A Hunger for Justice

Take his description of the influential Gates, a longtime friend whom he first met while teaching in England in the 1970s: "He was very shy at the time," Soyinka deadpans. "He was not as cocky and impossible as he is today."

Or take his response to a young man's tendentious question, after the talk, about whether race is really just "a construction."

"I was trying to avoid it like mad," Soyinka recalls, grinning. But when the young man brought him a book to sign, he seized the chance to have the last word. "Race is also an act of will," he wrote.

Still, it's that pressing sense of right and wrong that has most shaped Soyinka's path. He has no idea where it comes from. "Sometimes I say it must have been something I ate as a child, when nobody was looking," he says. "Because even I believe it is over-acute."

It's what drove him into a western Nigerian radio studio in 1965 carrying a reel of audiotape and a gun. An election was being stolen, a corrupt politician was about to make a prerecorded victory broadcast, and Soyinka was determined that the opposition's demand should hit the airwaves instead.

Drop your stolen mandate and leave town . . .

He was arrested but got off on a technicality. Four decades later, he's unconflicted about the risk he took. "There was only one line of action," he says.

To read Soyinka's earlier memoir, "Ake: The Years of Childhood," is to remain mystified about the source -- culinary or otherwise -- of his obsession with justice. Yet this evocation of his youth at least offers material for speculation.

Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka seems to have been born asking questions, and with an insatiable drive to experience the world before his time. "I am going to school," he announced when he was not quite 3. Sure enough, he tagged along behind his older sister one morning and talked the teacher into beginning his education early.

His schoolmaster father once told him: "You are not to let anything defeat you." His grandfather told him never to run from a fight. And his aunt, whom he calls "the original feminist," provided an indelible example of how to face down injustice. Soyinka ends "Ake" with the dramatic story of the successful women's revolt she helped lead, during colonial times, against corrupt and unfair taxation.

"It taught me about the power of organizations," he says.

From Nigeria's University College at Ibadan, Soyinka proceeded to England's University of Leeds, where he studied with a prominent Shakespeare critic. He found the British Isles frigid and deeply racist. While beginning his career as a playwright, he also bonded politically with other African students. They dreamed of the end of colonial rule and of the continent-wide assault on South Africa's apartheid regime that they were sure would follow.