Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka Biography, Literary Works, and Net Worth

Wole Soyinka, also known as Soyinka Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Hon. FRSL, is an English-language dramatist, novelist, poet, and essayist from Nigeria.He was born on July 13, 1934. He was the first sub-Saharan African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 for “in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence.” In Abeokuta, Soyinka was born into a Yoruba household. In 1954, he registered in Ibadan’s Government College before moving on to University College Ibadan and Leeds University in England. After completing his education in Nigeria and the UK, he worked for the London’s Royal Court Theatre. Later, he wrote dramas that were broadcast on radio and stage in both nations. He actively participated in Nigeria’s political development and the country’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule. He took control of the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio in 1965 and aired a call for the Western Nigeria Regional Elections to be called off. Because he volunteered to act as an independent mediator during the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon imprisoned him and kept him in seclusion for two years.

Wole Soyinka has been a vocal opponent of several Nigerian (and African) regimes over the years, particularly the numerous military dictatorships that have ruled the continent, as well as other political autocracies like the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The oppressive boot and the insignificance of the foot it is worn on have been major themes in much of his work. Soyinka fled Nigeria on a motorcycle using the “NADECO Route” from 1993 to 1998, the General Sani Abacha government. Later, Abacha declared that he had been “in absentia” sentenced to execution. In 1999, when civilian authority was reinstated in Nigeria, Soyinka went back there.

From 1975 to 1999, Wole Soyinka taught comparative literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria (then known as the University of If). He was appointed professor emeritus in 1999, the year Nigeria returned to civilian government. In the United States, he first held the position of Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts at Emory University in 1996 after serving as the Goldwin Smith Professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts at Cornell University from 1988 to 1991. Wole Soyinka has held academic posts at the Institute of African American Affairs at New York University and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is where he is presently an instructor of creative writing. Additionally, he has taught at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford colleges. Additionally, in 2008, Soyinka served as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University.

In December 2017, Wole Soyinka won the “Special Prize” division of the Europe Theatre Prize. This prize is given to an individual who “contributes to the realization of cultural events that promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples.”

Work and life

Wole Soyinka, an Isara dynasty descendant, was born in the metropolis of Abokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, then a British colony, as the second of seven children. Atinuke “Tinu” Aina Soyinka, Femi, Yeside, Omofolabo “Folabo” Ajayi-Soyinka, and Kayode Soyinka were his brothers. Folashade Soyinka, his younger sibling, passed away on her first birthday. Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, his father, was the headmaster of St. Peters School in Abokuta and an Anglican priest who went by the nickname “Essay” or “S.A.” The elder Soyinka had strong ties to his family and was related to Nigeria’s founding patriarch, Samuel Akinsanya, who was the Odemo, or King, of Isara-Remo. Grace Eniola Soyinka (née Jenkins-Harrison), Soyinka’s mother, had a store in the adjacent market and was known as the “Wild Christian.” She participated in the neighborhood women’s movement as a political activist. Also an Anglican, she. As a large portion of the neighborhood practiced the indigenous Yorùbá religion, Soyinka grew up in a eclectic religious environment that combined elements of both traditions. Despite coming from a religious background and growing up participating in the choir, Soyinka eventually came to reject religion for himself. Due to the status of his father, he had access to radio and electricity at home. In his autobiography Aké: The Years of Childhood, he goes into great detail about his upbringing. (1981). His mother was a prominent member of the prominent Ransome-Kuti family. She was the only child of Rev. Canon J. J. Ransome-Kuti’s first daughter, Anne Lape Iyabode Ransome-Kuti, and as such, was a niece of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti as well as Olusegun Azariah Ransome-Kuti and Oludotun Ransome-Kuti. First cousins once removed of Soyinka include the musician Fela Kuti, the human rights activist Beko Ransome-Kuti, the lawmaker Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, and the activist Yemisi Ransome-Kuti. Femi Kuti, Seun Kuti, and Yeni Kuti, all singers, are his second cousins. His younger sibling Femi Soyinka went on to become a doctor and a professor at a university.

Wole Soyinka enrolled at Abeokuta Grammar School in 1940 after finishing St. Peter’s Primary School in Abeokuta, where he won multiple creative composition awards. He was accepted in 1946 by Government College in Ibadan, one of the most prestigious secondary institutions in Nigeria at the time. He started his studies at University College Ibadan (1952–1954), a school connected to the University of London, after completing his course at Government College in 1952. He researched Western history, Greek, and English literature. A British literary expert named Molly Mahood was one of his teachers. Wole Soyinka started working on “Keffi’s Birthday Treat,” a brief radio play for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, in the academic year 1953–54, his second and final at University College. The play was aired in July 1954. The Pyrates Confraternity was the first fraternity in Nigeria and was established by Soyinka and six other students as an anti-corruption and justice-seeking student organization while they were in college.

Later in 1954, Wole Soyinka moved to England, where he completed his studies in English literature at the University of Leeds under the guidance of his mentor Wilson Knight. (1954–57). He encountered many up-and-coming, talented British writers. Soyinka started writing a column on academic life for a satirical magazine called The Eagle before defending his B.A. degree. In this column, he frequently criticized his university classmates.

Initial employment

After receiving an upper second-class diploma, Wole Soyinka continued his studies for an MA while still living in Leeds. He wanted to create new plays that combined Yorùbá traditional heritage with European theatrical traditions. His second significant work, The Lion and the Jewel, a comedy that caught the attention of several actors from London’s Royal Court Theatre, came after his first, The Swamp Dwellers (1958). Soyinka relocated to London and began working as a script reader for the Royal Court Theatre after receiving encouragement. Both of his performances were presented in Ibadan at the same time. They discussed the uncomfortable coexistence of tradition and development in Nigeria.

The Invention, the first of his plays to be staged at the Royal Court Theatre, debuted in 1957. Poems like “The Immigrant” and “My Next Door Neighbor,” which were printed in the Nigerian magazine Black Orpheus, were his only published writings at the time. German academic Ulli Beier, who had been a professor at the University of Ibadan since 1950, established this in 1957.

Wole Soyinka went to Nigeria after receiving a Rockefeller Research Fellowship from University College in Ibadan to study African theater. After the publication of the journal’s fifth issue (in November 1959), Soyinka took over Jahnheinz Jahn’s position as coeditor. The journal’s name, Black Orpheus, was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 essay “Orphée Noir,” which was included as the introduction to Léopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. In April 1960, he staged The Trials of Brother Jero in the dining room of University College Ibadan’s Mellanby Hall. His play A Dance of the Forest, which is a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s political establishment, won a competition to be the official play for Nigerian Independence Day that year. It made its debut in Lagos on October 1, 1960, as Nigeria honored its independence. The play mocks the young country by demonstrating that neither the present nor the past represent a golden era. Soyinka founded the “Nineteen-Sixty Masks,” an amateur performing group, in 1960 as well. He spent a lot of time on it over the following few years.

The first full-length play presented on Nigerian television was written by Wole Soyinka. The play, named My Father’s Burden, debuted on Western Nigeria Television (WNTV) on August 6, 1960. It was directed by Segun Olusola. As the federal government began to take over and control more of Soyinka’s Yorùbá homeland, the “Emergency” in Western Nigeria, Soyinka released works parodying it. After recent post-colonial independence, political unrest turned into a military coup and a civil conflict. (1967–70).

Wole Soyinka acquired a Land Rover with the help of the Rockefeller grant, and he started touring the nation as a scholar for the University College in Ibadan’s Department of English Language. He criticized Leopold Senghor’s Négritude movement at the time in an essay as a sentimental, indiscriminate glorification of the black African past that disregarded the possible advantages of modernization. The quote “A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude, he pounces” is frequently attributed to him. However, Wole Soyinka stated in a 1960 essay for the Horn that “you’ll know him by his elegant leap; the duiker will not paint ‘duiker’ on his beautiful back to proclaim his duikeritude.”He writes in Death and the monarch’s Horsemen, “That king is not yet crowned who will peg an elephant; the elephant trails no tethering-rope.”

Wole Soyinka’s article “Towards a True Theater” was released in December 1962. He started out by instructing in the English Language Department at Obafemi Awolowo University in If. He spoke about current events with “négrophiles” and publicly criticized government censorship on several occasions. His first full-length film, Culture in Transition, was published at the end of 1963. The Interpreters, described as “a complex but also vividly documentary novel,” was released in 1965 by André Deutsch in London.

Wole Soyinka established the Drama Association of Nigeria in December of that year with the help of academics and theater professionals. He also left his academic position in 1964 in protest of the authorities’ forced pro-government behavior. A few months later, in 1965, he was detained for the first time and accused of switching out the tape of a recorded speech by the premier of Western Nigeria with a different tape that contained allegations of election fraud (as he detailed in his 2006 memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn). After being imprisoned for a few months, Soyinka was freed as a result of writer demonstrations around the world. The comedic work Kongi’s Harvest and the drama Before the Blackout were both written by him in the same year. He also created the radio drama The Detainee for the BBC in London. His play The Road had its world debut on September 14, 1965, at the Theatre Royal in London as part of the Commonwealth Arts Festival. He received a promotion at the end of the year to headmaster and senior professor in the University of Lagos’ Department of English Language.

In his political addresses at the time, Wole Soyinka criticized the corruption in government and cult of personality in African dictatorships. His drama Kongi’s Harvest was revived and presented at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in April 1966. The Grand Prix was given to The Road. His drama The Trials of Brother Jero was performed in London’s Hampstead Theatre Club in June 1965, and The Lion and the Jewel was presented there in December 1966.

Civil conflict and incarceration

Wole Soyinka increased his political activism after accepting the position of Chair of Drama at the University of Ibadan. After the military takeover in January 1966, he secretly and officially met with the military governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the southeast town of Enugu in an effort to stop the civil war in Nigeria. (August 1967). He was forced to hide as a consequence. As civil conflict broke out between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the Biafrans, he was detained for 22 months. While imprisoned, he continued to write a sizable corpus of poems and notes critical of the Nigerian government despite being denied access to supplies like books, pens, and paper.

Despite being imprisoned, his drama The Lion and The Jewel was performed in Accra, Ghana, in September 1967. The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed were presented in New York City’s Greenwich Mews Theatre in November of that year. Idanre and Other Poems, a compilation of poems that Soyinka also released, was motivated by his trip to the Yoruba deity Ogun’s temple. He views Ogun as his “companion” deity, kindred spirit, and protector.

Kongi’s Harvest was performed in 1968 by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York.[60] The fantastical book The Forest of a Thousand Demons: A Hunter’s Saga by his countryman D. O. Fagunwa was transcribed into Yoruba by Wole Soyinka while he was still incarcerated.

Release and creation of literature

Wole Soyinka and other political prisoners were released after an amnesty was proclaimed following the end of the civil war in October 1969. Soyinka sought out solitude at a friend’s estate in southern France for the first few months after his release. He revised the Pentheus myth in The Bacchae of Euripides, which he published in 1969. Poems from Prison, a collection of his poetry, was shortly published in London. At the end of the year, he went back to working as Ibadan’s drama chair. In 1970, he simultaneously created the play Kongi’s Harvest and a film with the same name. In June 1970, he finished another piece named Madmen and Specialists. He traveled to the United States to the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where his most recent play had its world premiere, along with the company of 15 actors from the Ibadan University Theatre Art Company. They all gained knowledge of theatrical staging in a different English-speaking nation as a result.

A Shuttle in the Crypt, his collection of poetry, was published in 1971. In that year, Madmen and Specialists was performed in Ibadan. In the Paris performance of his play Murderous Angels, Soyinka traveled there to play Patrice Lumumba, the murdered first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo.

Wole Soyinka started years of voluntary exile in April 1971 after quitting his job at the University of Ibadan out of concern for the political climate in Nigeria. A portion of his well-known play The Dance of the Forests was presented in July in Paris.

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His Collected Plays and book Season of Anomy were both released by Oxford University Press in 1972. The Man Died, a collection of his compelling autobiographical writings from prison, was also released in that year. The University of Leeds conferred on him an Honoris Causa degree in 1973. The Bacchae of Euripides was commissioned and premiered by the National Theatre in London the same year that Camwood on the Leaves and Jero’s Metamorphosis were also first released. Wole Soyinka devoted time on scientific research between 1973 and 1975. He composed Death and the King’s Horseman while a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, from 1973 to 1974. Skip Gates and Dapo Ladimeji attended Churchill College, where the book was first read. He also delivered a number of talks at colleges across Europe.

The second volume of his collected plays was published by Oxford University Press in 1974. In 1975, Wole Soyinka relocated to Accra, the capital of Ghana, and was given the opportunity to become editor of Transition, a magazine. He criticized the “negrophiles” and military governments in Transition in his columns. (such as in his piece “Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition”). He demonstrated against Uganda’s Idi Amin military regime. Soyinka returned to his native Nigeria following the political upheaval there and the overthrow of Gowon’s military government in 1975. He then resumed his duties as Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Ife.

In 1976, he published two collections: Myth, Literature, and the African World, a collection of essays, and the poetry book Ogun Abibiman. Using examples from both European and African literature, Wole Soyinka contrasts and compares the two cultures while examining the beginnings of mysticism in African theatre. He gave a number of guest talks at the University of Ghana in Legon’s Institute of African Studies. His play Death and The King’s Horseman made its debut in Ife in October, while the French version of The Dance of the Forests was presented in Dakar.

His staging of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Opera Wnysi, took place in Ibadan in 1977. He both directed and performed in the 1979 drama The Biko Inquest by Jon Blair and Norman Fenton, which was based on the story of Steve Biko, a student and human rights activist from South Africa who was killed by apartheid police. Aké: The Years of Childhood, written by Wole Soyinka and published in 1981, received the 1983 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

The Guerrilla Unit is a second theatrical company that Wole Soyinka established. Its objective was to collaborate with local communities in the analysis of their issues and to use theatrical sketches to voice some of their complaints. His drama Requiem for a Futurologist received its world premiere at the University of Ife in 1983. One of his musical endeavors, the Unlimited Liability Company, released the long-playing record I Love My Country in July. On this record, several well-known Nigerian artists performed songs by Wole Soyinka. The movie Blues for a Prodigal, which he made in 1984, was shown at the University of Ife. The same year saw the production of his A Play of Giants.

Wole Soyinka was more politically engaged from 1975 to 1984. His managerial responsibilities at the University of Ife included overseeing traffic safety. He denounced the corruption in Shehu Shagari’s freely elected administration. Before being succeeded by army general Muhammadu Buhari, Wole Soyinka regularly disagreed with the military. His 1972 book The Man Died: Prison Notes was outlawed by a Nigerian judge in 1984. Rex Collings released his play Requiem for a Futurologist in London in 1985.

Since 1986

As the first African winner, Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was described as someone “who fashions the drama of existence in a broad cultural perspective and with poetic overtones.” According to Reed Way Dasenbrock, the decision to award Soyinka the Nobel Prize in Literature is “likely to prove quite controversial and thoroughly deserved.” He continues, “It is also the first Nobel Prize awarded to an African writer or to any writer from the ‘new literatures’ in English that have developed in the former colonies of the British Empire. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “This Past Must Address Its Present,” was a tribute to Nelson Mandela, a South African liberation warrior. Wole Soyinka’s speech was a direct attack on apartheid and the policies of racial segregation that the National South African government enforced on the majority. In 1986, he received the Agip Prize for Literature.

Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, a collection of his poems, was released in 1988, and in Nigeria, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, a collection of his essays, was also published. Wole Soyinka took a professorship in African studies and theater at Cornell University the same year. Third novel sarà: A Voyage Around Essay, which was influenced by his father’s intellectual group, was published in 1989. His radio play A Scourge of Hyacinths was broadcast by the BBC African Service in July 1991, and the following year (1992), the Italian city of Siena hosted the world debut of his play From Zia with Love. Both pieces are extremely scathing political caricatures that are based on occasions that occurred in Nigeria in the 1980s. Harvard University conferred an honorary degree on Wole Soyinka in 1993. The following year, Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, another chapter of his memoirs, was published. (A Memoir: 1946–1965). His drama The Beatification of Area Boy was released the following year. He was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in October 1994 for the promotion of African culture, human rights, freedom of speech, and media.

Wole Soyinka escaped from Nigeria to the United States in November 1994 via the Benin-Benin border. The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, his work, was first released in 1996. The General Sani Abacha administration accused him of treachery in 1997. In order to assist writers facing persecution, the International Parliament of Writers (IPW) was founded in 1993. From 1997 to 2000, Wole Soyinka served as the second CEO of the company. A fresh collection of Wole Soyinka’s poems, titled Outsiders, was published in 1999. The same year, a play titled Document of Identity that the BBC had commissioned was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. It was a lightly fictionalized account of the difficulties his daughter’s family encountered while passing through Britain on their way from Nigeria to the US in 1996; her son, Oseoba Airewele, was born in Luton and later became a stateless person.

In 2001, Wole Soyinka’s drama King Baabu, a political satire on African dictatorship, had its world premiere in Lagos. Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, a collection of his poems, was released by Methuen in 2002. His autobiography You Must Set Forth at Dawn was released by Random House in April 2006. His keynote address at the 2006 S.E.A. Write Awards Ceremony in Bangkok was postponed in protest of the Thai military’s effective overthrow of the government.

Wole Soyinka advocated for the cancellation of the violent and widely rigged presidential elections in Nigeria that had taken place two weeks earlier in April 2007. Wole Soyinka questioned the British government’s social logic in allowing every religion to openly proselytize their faith after a Nigerian student who had become radicalized in Britain attempted to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight to the United States. He claimed that it was being abused by religious fundamentalists, turning England into, in his opinion, a cesspool for the breeding of extremism. He endorsed religious freedom but cautioned against the unintended consequences of permitting religions to preach apocalyptic violence.

The International Humanist and Ethical Union and the British Humanist Association held the World Humanist Congress in Oxford in August 2014, where Wole Soyinka gave a recording of his speech titled “From Chibok with Love.” Freedom of opinion and expression: Forging a 21st Century Enlightenment was the theme of the congress. The 2014 International Humanist Award was given to him. At the Institute of African American Affairs at NYU, he held the position of researcher in residence.

In the southern, Christian-dominated region of Nigeria, Wole Soyinka opposes permitting Fulani herdsmen to graze their cattle on open land and thinks that these people should be designated as terrorists so that their freedom of movement can be restricted.

The most difficult year in the country’s history, according to Wole Soyinka, was 2020. He said in December 2020: “With the turbulence that characterized year 2020, and as activities wind down, the atmosphere has been repugnant and very negative. Although I don’t want to sound gloomy, this year in this country was among the most so, and it wasn’t just because of COVID-19. Although there have been other natural catastrophes, how have you managed to cope with them?

The Financial Times called Wole Soyinka’s first book in nearly 50 years, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, “a brutally satirical look at power and corruption in Nigeria, told in the form of a whodunnit involving three university friends.” It is Soyinka’s greatest novel, his retaliation against the sanities of the country’s ruling elite, and one of the most shocking accounts of an African nation in the twenty-first century, according to Ben Okri, who gave the book’s review in The Guardian. It should be read broadly.

Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman, a film adaptation by Biyi Bandele of Wole Soyinka’s stage drama Death And The King’s Horseman from 1975, was launched at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2022 and was co-produced by Netflix and Ebonylife TV. It is the first of Wole Soyinka’s works to be adapted into a feature film, and it had its TIFF debut.

Private existence

Wole Soyinka has gone through three marriages and two divorces. He has two more daughters in addition to the eight offspring from his three marriages. He married the late British author Barbara Dixon, whom he had first encountered at the University of Leeds in the 1950s, in 1958. The mother of his first child, Olaokun, was Barbara. Then came Morenike, his daughter. His second marriage, in 1963, produced two sons, Ilemakin and Moremi, as well as the dead Iyetade and Peyibomi, a Nigerian librarian. Amani is the second child of Soyinka. In 1989, Soyinka wed Folake Doherty. Bojode, Eniara, and Tunlewa are their three boys.

He disclosed his fight with prostate cancer in 2014.

Religion

On Sunday, November 20, 2022, Wole Soyinka made the following remarks about religion during a presentation of his two-volume compilation of essays.

Is a faith really necessary for me? I’ve never believed I need one. I study mythology. I don’t venerate any gods, sorry. However, I view deities as creatively real and as such, as my traveling partners in both the real and imaginative worlds.

Honors and legacy

Dedicated to honoring Professor Wole Soyinka, one of Nigeria and Africa’s most notable and lasting literary icons, the Wole Soyinka Annual Lecture Series was established in 1994. The National Association of Seadogs (Pyrates Confraternity), which Soyinka and six other students established in 1952 at the then University College Ibadan, is in charge of organizing it.

In his honor, an authors’ enclave was constructed in 2011 by the African Heritage Research Library and Cultural Center. It can be found in Nigeria’s Ibadan, Oyo State’s Adeyipo Village, Lagelu Local Government Area. The enclave has a Writer-in-Residence Program that allows authors to remain for two, three, or six months while working on their creative writing professionally. He paid a visit to the Benin Moat in 2013 while serving as a UNESCO delegate in honor of the Nigeria’s Seven Wonders initiative. He is presently serving as a consultant for the Lagos Black Heritage Festival after Lagos State determined that he was the only one capable of explaining to the public the goals and objectives of the Festival. In 2020, he was named a member of Humanists UK.

The collection Crucible of the Ages: Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80, edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah and Ogochwuku Promise, was released in 2014 by Bookcraft in Nigeria and Ayebia Clarke Publishing in the UK. It includes obituaries and contributions from Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Onyeka Nwelue, a Nigerian writer and filmmaker, met Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Harvard and was working on a documentary about Wole Soyinka, according to a tweet from Gates in 2018. A collection of poems named 84 Delicious Bottles of Wine, edited by Onyeka Nwelue and Odega Shawa, was released in honor of Wole Soyinka to celebrate his 84th birthday. Award-winning teen essayist, poet, and writer Adamu Usman Garko was one of the noteworthy contributors.

European Theater Award

In Rome, he was awarded the Special Prize of the 2017 Europe Theatre Prize. According to the Prize organization:

Wole Soyinka, a writer, playwright, and poet who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1986, is given a Special Prize for his ability to build the perfect connection between Europe and Africa through his work. By actively participating in the dialogue between Africa and Europe, touching on ever-more urgent political issues, and bringing richness and beauty to literature, theater, and action in English in Europe and the rest of the world, Wole Soyinka has made a significant contribution to the renewal of African cultural life.

Net Worth

There are about 20 of Soyinka’s writings, which include plays, books, and poetry. When writing in English, he employs an orally intricate and expansive literary style. Wole Soyinka is without a question a crucial component of African literature.

Wole Soyinka is a well-known author who has released a number of books on Amazon and other online book retailers. He is one of the best-selling authors. In 1958, not long after getting his Master’s degree, he started his first career.

A researcher in the English language at the University of Ibadan and an English teacher and researcher at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife were among the many positions he took up after returning to Nigeria.

According to numerous sources, Wole Soyinka’s net worth is believed to be around $2 million. He doesn’t lead an opulent existence because he typically appears in the media wearing just a simple shirt and pants.