A Hunger for Justice

Fat chance. As Soyinka learned even before Nigerian independence arrived in 1960, the first generation of his country's nationalist leaders had far less idealistic notions of what freedom would mean.

"They saw themselves as just stepping into the shoes of the colonial powers," he says. "They were inviting us to finish our studies quickly so as to join them in the ranks of the elite." He realized that his political energy would be needed at home.

Less than six years after independence, Nigeria suffered its first military coup. A year and a half later, the eastern region declared itself the Republic of Biafra. This was followed by a devastating civil war, during which Soyinka -- who had made a clandestine trip to Biafra as part of an effort to head off the conflict -- was arrested by the Nigerian government.

He spent more than two years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement. He kept his sanity, in part, by writing. Some poetry was smuggled out for publication:

Bulletin:

He sleeps well, eats

Well. His doctors note

No damage

Our plastic surgeons tend his public image.

He also wrote a celebrated prison memoir, "The Man Died."

Emerging from prison in the fall of 1969, he taught at Ibadan, where Biodun Jeyifo -- now a professor of English at Cornell -- was his student. By then, Soyinka was a hero to Jeyifo's generation. He was "extremely courageous, dazzling, politically and socially nonconforming but not in a bohemian sense," Jeyifo recalls. "He was saying the things that needed to be said. He was the one around whom the opposition to the dictators centered."

But Soyinka himself was feeling pessimistic and alienated from his country. Before long he went into what he calls "my first -- and only -- spell of voluntary exile."