Why I Crossed Over To Biafra To Meet Ojukwu- Woke Soyinka

The life and times of Prof. Wole Soyinka, especially in a piece that attempts to chronicle his acts of bravery, will be incomplete without the familiar story of how he broke into the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation studio in Ibadan during the Western Region’s political crisis in 1965.

Soyinka tersely dismisses the question on that with this:

I had matured into a period of a people on the rise, on the move – people of dignity who refused that their voices should be stolen, arrogantly and contemptuously. There have been quite a few moments of my existence among people like that… I was one of them, my voice was being stolen. I could not sit down and accept that somebody should steal my voice. I felt at one with the majority of the people.”

Wole Soyinka’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War for which he was sent to prison is even a bigger event in his life without which his life history will be incomplete. Hear him:

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“We were more or less a family of artistes at Independence. There was a creative family and that family was being scattered. I was in Stockholm in 1967 for the Scandinavian-African Writers conference. And onethe saddest moments for me was that so many faces were missing from Nigeria – expected but not there: Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara – the Biafrans were missing even in safe Stockholm. The drums of war were no longer muted.

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It was the last chance for us to meet and talk about what was now inevitable but could still, just maybe, be averted at the last moment.

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