Do we like Wole Soyinka?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of standing up to dictators and to anti-gay laws, with the only gaps being that nothing turned up on climate and he can be prickly.
Wole Soyinka is the Nigerian playwright and poet who in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also a writer who has paid for his politics. He was held for 27 months without trial after visiting Biafra during the civil war, and wrote about it in The Man Died.
The second act was exile. From 1994 to 1998 he lived abroad as one of the loudest critics of General Sani Abacha's rule, campaigning for a return to democracy. He came home to a triumphant welcome after Abacha died. Most celebrities pick their battles carefully, but this bloke took on a military regime.
On the harm check, the record is good. In a 2019 conversation with Elif Shafak he took aim at Nigeria's anti-gay bill. He asked “What's your business with what happens with consenting adults?” and criticised politicians for imposing their own newly acquired prejudices. I found no campaigning against trans people, women or migrants, and no conspiracy-theory slide. One honest gap: nothing turned up from him on climate.
He backs free expression even when it's unpopular. In 2023 he told Davido he owed no apology after a music video angered some Muslims, saying “No apology is required, none should be offered.” He added that anyone offended was free to boycott Davido's products. Where you land on that depends on how you weigh artistic freedom against religious offence, but it is a free-speech stance rather than a hateful one.
The recent run-in was with Washington. In October 2025 the 91-year-old said his US visa had been revoked, and he linked it to calling Trump a “white version of Idi Amin”. The letter cited new information without saying what it was. He said he wasn't fussed, but that people deserve to be treated decently wherever they are, and he has said he won't reapply. He had already destroyed his green card in 2017 over Trump's first inauguration.
The good stuff is the career and the courage. Beyond the Nobel, he has been honoured with the Royal Society of Literature's Benson Medal, an Anisfield-Wolf lifetime achievement award and a Europe Theatre Prize special prize. Stage productions of his plays were still running in 2026, and Tinubu's birthday tribute credited his opposition to military dictatorship.