A Nobel laureate promotes a “new Africa”

Wole Soyinka, a playwright, poet, novelist, and political activist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, spent a couple of days in February on the Pullman campus.

His visit was in conjunction with the Theater Arts Program’s presentation of his play Death and the King’s Horseman, which examines differences between Western and African cultures. At the core of Soyinka’s work is the idea of a “new Africa,” wherein native myth is joined with contemporary reality and ancient tradition melds with current technology, leading Africa out of its colonial past.