Fascinating profile of a human rights hero.
The oak-paneled colloquium room at Harvard's Barker Center is too small for the noontime crowd. Another 25 chairs arrive before the speaker does, but with the body count nearing 100, there still aren't enough seats. Several women in the back corner perch on a table, beneath an outsize portrait of a Harvard notable in academic robes, as the 72-year-old winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature strides in.
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Soyinka has a new memoir out this month and before something more urgent seized his attention, he'd been planning to speak about it today. He was going to call his talk "How Not to Write an Autobiography."
Don't start on a negative note, would have been his most important advice. In the late 1990s, as he began his book, he was in exile from his native Nigeria -- forced to flee because he opposed the brutal dictator Sani Abacha. At first, he allowed his rage to take over the narrative.
Not that anyone could blame him for being angry: As long as Abacha remained in power, Soyinka was a marked man. Previous Nigerian dictators might have hesitated to go after a Nobel laureate, but Abacha had shocked the world by hanging writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995, and he was trying Soyinka for treason in absentia. For this dictator, he says, killing off a Nobel laureate would be "like adding a very special scalp to your collection."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/26/AR2006042602572.html
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