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The Festive Year: Wole Soyinka's Annus Mirabilis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Derek Wright
Derek Wright
Affiliation:
Lecturer in English, Northern Territory University, Darwin, Australia
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Extract

It was in 1960, the year of independence and therefore a time of celebration and festivities in Nigeria, that Wole Soyinka, after just over five years in Britain (three at the University of Leeds and two at the Royal Court Theatre, London), returned to his native land. This was moreover, according to some sources, a period in which he undertook empirical research into festivities of a different kind, which subsequently supplied a specific input into the ritualism of his early plays.

Type
Africana
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 511 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Moore, Gerald, Wole Soyinka (London, 1978 edn.), p. 9.Google Scholar

2 Adedeji, Joel, ‘A Profile of Nigerian Theatre, 1960–1970’, in Nigeria Magazine (Lagos), 107–9, 1971, p. 3.Google Scholar

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8 Esso World Theatre Production, 1963. Ann Dundon discusses the masquerade sequence in ‘Soyinkan Aesthetics in Culture in Transition: an essay on film’, First Ibadan Annual African Literature Conference, 6–10 July 1976, pp. 11–12, kindly supplied by James Gibbs.

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29 Ibid. p. 60.

30 Soyinka, Collected Plays, Vol. I, p. 5.

31 Ogunba, ‘Traditional African Festival Drama’, p. 16.

32 Ogunba, Oyin, ‘The Traditional Content of the Plays of Wole Soyinka’, in African Literature Today (London), 5, 1971, p. 106.Google Scholar