Q&A

 

Wole Soyinka became the first black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and is now one of the continent’s most revered authors. But two decades earlier, he was sent to prison without trial for speaking out about the civil war in his native Nigeria. Now aged 90, at his home in Abeokuta, Southwestern Nigeria, Soyinka spoke with CNN about the toll that period of incarceration took on his mind.

 

What did it feel like to go to prison just because you were agitating for what you felt was right? It was a very testing period for me. Twenty-two months in total isolation, denied books, denied paper, my cell constantly searched, nothing at all to sustain my mind. I think one of the most cunning categories of humanity that I’ve ever encountered is the prisoner. The prisoner has to survive. It’s a survival test, not a question of self-advancement. And (in solitary confinement) what is the most space-economic enterprise you could undertake? The mental enterprise, calculations, mathematics. I made my own ink with dirt; I made my own pen from the bones in the meat of my food, creating a complete self-sustaining mental micro-world of my own. It was also a dangerous period for the mind. I remember when I used to hallucinate, so I would leap up and try to destroy those kinds of hallucinatory images that came out. But eventually, I mastered all that period, and after that, I began recollecting those formulae in geometry and trigonometry which I had hated, and I began pulling them back, making calculations on the ground. Believe it or not, I rediscovered the theory of permutations and combinations. Those things I had hated in school became my sustenance.

 

You wrote about those prison years in a memoir which has now been turned into a movie, The Man Died. Have you seen it yet? No. Let me put it this way, turning anything in my life into something other people can watch, pains me. I assisted them in trying to locate a house in which I hid and operated during the civil war. They were looking for something close to one we were using during that period. But it’s not just about me alone, it’s also about a particular period. I might watch it eventually, but not immediately. Even this very interview we’re doing, I won’t watch. It always takes a while to bring myself to watch me.

Full Q&A interview