Wole Soyinka. Photo: Eamonn McCabe

When the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka fled Nigeria in 1994, and was sentenced to death in absentia by the military regime of Sani Abacha in 1997, he likened the “liminal but dynamic” state of the writer in exile to a parachutist’s free fall. His limbo was ostensibly ended by Abacha’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1998 and Nigeria’s steps towards democracy. Yet for Soyinka, whose 1970s prison memoir famously proclaimed that “the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny”, there can be no true home without justice.

“I’m still looking forward to a homecoming,” he says, though he now moves freely between Nigeria and the United States – he lives near Los Angeles and since 1997 has been Woodruff professor of the arts at Emory University in Atlanta. “To really feel you’ve come home, you have to have overcome the factors that sent you out. That’s not happened yet – and probably never will in my lifetime.”

Soyinka is 68, and for more than 40 years his most obsessive theme has been “the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it”. The 1986 Nobel prize judges deemed him “one of the finest poetical playwrights to have written in English”. Yet his lifelong critique of power has also been through screen and radio plays, poetry, novels, essays, and autobiography.

Soyinka, who last year threatened to stay away from Britain after “aggressive questioning” from immigration officials, has resumed his visits since he found his entry eased. In public he often wears a woolly hat to disguise his leonine spray of white hair. “I was already notorious before the Nobel, but my constituency enlarged. Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped. It was, and is, hell.”

His exile and death sentence for treason began after Nigeria’s General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the June 1993 presidential elections and imprisoned the apparently victorious opposition candidate, Moshood Abiola. An interim civilian government was overthrown by General Abacha in November 1993, ushering in what Soyinka foresaw as the “worst and most brutal regime” in the country’s history. Its atrocities included the hanging of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. When Soyinka backed a campaign for international sanctions, his passport was confiscated and he was repeatedly prevented from leaving the country. He escaped in November 1994 as a passenger on a 12-hour motorbike ride over the Benin border, “plunging into the forest of daemons on a sputtering two-wheeler”.

While lecturing on the dichotomy between power and freedom Soyinka took consolation in poetry. Samarkand and Other Markets I have Known , his first poetry collection since Mandela’s Earth 14 years ago, was published last month, when Soyinka read from it at Poetry International in London. It ranges from a tribute to Saro-Wiwa to a poem on the al-Qaida bombing of US embassies in east Africa. “Jotting a few lines down when an image strikes you, you can creatively distract yourself from the consuming preoccupation of trying to oust a tenacious monster,” he says.

Such a monster looms in his latest play, King Baabu , also published last month. Known for scabrous satire influenced by Swift and Pope, Soyinka has turned for inspiration to Ubu Roi , Alfred Jarry’s grotesque rendering of Macbeth . It premiered in Lagos last year (before touring to Germany, Switzerland and South Africa) while many of the figures it lampooned were paraded before Nigeria’s human rights committee, set up to investigate violations under Abacha. Yet while Soyinka used episodes from Abacha’s bloody reign to create the tyrannical General Basha Bash, who crowns himself King Baabu, he says the character is a composite of despots, including Uganda’s Idi Amin. “These days, [Zimbabwe's Robert] Mugabe is moving close to occupying the skin of King Baabu,” Soyinka says. “He’s playing the race card in a disgusting way.”

In his preface to Opera Wonyosi (1977), Soyinka’s version of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera which skewered the corrupt Lagos elite of the oil boom years, he wrote that art “should expose, reflect, even magnify the decadent, rotted underbelly of a society that has lost its direction… in the confidence that sooner or later society will recognise itself.” He says, “The problem hadn’t been exhausted dramatically; I wanted to take it to the limits in King Baabu.”

While Chinua Achebe, his Nigerian contemporary, has paid tribute to Soyinka’s “stupendous energy and vitality”, the poet and critic Chinweizu dismissed the Nobel award as the “undesirable honouring the unreadable”. The stab highlights perhaps the most persistent criticisms of Soyinka’s work, even among admirers: grandiloquence and obscurantism. Nadine Gordimer thought his writing could be “overly self-conscious”, offering evidence of unresolved choices. Ben Okri, whose Booker prize-winning novel The Famished Road owes its title to a line in a Soyinka play, said he “deprives us of a great deal of wisdom with the fury of his complexities”. Another Nigerian playwright, Femi Osofisan, was aghast at “frenzied scenes of logorrhoea”.

A past actor as well as director and producer of his own plays, Soyinka has a sonorous eloquence often edged with irony, and a self-dramatising bent. When he made a televised appearance last year at the Nigerian human rights committee, a lawyer implored him to “use simple English that we can understand”. As John Updike once pointed out, Soyinka is widely regarded with awe in Nigeria, and throughout Africa, “both for a political boldness that landed him in prison and for a commanding intellect that is manifest in every genre he tackles”.

Soyinka’s recent poetry condemns religious fundamentalism. In his view, the northern states that have adopted Islamic law, or sharia, are no longer part of Nigeria. “They’ve opted out, seceded, because the constitution does not permit theocracy in a secular federation.” He attacks death sentences for adultery “or pregnancy outside marriage,” such as those against Amina Lawal and Safiya Hussaini – the latter quashed after international outrage. “I cannot belong to a nation which permits such barbarities as stoning to death and amputation – I don’t care what religion it is.” Yet he is adamantly opposed to moves to boycott this month’s Miss World contest in Nigeria as a protest against sharia law sentences, believing this would “play right into the hands of the fundamentalists,” some of whom have also called for a boycott on the grounds that the contest is unIslamic. “I’ve always thought Miss World was idiotic and boring,” Soyinka says. “But it’s the political dimension here; it would be a triumph handed to the zealots. I’ve said if necessary, I’ll go to the contest and escort them on to the stage.”

He adds: “The blatant aggressiveness of theocracies I find distressing, because I grew up when Christians, Muslim and animists lived peacefully together.”

Soyinka was born in Abeokuta in south-west Nigeria, the second of six children. He grew up in an Anglican mission compound, where his father, Samuel, was a school headmaster. He ascribes an absolute self-confidence – which some see as arrogance – to the upbringing magically depicted in his childhood memoir, Aké (1981), and its prequel, Isara: A Voyage Around Essay (1989), which recalled his father’s Yoruba ancestral home. He owes his spirituality to his mother, Grace , “although mine went in a different direction”. Rebelling against his parents’ Christianity, he was drawn to the Yoruba orisa – ancestor or nature worship – of his grandfather, which became a pillar of his art.

After studies in Ibadan, Soyinka came to Leeds University in 1954. He found mentors in the Shakespearean scholar G Wilson Knight and the Marxist critic Arnold Kettle. “I was a socialist, but I couldn’t accept the Marxist interpretation of history,” he says. “It conflicted with the untidy, non-scientific element which is human nature.” He satirised the racism he found in 1950s Britain (“On the bus people would rather stand than take the empty seat beside you”) in a poem, “Telephone Conversation”, where a landlady interrogates a prospective lodger as to how black he is. But his first love was drama, imbibed from Yoruba “total theatre”, with its travelling players,mime, masques, music and dance.

A script reader at London’s Royal Court theatre in 1957-59, his first plays were about the “festering toe” of Africa. He destroyed his first effort: “It didn’t work. My tutor said, ‘Soyinka, Why do you have such purple passages?’ I was inflicting dire tortures on the Boers.” His next, The Invention , was staged at the Royal Court in 1959. “I fed my resentment of the indignities I experienced in Britain into that play and my politics. We dreamt of being part of a liberation army in South Africa.” He wrote more plays in the milieu that nurtured Arnold Wesker, John Osborne and Harold Pinter, “but I realised the problems that would preoccupy me were different. I wanted to explore the mythological resources of my society. I couldn’t wait to get back to Nigeria.”

After a spell down and out in Paris as a cafe singer and guitar player, Soyinka returned to Nigeria in 1960, on a Rockefeller drama scholarship at Ibadan University. He formed his own troupe, Masks, and later the Orisun theatre company. He returned, like others of his generation, “with grandiose ideas about the kind of nation I must assist in building.” Yet he once said he could “smell the reactionary sperm” on the first crop of African leaders. “That was the coming of wisdom,” he says. “I knew we were in serious trouble: they were ostentatious, exhibitionist, profligate; they couldn’t wait to step into the shoes of their departing colonial masters. We realised the struggle had to begin at our own doors – with the enemy within”.

Commissioned to write a play for Nigeria’s independence celebrations in 1960, Soyinka marked the nation’s political stillbirth with A Dance of the Forests, in which a spirit child shuttles between this life and that of the unborn. The play unsettled Nigeria’s ruling class with its subversion of the ideal of a pure, uncontaminated precolonial Africa. “It was to warn against the replacement of external with internal domination,” says Soyinka. “It sprang from an early consciousness that we’re romanticising history when there’s a real problem of power.” While lecturing in the mid-1960s at universities in Ife, Lagos and Ibadan, Soyinka wrote comic crowd-pullers, such as The Trials of Brother Jero, and politically charged tragic dramas, such as The Road and Kongi’s Harvest . He also wrote an existentialist novel, The Interpreters (1965).

Scoffing at Negritude, the francophone movement led by the Senegalese poet and president Leopold Sedar Senghor which advocated a black African identity divorced from European rationalism, Soyinka famously said, “a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude”. He was struck by affinities between the ancient Greek and Yoruba pantheons, and Britain’s National Theatre commissioned an adaptation, The Bacchae of Euripedes (1973). He adopted Ogun, the Promethean Yoruba god of iron, as a creative muse. “Like Sophocles and Euripedes, Soyinka derived a secular poetics and aesthetics from religious mythology, fusing Yoruba and Greek elements into a distinctively African notion of tragedy,” says Malawian critic Mpalive-Hangson Msika, lecturer in English and humanities at Birkbeck College and author of the 1998 book Wole Soyinka (Northcote House). For Msika, Soyinka’s art was a precursor of the “hybridity” proclaimed by postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha. Soyinka drew on O’Neill and Synge, Beckett and Brecht. His refusal to “cut off of any source of knowledge” drew opprobrium from Chinweizu and fellow Nigerian critics in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980). They attacked him as a “Euro-assimilationist” for paying “imitative homage” to the western canon. His “coup” against Negritude had stymied the spread of black consciousness to Britain’s former colonies, they say.

In essays that appear in Art Dialogue and Outrage (1988) Soyinka branded his critics “neo-Tarzanists” for their “puritan vision of an Africa limited to raffia skirts”. He says, “They think anything else is a European affectation – never mind that they wear Italian-cut shoes and that their civil wars are fought with the most sophisticated weapons. I’ve no patience with such phonies.” As for impenetrability: “There’s great variety in my work: some is so winnowed that school children love it.” Soyinka, who in 1968 translated DO Fagunwa’s classic Yoruba novel The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, adds: “I come from a culture which uses language in a very dense way.” For Msika, his plays possess a “necessary difficulty: they use a variety of western and African idioms, but move between them fluidly, without signposting the boundaries between cultures.”

Like his cousin, the late Afrobeat star Fela Kuti, Soyinka seldom shrank from confrontation with the authorities. In 1965 he held up the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation’s western region studios in Ibadan at gunpoint, in protest against an “electoral robbery”. He swapped a tape of a speech by the new premier for one telling him to “get out of town”, and spent three months in detention for this swashbuckling gambit – the climax of his memoir Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (1994). He was acquitted of armed robbery “on a technicality” in a reputedly hilarious trial. The following year the army seized power, and Soyinka spent 27 months of the ensuing civil war of 1967-70 in detention, mostly in solitary confinement, conscious that “an attempt was being made to destroy my mind”. He had led peace missions to secessionist Biafra, but was never charged or put on trial. His poems, smuggled out of prison on toilet paper, were published in London.

After his release, he went in to an “exile of despair”, and in France wrote The Man Died (1972), described by Gordimer as the “most complete work of prison literature ever written in Africa”. The experience also fed his satirical play, Madmen and Specialists (1970), the poems of A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) and the novel Season of Anomy (1973). The Economist deemed Soyinka’s prison writings a failure: “personal, bitter and obsessed by his own fate”. “Obviously some bitterness exists,” Soyinka reflects. “I coined the term ‘wasted generation’ because of the scale of our ambition as young people; we were the renaissance people.” While many see his art as darkening after his imprisonment, for the British poet and playwright Gabriel Gbadamosi, Soyinka’s voice was saved from becoming “bleakly destructive or disillusioned” by his drawing deeply on “Yoruba metaphysics as it confronts ‘tragic’ experience”. This singular vision fuelled Death and the King’s Horseman (1976), which was followed by A Play of Giants (1984), an absurdist satire on Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu and Equatorial Guinea’s Macias Nguema.

Soyinka returned from “voluntary exile” when the general who had jailed him, Yakubu Gowon, was toppled in a coup. He became professor of comparative literature at Ife university from 1975 until retirement in the mid-1980s. Yet he was soon attacking the 1979-83 civilian regime of President Shehu Shagari as an “insatiable robbery consortium”. His “guerrilla theatre” improvised “shot-gun sketches” outside the house of assembly. “Performances were stopped, some actors were arrested or attacked by political thugs.” He also made popular records lampooning the regime’s corruption. His film Blues for a Prodigal (1983), intended as a “call to arms” against the regime, was seized and doctored at its Lagos premier, and Soyinka was put under house arrest for criticising election rigging. Tipped off that there was a price on his head, he fled the country for four months until Shagari was ousted. Later he campaigned for safety on Nigeria’s notorious roads.

Patrick Wilmot, a fellow academic and activist in Nigeria in the 1980s, recalls his friend as an icon for students. “He speaks his mind and he’s willing to stick his neck out and fight; he’s not afraid of anybody.” But while Marxist playwrights, such as Femi Osofisan, were accusing Soyinka of “ideological ambiguity”, feminists in the 1980s found fault with his portrayal of women. For Carole Boyce-Davies, now professor of English and African world studies at Florida International University, his women conformed to three types: “maidens, mistresses and matrons”. He is not a feminist, Msika concedes, “but neither is he a mysogynist. He is a man who respects women, though he also loves women as a source of pleasure, and doesn’t find that offensive. His women are earth mothers; he idealises them as goddesses.”

Soyinka, who once said he had an “over-healthy relationship with women”, is obsessive about privacy. “I hate talking about my personal life. There’s so much of one’s life one lives publicly; when I get home, it’s what I have left.” His first, brief, marriage was to Barbara Skeath, a fellow student at Leeds, who died last year. He would “rather not talk” about his 10-year second marriage, to a Nigerian, Laide Idowu, which ended in the 1960s. His third wife, Folake Doherty, is also Nigerian. His eldest sons from his first marriage are in Britain: Olaokum, a doctor, amd Ilemakin, who makes documentaries. But Soyinka declines with good humour even to number his other progeny. “In our tradition we don’t count our children. In my case the gods have been kind – maybe over-generous.”

Soyinka co-founded the exile group, United Democratic Front of Nigeria, and backed the clandestine pro-democracy Radio Kudirat. His essays The Open Sore of a Continent (1997) were a personal response to the Nigerian predicament, triggered by the execution of Saro-Wiwa, while The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1999) are collected Harvard lectures on justice and reconciliation. “There are so many forces tearing Nigeria apart that I ask myself if it is a nation.”

He turned a savagely satirical eye on Britain in his play Document of Identity (1999), commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and based on the experience of his daughter, an academic forced to flee Nigeria by the threats against her father’s family. En route to the US, she gave birth prematurely in London, but found the newborn trapped in a stateless limbo. Soyinka condemns the “tinge of racism in the immigration policies of many nations.”

The Beatification of Area Boy, a play set in present-day Lagos, premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1995. At rehearsals its director Jude Kelly found Soyinka “very respectful of actors; tough about what he doesn’t agree with, but open.” It played in Leeds the night Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed. “It became a hugely involving, emotional experience,” says Kelly, for whom Soyinka is “still able to write plays that are cathartic – full of warning and pity”.

The reception for King Baabu was more equivocal. Helon Habila, Nigerian winner of last year’s Caine prize for African writing, and writer in residence at the University of East Anglia, attended its glittering premier in Lagos last year. He found the play “too strident and its message over-hammered”, but thought reviewers were inhibited from saying so. In Kelly’s view the “tragedy of Wole’s situation is that, because Nigeria’s been so war-torn, he’s not been able to build a substantive theatre company. Ideally, he’d have a permanent troupe of fine actors who understood the culture from which he’s writing and could transmit both its authenticity and its universality.”

According to Habila, Soyinka is better known in Nigeria as a political activist than a playwright, though he remains an influence on younger writers. “He’s been an example for people because he’s lived what he believes in,” he says.

When Soyinka ended his exile in 1998, he had “no sense of having been away; I’d carried the country in my head.” But, re-visiting his house in Abeokuta, he found soldiers had driven away the caretakers and smashed it up. Even so, it was “marvellous to step on the bit of turf in which I intend to be buried.”

Soyinka, who called the path to democracy a “marathon not a sprint”, and the choice of President Olusegun Obasanjo “not so much an election as a selection”, believes “those who have seized the reins of power are Abacha’s collaborators; if Abacha were to return from the dead, they’d be the first to lick his feet.”

Yet the tyrant’s demise has given Soyinka space to relax. He collects African carvings, bronzes and contemporary paintings and, given the history of plunder from Africa, he confesses to a “vengeful thrill” in repatriating antiquities from the west. Yet his guard is seldom down. “One never completely loses enemies,” he says. He is fighting a libel suit against a former minister in the Shagari cabinet who Soyinka claims vilified him in a magazine.

“The fall of one dictator doesn’t mean it’s over,” says Soyinka. “His cause can still be pursued by his henchmen or their mercenaries – including religious fanatics who consider people like me enemies of their faith”.

Life at a glance

Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka

Born: July 13 1934, Abeokuta, Nigeria.

Education: University College, Ibadan; Leeds University.

Married: Barbara Skeath, Laide Idowu (divorced); Folake Doherty.

Some plays: 1960 A Dance in the Forests; ‘64 The Trials of Brother Jero;’65 The Road; ‘70 Madmen and Specialists; ‘73 The Bacchae; ‘76 Death and the King’s Horseman; ‘77 Opera Wonyosi; ‘84 A Play of Giants; ‘95 The Beatification of Area Boy; ‘99 Document of Identity; ‘01 King Baabu. Some books: 1965 The Interpreters; ‘72 The Man Died, A Shuttle in the Crypt; ‘73 Season of Anomy; ‘76 Myth, Literature and the African World; ‘81 Aké; ‘88 Mandela’s Earth; ‘89 Isara; ‘94 Ibadan; ‘97 The Open Sore of a Continent; ‘99 The Burden of Memory; ‘02 Samarkand.

Honours: 1986 Nobel prize for literature. Commmander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.