BREAKING: Tinubu names National Theatre after Soyinka on his 90th birthday 

 

 

President Bola Tinubu has named the National Arts Theatre in Iganmu, Lagos, after Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka.

 

Tinubu announced this in a letter he wrote to celebrate the iconic figure in commemoration of his 90th birthday.

 

The National Theatre, built in 1976 in preparation for the Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, is Nigeria’s primary centre for the performing arts in.

 

The centre was renamed Wole Soyinka Theatre in recognition of the intellectual industry of the Nobel Laureate who turns 90 on July 13.

 

Soyinka, born Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, was born on July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta.

 

 

 

In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England.

 

After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio.

 

He took an active role in Nigeria’s political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule.

 

In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections.

 

In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.

 

Soyinka was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “wide cultural perspective and… poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence.” He became the first sub-Saharan African to win the Prize in literature.