Items

• University news

  The Chancellor of Oxford university, Mr. Harold Macmillan, presided over a congregation yesterday when the degree of Doctor of Letters by Diploma was conferred onto Mr. Leopold Sedar Senghor, president of the Republic of Senegal. Degrees by diploma are conferred only on members of the Royal Family, heads of state and chancellors of the university. President Senghor, a poet and philosophic writer and honorary fellow of St. Antony's College, is the second head of an African state to receive such a degree. The Boden Sanskrit Prize has been awarded to S. P. M. Mackenzie, University College.
• Two Playwrights Win 500 (pounds)

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, and Mr. Tom Stoppard, author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, received the first John Whiting awards on Friday. They were both given a prize of 500 (pounds).
• 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."
• South African wins Booker prize

  The Booker McConnell prize for fiction was awarded last night to J. M. Coetzee for Life and Times of Michael K, published by Secker and Warburg... Mr Coetzee wins the prize of 10,000 and considerable prestige for his political novel about South Africa... Mr Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. Trained as a computer scientist and linguist, he teaches linguistics and American literature at the University of Cape Town.
• Season of African Plays

  Mr. Michael White and the African Music and Drama Trust are to present the I Jinle Company (The Transcription Centre Theatre Workshop) in three African plays, which will be performed in repertory for a season at the Hampstead Theatre Club from June 28. The plays are: The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed, both by Wole Soyinka, which will be performed as a double bill, opening June 28, and The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard, opening on June 30. Wole Soyinka is known in Nigeria and in Britain not only as a dramatic writer, but also as an actor and producer. His earlier play, The Road, a highlight of the Commonwealth Arts Festival last year, recently won the Drama Prize at the Negro Arts Festival in Dakar. The Trials of Brother Jero is a satirical comedy, featuring a cunning prophet (played by Zaikes Mokae), whose brand of Christianity works to his own advantage. The Strong Breed is about a savage New Year ritual and the search for a scapegoat. The leads are played by Femi Euba and Rosetta N'wanzoke.
• 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...
• Picture Gallery

  [Photo with caption] Two writers involved in politics wait to receive honorary degrees at Harvard University: Alan Paton, novelist and leader of the South African Liberal Party, chats with Leopold Sedar Senghor, poet and President of Senegal.
• Nigeria protests grow as president clings to power

  Protesters in Abuja included Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka [photo caption]
• Local election test for Nigerian regime

  Nigerians go to the polls tomorrow in the first test of the military government's declared intention to return the country to civilian rule by October next year. The local multi-party elections take place against a background of renewed focus on the administration's human rights record, following the charging with treason this week of 15 opposition activitists, including Mr Wole Soyinka, the Nobel prize winner...
• 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.
• How is it that things haven't fallen apart

  Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian academic and Nobel Prize-winning author, spoke of belonging to a "wasted generation". Every country has its "lost generation". Some were stolen away by war, some by economic downturns, some by ruthless dictatorship. Nigeria's is perhaps the only one stolen away by too much power and money and leisure and privilege... Hope has to come from the ordinary people. Today, the most outstanding leaders are emerging not from the ranks of the ruling class, but from among ordinary people who have despaired of the government and have decided to create their own path... And yet the irony is that democracy will ultimately work in favour of the ordinary Nigerian and against the politicians who pretend to be true democrats. The genius of democracy is that it is a self-perfecting system. The laws the politicians are now enacting as if in jest, under the assumption that they apply only to the common man and not to them, these same laws are what would work against them the day one good leader decides to enforce them. Then a new era for Nigeria would begin."
• Charges of Forming Illegal W. Nigeria Government: Police Seek Poet

  Following a clash between police and undergraduates at Ibadan University, all students there have been restricted to the campus. They were demonstrating against the outcome of the regional elections. In Lagos market women were dispersed by police with tear gas while on a protest march to the Prime Minister's residence from Mushin, which is the Western Nigerian suburb of the Federal capital. Police in Ibadan toda declared Mr. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and poet who featured in the recent Commonwealth arts festival in Britain, to be a wanted person. They have asked for public cooperation in finding Mr. Soyinka, in connexion with an incident which prevented a message from Mr. Akintola, the regional Premier, being broadcast. It was stated that the recorded message was seized in the studio by an armed man, who took it away. The regional Governor has reappointed Chief Babatunji Oloweku Justice Minister and Attorney General. This is the first portfolio to be allocated so far. Chief Remifani Kayode, Chief Claude Akran, and Chief Adebiyi Adeyi have been reappointed ministers.
• Butler Didn't Do It

  "Clearly the splash event of the week and of the literary season is the Booker prizegiving."
• Awards and Prizes in 1986

  The main literary award winners of 1986 were as follows: the Nobel Prize for Literature...Wole Soyinka of Nigeria; the Booker Prize... Kingsley Amis The Old Devils (Hutchinson); the Prix Goncourt...Michel Host Valet de Nuit (Editions Grasset); the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award...Marguerite Duras The Lover (Collins)...
• Arts Council Awards for Two Playwrights

  Lord Goodman, chairman of the Arts Council, is to present awards of 500 each to two playwrights to-day. Wole Soyinka and Tom Stoppard are the first writers to receive the John Whiting Award, which is given to British or Commonwealth playwrights for a play or plays, either read in script form or seen in production during the year, which show a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing... The 1966-67 award will be made jointly to: Wole Soyinka, for plays published in a volume of "Five Plays" including the following produced in this country for the first time during the year. The lion and the jewel (Royal Court Theatre), and Trials of brother Jero (Hamstead Theatre Club); and Tom Stoppard, for his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstein are dead (National Theatre).
• African Adventurer: The life of a Nigerian maverick makes for a challenging read

  Politically engage young writers are supposed to mellow when they grow old. With experience and recognition, you somehow expect them to become more settled in their chosen craft, less fired-up, more removed from the fray. But not Wole Soyinka. Twenty years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African to do so, he has pitched himself back into the seething politics of Nigeria, "the place I never should have left". [David White reviews Wole Soyinka's autobiographical work.]
• A life in pictures: Wole Soyinka

  The Nigerian Nobel laureate, author, politial activist, and unflinching campaigner against the "oppressive boot" [A collection of photos and captions featuring Wole Soyinka.]
• Viewpoint

  A friend back from Sweden reports that this may be the year of Africa for the Nobel Prize for literature.