uganda. It was sufficient for my cousin that, at one time or the other, they had all challenged, defied, or ridiculed an imperial power -- any voice raised in denunciation of the murders by Idi Amin or the torture cages of Sekou Toure was the voice of a Western stooge, CIA agent, or imperialist lackey. There were no grays in Fela's politics of black and white.
. . . . .
The simplest way to put this, therefore, is perhaps that death, in those early days, had a sense of proportion -- death knew its place.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers...
. . . . .
Traveller, you must set forth
At dawn
I promise marvels of the holy hour...
. . . . .
"To keep Nigeria one / Justice must be done."
. . . . .
I continued to sweat out that lethal question: What would I have done?
. . . . .
Such dehumanization of the populace did not take place only at checkpoints that were formally manned, but these were the most public places, and their audiences were guaranteed to cover the entire gamut of civil life. Day by day, civil society endured, witnessed, and passed on the message. The uncertainty with which a traveler set out in the morning, deprived of the authority of office and security of the home, was a constant, debilitating companion. It preyed on innocence itself, instilling an irrational fear because of the irrationality of the lords of existence to whom an unintended slur, a gesture adjudged to be lacking in the respect that was due to the wielders of guns and horsewhips, could result in instant, public humiliation or worse.

And it spread and spread, and the culture was imbibed by a prostrate society, one governor and petty administrator striving to outdo the next in sadism. Secretariats were guaranteed regular captive spectators as these were turned into stadia of blood sports masquerading as 'discipline.' And of course, to ensure that the lessons there were driven home, literally, state television and other media would be summoned in advance to capture and disseminate the images -- the spruced-up, ticktock, no-nonsense administrator, enforcing public discipline in set-up scenarios.
. . . . .
It was rather like going to sleep in a familiar room, yet waking up each morning in the wrong neighborhood, a feeling that was undoubtedly aggravated by recollection of those months in solitary, difficult as they sometimes proved, in which one constituted the entirety of his world, undisturbed. I had not thought that the prison regimen could ever lay claim to leaving the inmate with more dignity than victims of the dis'pline in which civil society daily acquiesced.
. . . . .
Interlude to a Friendship
. . . . .
Looking back, it strikes me with some astonishment that, until his death in 1987, one constant, a large presence in the 'extracurricular' undertakings of my adult existence, was Olufemi Babington Johnson. Just who was this being?
. . . . .
Femi's generosity was not limited to tributes to a friend.
. . . . .
Or could he also have taken umbrage at my response when, accused of having 'sold out' to the military, I retorted, quite truthfully, that not even the entire Nigerian nation, with all its wealth, could afford me?
. . . . .
Even in late 2002, the once-democratic constant, Ivory Coast, underwent the once-unthinkable -- a military coup!
. . . . .
It boils down, ultimately, to one's personal confidence in determining the length of spoon with which one dines with the devil and one's ability to keep a firm hold on it. This involves deriving no advantages, no gains, no recompense in the process -- if anything, expending oneself both materially and mentally for the attainment of a fixed and limited goal, retaining one's independence of action. Most delicious of all is the ability to walk away from the dinner table, flinging a coin onto it as a tip for the host.
. . . . .
Dining with the devil remains undeniably a mined board -- prone to misunderstanding, betrayal, public skepticism, getting the fingers nicely toasted, mud all over one's face, and so on.
. . . . .
Nigerians had been brutalized -- deliberately -- by the new culture of public executions, dubbed, with gallows humor, "The Bar Beach Show," after a television show then current. Children were conspicuously present. Eighteenth-century England could not have boasted a more macabre occasion for public roistering.

JP Bekederemo-Clark, poet and playwright, Chinua Achebe, and I, often dubbed the 'elder statesmen' of Nigerian contemporary literature -- would make a publicized personal appeal to Babangida and the Ruling Council for the lives of of the accused, based principally on the plea that the nation had had enough of killings and all future action should be directed a national healing.
. . . . .
[It worked :)
. . . . .
George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said, "I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?"
. . . . .
I was persuaded that competitions in the world of creativity are meant for the young or the early adult, not for the mature, self-cognizant being.
. . . . .
Sacrifice, preferably as a voluntary act, is part of communion.

War and Peace by Tolstoy read like a primer compared to this book. After 50 pages of tiny font, I decided, (which I rarely do), not to waste my time reading any more...Wole Soyinka was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. I had to read every two or three sentences again to get the gist of the material. It is a memoir of the writer. I admire Wole Soyinka as a man, as a fighter of justice, and never-ending ambition for the people of the countries of Africa to be independent from colonization and racial prejudice. I would have really liked to know and understand his story. I just did not have the stamina or growth mindset to continue reading a memoir that did not have to be so difficult to read. I rarely feel illiterate when it comes to reading and understanding novels. This was one of those frustrating experiences. I fully understand a child who does not like to read because books are just too hard to read. I want to just move on and read a plethora of books I have in store at my home that will bring me the love of reading I have developed over the many years I have been living.

One wants to sit with W.S (as he refers to himself in some of the pages of this book) to just talk to him, have a cold beer or something. He oozes humanity in this page turner but above all, it's a history trip. down the many presidents Nigeria has had and Wole's interactions, if any, with them.
It's a book about a person and a nation. Of death. Of love. Bust mostly of struggle for democratic space and for the soul of a nation.

very thought provoking i am wondering if he is where the idea of the father in Temple of my Familiar came from.