A Hunger for Justice

He accepted the Nobel as a great honor, though he viewed it as not his alone but belonging to "a community of writers" in Africa whose work had been ignored too long.

'Authority and Power'

It was an honor, but also a burden. The Nobel reduced Soyinka's already minimal zone of privacy to almost nothing. Guarding what little remains, he declines to talk about his family at all. Family members are barely mentioned in "You Must Set Forth at Dawn," which carries a dedication to "all my stoically resigned children" along with his third wife, Folake.

Yet the prize, of course, was also an opportunity: It gave him a bigger platform from which to denounce injustice. No one who knew him could have been surprised when he used his 1986 Nobel lecture as a call for action against the "inhuman affront" of apartheid.

Just a few years later, amazingly, that affront was history, and Soyinka found himself invited to what he calls "the most expensive dinner I ever ate" (because he paid his own way to Paris to attend) with a liberated Nelson Mandela.

It was an exhilarating time, but the situation in South Africa remained perilous. Many feared that rivalry between the Mandela-led African National Congress and backers of Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi would lead to civil war. Such a result, in the newly freed nation to which enormous hopes were pinned, would have been "devastating for the continent," Soyinka believed. Alarmed, he volunteered to help arrange a meeting between the feuding parties.

In the end, the standoff was resolved without benefit of what Soyinka jokingly calls his "shuttle diplomacy." Mandela -- who had held back at first because he didn't wish to override objections by ANC colleagues -- set up the meeting on his own when he felt the time was right. For Soyinka, the combination of leadership and restraint exerted by the charismatic South African perfectly illustrates the crucial distinction between authority and power.

Authority is something given to you, he says -- it's "conceded to people in specific situations." But "power is something which you seize." Once you do, "you cannot retreat, because each step takes you farther away from the zone of legitimacy, and in order to survive, you must increase the stakes."

The worst thing about the thirst for power, Soyinka says, is that it seems tied to the need to dominate and humiliate. When he has exercised authority, he has tried to do it "without diminishing or reducing the other person in their self-estimation." Not so the succession of dictatorial regimes that have oppressed Nigeria, or the Janjaweed militia in Darfur. Not so the Americans at Abu Ghraib.

Soyinka is no pacifist. If al-Qaeda had attacked his country on Sept. 11, 2001, he would have wanted it to respond as the United States did in Afghanistan. But he found the invasion of Iraq "totally inexcusable," and he thinks those horrific prison snapshots show power's urge toward domination and humiliation at its sadistic worst.

"You want to record it, so you can maybe look at it afterwards, you know?" he says, voice dropping to an angry whisper. "Send it to your friends to show just how mighty you are."

'An Elder's Status'

During his exile in the 1990s, Soyinka feared he would be killed before he could return home. Unwilling to have "Abacha's triumphant feet galumphing over my body," he instructed friends and family that if the worst happened, he wished to be buried not in Nigeria, but in a Jamaican settlement where earlier exiles from his homeland had found refuge.

With the dictator's sudden death, the question of an alternative burial place became moot. He found himself on a Lufthansa flight to Lagos, accompanied by a tangle of complex emotions.

For one thing, he felt a strange sense of what he calls "deflation" because an earlier, high-stakes plan for his return -- he was to have been smuggled across the border in the hopes of galvanizing opposition to Abacha -- was now unnecessary.

He couldn't stop thinking of friends and colleagues who were no longer alive to welcome him home. "I take friendship very seriously," he says, and indeed, his memoir reads at times like a lament for his closest friend, a bighearted businessman named Femi Johnson, who died before Soyinka's exile began. Most of those to whom he's close are younger now.

He does not sound hopeful about Nigeria's future. Asked what has changed in the decades since independence, he mentions just one positive development: a growth in the political sophistication of his countrymen. "For the rest," he says, whether you're talking about the electricity supply, health care, the environment, "there's an increased sense of planlessness." He thinks Nigeria's oil wealth, much of it siphoned off by corruption, has hurt more than it has helped.

"It makes me furious," he says. "The wealthier we've grown, the worse has been the degradation of society."

Could it be time to stop fighting the apparently inevitable? Early in his memoir, Soyinka quotes a Yoruba saying: "As one approaches an elder's status, one ceases to indulge in battles."

But there's no real chance of his taking this wisdom to heart.

After all, Nigeria's current ruler, Olesegun Obasanjo, looks good only by comparison with Abacha. Obasanjo is seeking to change the constitution -- using what Soyinka calls "bribery" and "open thuggery" -- so he can remain in office for a third term.

Is there an option for a man with an overactive sense of right and wrong?

"For me," Wole Soyinka says, "it is a declaration of war."