I am not a very political person so I found some of this book a little out of interest area. However, I warmed to Wole Soyinka through the course of the book and enjoyed most of his exploits. I learned a lot about the culture of Nigeria.

One of the best memoirs out here. I am more in awe of Wole Soyinka after reading this!!

From the Publisher
In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified his plays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit of Nigeria itself by bringing to life the friends and family who bolstered and inspired him, and by describing the pioneering theater works that defied censure and tradition. Soyinka not only recounts his exile and the terrible reign of General Sani Abacha, but shares vivid memories and playful anecdotes-including his improbable friendship with a prominent Nigerian businessman and the time he smuggled a frozen wildcat into America so that his students could experience a proper Nigerian barbecue. More than a major figure in the world of literature, Wole Soyinka is a courageous voice for human rights, democracy, and freedom. You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an intimate chronicle of his thrilling public life, a meditation on justice and tyranny, and a mesmerizing testament to a ravaged yet hopeful land.

Wole Soyinka's memoirs have left me in an indifferent state. For the most part I felt his statements as too lengthy and wordy, his prose academically and intellectually. The facts from the history of Nigeria, as far as the author was directly involved, are certainly reproduced correctly, but I've never found a real connection to what was happening. Sometimes a little wit flashes through and you can feel the joy in telling stories, and at these points, I also noticed that this author can write, but those parts were way too few.

What also bothered me was the fact that his family got too little attention. His two wives and his children are rarely mentioned and mostly only in passing and I wonder why that is. I had the impression that the author is more interested in presenting himself. Although that's the ultimate reason to write a memoir, I think a little more modesty would have done the book certainly well. I'm sorry to say this, especially because I can subscribe to his political opinions almost 100%, and I am glad that this oppressed country Nigeria, where there was one dictatorship after another, has produced a highly successful and committed writer.

After all, this book has brought Nigeria a little closer to me and I can now see news from that country with different eyes.

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Amazing and hilarious read.

I loved this book - great journey

Definitely learned a lot of history of which I was completely ignorant, but I felt a bit shut out from the person, like the stories he is recounting mean much more to him than to me because I don't see the resonances and emotional reactions are hard to portray in the first person. I would recommend his novel The Interpreters if you want to have access to the literary talent that won the nobel prize.

Wole Soyinka is a Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Much of the book is about Nigerian political history and the author's part in it, but the part I enjoyed the most involved his cross cultural experiences in the USA. On roadkill: "The Chicago experience remained my introduction to the wastrel habit of American drivers after they have been victims of assault by rampaging game. A little more education, and such drivers would know that there was only one explanation for such 'accidents' -- they are a gift from Ogun and should be honored as such, atop a funeral pyre to the accompanying music of popping corks and roasting peppers." p. 289

My inadequate Nigerian History was ready to be substituted as i picked up this book. As i dropped it, my curiosity into other subjects of that history was heightened.

One thing is clear though: the trials of Wole Soyinka are an aspiration that the millennials and centennials have started running too late to meet up with.

Few figures in literary history have taken charge of their national development so bravely, so successfully and with such integrity. Wole Soyinka routinely risks his liberty and his life to oppose the decades-long tapestry of injustice in his home country of Nigeria. He does this while producing a well-respected body of dramatic works, moving and original poetry and seriously dense, generally autobiographical prose. Marvellously, amidst cruelly devised suffering and casualties, he moves away from cynicism and bitterness towards humor and celebration.

Various reviewers have faulted Soyinka’s sometimes challenging syntax and vocabulary, the slow start of the book and his focus on Nigerian politics to the exclusion of detail-sharing about his own personal life. Let’s take these criticisms in reverse order: Certainly, after 500 pages, I know much more about Sani Abacha, Babangida and Obasanjo than I do about Soyinka’s various children who appear very rarely without warning for a paragraph or two and I don’t know a single thing about any of the women that he sleeps with, nearly elopes with, falls in love with or marries. Wole Soyinka doesn’t sell out a single one of his friends, colleagues, lovers or family members to make his narrative spicier or more accessible. Given the exceptional public stature that he enjoys in Nigeria, his silence about other living, younger Nigerians seems appropriate, loving and forgivable. Indeed, judging by the treatment that the majority of Nigerians receive in his memoir, you’d rather not show up on his radar. Thankfully, the intense drama both of his personal struggles and of his (inter)national ones does not need recourse to romance or interpersonal sentimentality.

“You Must Set Forth at Dawn” does get off to a bit of a halting start. I certainly made a few attempts (over nearly a year) before I got hooked and I didn’t get swept away in world-ignoring fascination until the second half. If you aren’t totally out-classed by Soyinka’s learning and his form of self-expression; if your complaint is that he’s moving too slowly or seems to be a bit disorganized (and not that you don’t understand him), do yourself a big favor and stick with this book. I suspect that some of the narrative molasses derives from a sort of traditional structure that Soyinka confers upon his work, hinted at most obviously in the titles of the memoir’s “parts.” I don’t really care how this structure works or what ceremony of invocation, praise, burial or commemoration might underlay it. But I do suspect that something of the kind is active and that its activity does not accelerate matters.

I would be inclined to a bit more critical of pacing and artiface; but I think that it has something to do with how Soyinka makes his memoir simultaneously a testimony to one of his closest friends. Soyinka’s love and appreciation for Femi is touching and humanizing. Indeed the prominence of this unlikely friendship throughout the memoir is a wonderful tool for making Soyinka approachable. Femi, is jovial, practical and seemingly free from Soyinka’s intensely cerebral characteristics and rage. The consistent strand of memorializing Femi throughout the narrative is selfless and beautiful; a wonderful example of how to share narrative space and celebrate friendship. But, I concede, “You Must Set Forth at Dawn” starts slow and stays slow for a little while. Proceed. In all likelihood you will read the last 200 pages in one sitting.

I believe there is also something convoluting Soyinka’s syntax that is persistent enough throughout his prose writings that I have often wondered if it is not a grammatical influence of Yoruba. Soyinka’s sentences sometimes (once every fifty pages or so) seem out of order; their punctuation at first suggesting a way of reading that will not even result in a complete sentence or thought. It doesn’t happen too often; but it happens now and then—often in some of his double barrelled, flights of lyricism. When it comes down to it, Soyinka is good enough at writing, intentional enough, deliberate enough and passionate enough about his communication that I think he deserves the extra effort and attention that some of his passages demand.

Yes, he overwrites. The dramatist and radio personality is evident, happy to be heard and glad to reaffirm his wisdom and authority. Ever since Soyinka first stepped into prose with “The Interpreters” he’s shown that he clearly enjoys the freedom from poetry’s exactitude and relatively minimalist precision that prose offers, but that he’s brought along an intensely poetic insistence on freighting any pronouncement that he really believes in with as much weight, beauty or significance as it can bear—and sometimes more. And he really believes in the vast majority of his pronouncements. He is not an uncertain or indirect writer. It’s fire and steel, something wryly, earthily hilarious, a bit of ozone and oxygen deprivation and then more fire and steel. Though, against that intimidating characterization it must be emphasized, that Soyinka’s infectious and inspiring confidence tempers his assertiveness with an ever-present affirmation of life, of celebration. His love of wine, his willingness to smuggle a frozen civet cat via airplane into Europe for a banquet designed exclusively to cheer up some crestfallen countrymen, his glee at caper and intrigue, his distrust of those who cannot let loose and be wonderfully free, everything of this color and lightness suffuses the book and is one of the things that makes Soyinka exceptional. His is not a head held high out of stubbornness or self-righteousness, bitterness or simple will power. He is masterfully rooted, sure of the world and even of his nation, confident, it seems, that there will be more and more to celebrate and committed to playing his part in bringing about that preferable reality.

Some examples of Soyinka laying it on thick and lovely:

“The military had become enthroned as the new elite, and the level of fawning and jockeying to be merely noticed and smiled upon by any pretender in uniform already spoke of a nation that was loudly pleading to be crushed underfoot. The army was only too willing to oblige, the message ground into public consciousness—of young and old, big man and nonentity—that there was a new overlordship sprung to life in full formation, that the ragged boot of the lowest corporal rested permanently on that rung of the ladder where the hands of the civil engineer, the business tycoon, the university professor, the crowned head, and even the cleric competed for a hold that might eventually haul up the rest of the body one more step.”

“There would come that moment when the mind revolted. I would look around, listen to the conversation around me—a pretentious note, perhaps, a preposterous proposition, an artificial ardor, a comfortable liberalism or armchair radicalism—and the wine would turn flat on my tongue, my mind would go blank, leaving only the rebuke: What are you still doing in this place?”

“It is only natural that a bond should exist among ‘inferior’ beings, a silent but palpable hostility toward overweening superbeings. It has to be this current of sympathy that transmits itself to the potential victim, and the greater the danger, the stronger the current. It is not so much that they speak directly to you, it is a language in their body, eloquent, effortlessly communicated to others with whom they share the bond of this imposed ‘inferior’ status. Since they know what is happening or what is about to happen, they emit a silent wave of despair or anguish, a deep resentment, and a sense of impotence. It flashes past you, and your antenna picks it up—I think that is all there is to it.”

As Soyinka matures and grows stronger, as he becomes more resourced and focused, I had this wonderful feeling that my narrator was rolling up his sleeves with the intent to kick ass and the vicarious thrill was exhilarating. I had never properly studied the complicated history of Nigeria; but learning it on the shoulders of a man who battled to preserve the best of his culture and to excise the various cancers that it (and many other nations) suffer was easily the best way that I have ever learned the history of anything. Unfortunately, I don’t know where in the world to look for another figure like Soyinka, for anyone else that could pull me into the struggles of his country and make me believe in the thrilling wonderful privilege of celebrating a constant fight against injustice.