Items

• Voyage Round Soyinka

  In the article, Anthony Curtis discusses Wole Soyinka as a poet and spokesperson. Curtis writes, "[Soyinka] is able to distance himself from these situations and see them with humorous clarify as well as passionate indignation. Here is a major a writer who has faced two parallel disasters, that of being stultified by a shower of token honours in the west, and at home being put into gaol for subversion."
• Violence Hits Central Johannesburg after Execution of Moloise

  International outrage and violent demonstrations in the centre of Johannesburg followed the execution yesterday in Pretoria of Benjamin Moloise, a black South African poet. The execution - carried out in spite of pleas from around the world for clemency - prompted an angry response from Commonwealth heads of government, meeting in Nassau. Efforts are under way there to draw up a joint policy aimed to end apartheid in South Africa. [Article continues to describe Margaret Thatcher's involvement, and the meeting of the Commonwealth leaders/how they plan to work to end apartheid.]
• The Times Diary: Envoy steps into gap

  "The Malagasy Republic's ambassador in London, Mr. Jules Razafimbahiny, 46, is being called back to help fill the gap caused by the death of the Malagasy Foreign Minister, Dr. Albert Sylla, in an air crash in Madagascar last month. Mr. Razafimbahiny is to become Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, the senior position going to the Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Jacques Rabemananjara, who is also a poet of note and was imprisoned by the French in France following the insurrection of 1947...
• The editor lied

  John Haynes notes that this collection of African Poetry in English emphasizes poets born after 1945 and has a distinguishing factor of featuring "poetry in the shadow of police states."
• Sportsman and Poet

  A statement issued yesterday by Maindy Msimang, administrative officer of the African National Congress in London, said: "News of the attempted murder of Dennis Brutus by the trigger-happy South African police, who are reported to have fired two shots at him at close range, will shock millions of people in South Africa and abroad, who have known him as a former weightlifting champion but also, and more particularly, as a dauntless opponent of racial discrimination in South African sport. A gifted young poet, who recently won the Nigerian award in a competition of African poets, Dennis Brutus has been hounded and persecuted by the South African Government."
• Progress in Nigeria since civil war

  A 10-page Special Report on Nigeria will appear in The Times on Monday. Less than three years since the Biafran secession move collapsed the Nigerian civil war has been largely forgotten. Wole Soyinka, Africa's leading playwright, for whom it remains a vivid memory and who was imprisoned for nearly two years in solitary confinement, talks in the report revealingly about his country and his own future. Peter Hopkirk reports on the mood today among former Biafrans, and Cyprian Ekwensi, the novelist, writes on Africa's "rediscovery" of its cultural heritage.
• Pretoria judge delays hanging

  A three week stay of execution was granted last night to Benjamin Moloise, who was due to be hanged shortly after dawn today for the murder of a black security policeman... Moloise, a poet and upholsterer, aged 30, was convincted in November 1983 of the murder of Warrant Officer Phillip Selope, who was shot in an ambush in a township outside Pretoria a year earlier. The African National Congress has said it ordered the "execution" of the policeman for his part in the arrest of three ANC guerrillas who were later hanged in Pretoria, but that Moloise had no part in it.
• Power of the Pen in Exile: The Times Profile, Breyten Breytenbach

  This profile of Breyten Breytenbach describes his arrest in South Africa, his subsequent release, and his feelings about the South African regime and Afrikaans as a language more generally. "It was at the age of 36, the height of his literary acclaim, that South Africa's leading Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach was imprisoned for seven years for clandestine activities against the apartheid system."
• Police hold playwright

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright and head of the drama department at Ibadan University, has been detained by the federal Government for security reasons. He was arrested after being interrogated by the federal police. Doctors, including Soyinka's personal physician, are quoted as reporting that he was not manhandled by the Nigerian police, as alleged by some foreign newspapers. His wife was allowed to visit him last Friday. News of other writers in the former Eastern Nigeria is obscure, although it is known that the poet Christopher Okigbo, the representative of Cambridge University Press here, was killed in action as an army major. Mr. Soyinka was reported in The Times last week to have been released by the federal authorities after his detention on August 17. Reports reaching London said that he was seriously ill. His arrest on that occasion followed the publication in Nigeria of a letter in which he urged the federal Government to call a truce on hostilities with the secessionist Eastern Region. Mr. Soyinka, who was educated at Leeds University, is the best-known poet, playwright, and novelist in Nigeria. Among his plays performed in Britain are, The Road, The Trials of Brother Jero, and The Lion and the Jewel.
• Poet tells court of 'walled pit' in prison

  Breyten Breytenbach, the award-winning Afrikaans poet, described today how he began to "doubt my sanity" in the total isolation of the "walled pit" of his maximum security cell in Pretoria Central Prison. He was giving evidence for the second day running at the Pretoria Palace of Justice where he is on trial under the Terrorism Act and 17 other charges under the Riotous Assemblies and Prisons Acts. ...He is alleged to have tried to bribe a warden to let him escape. Mr Breytenbach was arrested early in 1975 after he had returned to South Africa after years of self-imposed exile in Paris to organize white activists into bringing about radical change in South Africa.
• Poet fights apartheid with his pen

  Mr Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaans poet, who arrived here on Sunday after being unexpectedly freed from prison in South Africa, said yesterday that he would not continue his political fight against apartheid. "I realize that I am not a politician," he said in an television interview. "But my whole life is against this type of situation, this type of ideology, in my private and professional life, as a poet and painter." Asking if he would continue his struggle through his poems and paintings, Mr Breytenbach said: "Yes, that will be my way." Mr Breytenbach, aged 44, was released on Thursday after serving seven years of a nine-year sentence on charges of plotting to overthrow the South African Government. At his trial he had admitted actively supporting the banned African National Congress. Looking fit and well, Mr Breytenbach said that he had seven years of poetry written in prison which he hoped to prepare for publication.
• Playwright in Search of a Role

  Wole Soyinka has had a knack of getting into political deep water. That is why the writer, who in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature, has spent long periods of his life in exile. Now, at 68, he is in the gradual process of moving back to his home country, fired up with the idea of becoming more active in Nigerian politics...
• Outspoken Man of Letters

  ...Poet, dramatist, novelist, and journalist [Soyinka] personifies Nigeria's fascination with politics and the population's irrepressible urge to speak out on any and every issue... Mr. Soyinka's frankness - some would say arrogance - has landed him in trouble in the past and he was detained by the federal government for two years in 1967 when he tried his hand at resolving civil war and visited secessionist Biafra... Nigeria's Nobel prize winner, one of his compatriots told me, is part of a group of people who act as the conscience of the nation...
• No lies, no half-truths: a writer's cup of bitterness runs over

  The article writes on Wole Soyinka's new book, A Man Died, which was "based on his experiences in and out of prison during the civil war [in Nigeria], and which seems certain to cause General Gowon's Government grave embarassment."
• Nine years jail for Afrikaans poet

  Mr Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaans writer and poet, was today jailed for nine years by the Pretoria Supreme Court for taking part in "terroristic activities." ...Referring to the public apology which Mr Breytenbach made in court yesterday, the judge said he believed his testimony of regret was genuine. He also took into account that Mr Breytenbach's crime--the formation of an organization known as "Atlas" or "Okhela," whose aim was to overthrow the South African Government--never got beyond the discussion stage. However, violence could have resulted from the poet's actions, he said.
• News in Brief: Nigerian Author on Hunger Strike

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and university lecturer, has gone on hunger strike after being held by the police at Ibadan for nearly a week, his lawyer said today. Mr. Soyinka, whose play The Road was staged at the recent Commonwealth Arts Festival in London, gave himself up last Tuesday. A warrant had been issued for his arrest, and the police said they wanted to question him about an illicit broadcast from Ibadan.
• Mr. Wole Soyinka Acquitted

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright and university lecturer, who has been standing trial at Ibadan on a charge of robbery with violence, was acquitted today. Mr. Justice Kayode Eso said there was a material conflict in the evidence of the prosecution witnesses. He was, however, convinced that the incident complained of in the charge really took place. Last October a gunman entered a Radio Nigeria studio in Ibadan, capital of western Nigeria, and attempted to replace the tape of a message from Chief Akintola, the Prime Minister, with his own. Mr. Soyinka said he was not in Ibadan at the time.
• Mr Hain aims for Springboks' Achilles heel

  [Excerpt]: "SUPPORT has snowballed beyond our wildest dreams,' says Peter hain, 19-year-old chairman of the Stop the Seventy Tour Committee formed recently to co-ordinate opposition, to next year's visit to Britain of the South African cricket team but now in the thick of the furore over the current Springbok rugger tour... It was through Denis Brutus, black South African president of SANROC (the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee) that Hain met 22-year old Hugh Geach, a Reading University student in Soil Science who is now honorary secretary of STST. Brutus is one of the few activists now hounding the Springboks with first-hand knowledge of het grim realities of Apartheid..."
• More arrested in South Africa

  Cape Town, Sept 16 -- At least four whites and an African have been detained under the Terrorism Act, in a new wave of arrests by South African security police. The latest arrests are connected with the detention some weeks ago of Breyten Breytenbach, an Afrikaner poet, James Polley, a Cape Town University lecturer, and a number of student leaders.
• Letters to the editor: Nigerian author

  From Mr. Ronald Bryden and others... Sir,-- It has been reported that Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's leading poet and playwright, has been imprisoned for signing a letter to a Nigerian newspaper proposing a truce in the present hostilities. We, the undersigned, are deeply concerned over Mr. Soyinka's predicament. To imprison him merely for suggesting a way out of the present unhappy situation can only do harm to Nigeria both at home and abroad. We therefore appeal to those with the power to do so to release him. Yours faithfully, Ronald Bryden, Andre Deutsch, Dennis Duerden, William Gaskill, Dan Jacobson, Joan Littlewood, Roland Penrose, Kenneth Tynan
• Letter to the Editor: Wole Soyinka

  Wole Soyinka, From Mr. Rex Collings. Sir--You published a report in the Diary some time ago (May 16) that I had received a letter from Wole Soyinka. This letter contained one very disturbing paragraph which at the specific request of the Nigerians who had sent the letter on to me I could not immediately make public. Now I can. This paragraph reads: "Physically not as good as may be expected. Serious eye complaint, no treatment. More than a year asking for treatment--ignored." Last year in a letter dated August 23 Chief Awolowo wrote to me "With reference to your letter dated July 11, 1968, I am reliably informed that Mr. Wole Soyika is alive and in good health." It must be obvious that if Wole's letter to me was accurate then Chief Awolowo was seriously misinformed. In the gaols of the world many political prisoners languish, some in appalling conditions denied all contact with the outsside world, others tortured, humiliated, and forgotten. Protests from outside sometimes make these conditions harsher and it is often difficult to know when to speak and when to keep silent. To plead for compassion and understanding, to ask that the political prisoners in Nigeria should be treated with humanity, is not to take sides in the horrible conflict that is tearing the country apart. A country is judged ultimately by the humanity that it shows in such instances and in its adherence to civilized standards. I am not interested nor are others in getting special treatment for Wole Soyinka. We are interested in trying to ensure that he and others like him should be treated with compassion....
• Jailed writer offered to work for police

  Breyten Breytenbach, the jailed Afrikaans writer, offered to infiltrate the South African Communist Party in exchange for his early release from prison, according to a letter produced during his trial... Mr. Breytenbach, already serving a nine-year prison sentence, is facing 17 charges under the Terrorism, Riotous Assemblies and Prisons Acts. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
• Jailed poet wins South African literary award

  Breyten Breytenbach, the jailed South African writer, has won a literary prize awarded by the pro-government press, for a book of poems written in prison. Mr Breytenbach was sentenced in 1975 to nine years' imprisonment for alleged subversion on behalf of the banned African National Congress. The prize was awarded by the Perskor group which owns Die Transvaler and other Afrikaans newspapers. It is for a collection of poems entitled Voetskrif (Footnote). The prize money of 2,000 rand has been handed over to the poet's brother.
• Ironies of exile: Post-colonial homelessness and the anticlimax of return

  Lewis Nkosi reviews the book The Rift by Hilda Bernstein and comments with his own personal experience on exile in South Africa. Nkosi suggests that "In Africa, too, the moment of modernism is invariably associated with displacement, imprisonment, and exile"; he suggests that leading African writers have been imprisoned and banished in their countries, such as Wole Soyinka, Kofi Awoonor, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nurrudin Farah, and Dambudzo Marechera. Nkosi himself was exiled from South Africa; he writes that "for many South Africans [exile was] the very condition of their existence."
• Clash of values

  This was a sad evening. Outside the Mercury there were a few damp demonstrators with "Free Soyinka" banners: inside, an almost equally small audience turned up for the excruciating British premiere, by the Harmony Cultural Theatre Group, of a piece in which he almost seems to have inscribed his own fat--that of a pilgrim intellectual who returns to expose himself to tribal savagery...