Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka Will Give Talk, Attend Book Signing Oct. 30.

Nigerian playwright, poet, and essayist Wole Soyinka, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, will give a lecture on “Cultural Relativism and the Alibis of Faith” 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30, in Colton Chapel.

Earlier that day, he will attend a book signing from 3:30-4:30 p.m. at the College Bookstore in the basement of Farinon College Center.

Free and open to the public, the events are sponsored by the Lyman Coleman Fund under the auspices of the Department of Religious Studies, and supported by the Africana Studies program. Soyinka’s visit is being coordinated by Eric Ziolkowski, professor and head of religious studies.

In conjunction with Soyinka’s upcoming visit, which will include a session with faculty and students, College Theater will present two staged readings of his early play, The Swamp Dwellers, under the direction of playwright Samuel Hay, visiting professor of government and law and one of the leading scholars in black drama in the U.S. The free, public presentations will be given 8 p.m. Oct. 15-16 in the Black Box Theater of the Williams Center for the Arts.

Mathematics major Stephanie N. Dorsey ’04 (Ft. Gordon, Ga.) is serving as director’s assistant for the production. The cast is comprised of English major Tia Kenan ’06 (Union, N.J.) — Alu; mechanical engineering major Tito Anyanwu ’07, Brooklyn, N.Y. – Makuri; Liam Yao ’06 (Bronx, N.Y.) – Beggar; English major Nana Addo Opoku ’05 (Easton, Pa.) – Igwezu; electrical and computer engineering major Verrion Wright ’06 (Brooklyn, N.Y.) – Kadiye; Jhenelle Andrade ’06 (Bronx, N.Y.) – Drummer; government and law major Leah Lamattina ’04 (Massapequa Park, N.Y.) – Servant; and anthropology and sociology major Riley Carr ’04 (Succasunna, N.J.) – Servant.

Chris Valenti ’02, who founded the company Theatrical Associates in his senior year, will act as technical director, lighting designer, and set designer for Swamp Dwellers.

Soyinka was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where he earned a doctorate in 1973. His six years in England included a stint as a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London from 1958-1959.

In 1960, Soyinka was awarded a Rockefeller grant and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded a theatre group, The 1960 Masks, and in 1964, he started the Orisun Theatre Company, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months. Soyinka, who writes in English, has published about 20 works, including plays, novels, and volumes of poetry.

He incorporates in his writing the mythology of his tribe, the Yoruba, with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the center. He wrote his first plays during his time in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel, which were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and published in 1963. He has written two novels, including The Interpreters (1965), in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973), based on the writer’s thoughts during his imprisonment. His poems are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), the long poem Ogun Abibiman (1976), and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988). Soyinka’s highly acclaimed autobiography, Aké: The Years of Childhood, was published by Random House in 1982.