At 90, Wole Soyinka Revisits His Younger, More Optimistic Self

We are living, all of us, in an exhausting world, and the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is not immune. You don’t become as profoundly invested in art and politics as he has been over his long life unless you care to your core about the path that we as a species are charting.

“I’m a fundamentalist of human freedom,” he said one morning last week in Brooklyn. “It’s as elementary as that.”

In the late 1960s, during Nigeria’s civil war, he was held for two years as a political prisoner, having agitated against the conflict. Three decades later, he was charged in absentia with treason, bringing the possibility of a death sentence, but he remained abroad until the dictator who had persecuted him died and was succeeded by a leader who promised reform. In between, cementing Soyinka’s status as a global intellectual, he won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Academy lauding his “vivid, often harrowing” works and their “evocative, poetically intensified diction.”

As his 90th birthday approached last summer, though, he decided to give himself an unusual gift — in reaction to what he called “the double whammy of Ukraine and Gaza,” which made him so pessimistic that his impulse was to withdraw completely.

“I remember going months saying to myself, I don’t want to read any newspapers, I don’t want to watch television news, I just want to get out, stay out and enjoy what it feels like,” he said, sitting in a greenroom at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where Theater for a New Audience is giving his 1958 play “The Swamp Dwellers” its Off Broadway premiere.