From July 2006 on Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the Nobel Prize winning playwright and poet Wole Soyinka (Books by Soyinka), born in Abeokuta, Nigeria (1934). He won a scholarship to England’s University of Leeds, where he studied Shakespeare. While he was in school, he learned that his home country would soon be freed from its colonial rulers, and he couldn’t wait to return home to a newly independent nation. So he was horrified when the new native rulers of Nigeria turned out to be just as corrupt as the colonial rulers had ever been.

In 1965, on the day of an unfair election in Nigeria, Soyinka drove to the local radio station, where they were about to broadcast a prerecorded victory speech by the corrupt new president. Soyinka walked in the front door of the radio station with a gun and a reel of audiotape, and he forced to station managers to play a dissenting broadcast instead. Somehow, he managed to stay out of jail until 1967, when he was thrown in prison.

He spent the next two years in solitary confinement. They would not give him anything to write with, so he made his own ink and wrote on toilet paper and cigarette packages. His prison writings were incredibly popular, and they were eventually collected in Poems from Prison (1969) and The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972).

In time, Soyinka went into exile in England, where he began teaching at Cambridge. It was there that he wrote his play Death and the King’s Horseman (1976).

He’s continued fighting against corruption in Nigeria while writing books. In 1994, he had his passport revoked by Nigerian officials, and had to escape his home country on a twelve-hour motorbike ride over the border. He spent the next several years writing his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn, but he didn’t finish it until he was able to return to Nigeria. The memoir came out this year (2006).

The part that resonated with me:

Wole Soyinka said, “A book if necessary should be a hammer [or] a hand grenade which you detonate under a stagnant way of looking at the world.”

Hammers and Hand Grenades. The name of my EP when I am done recording.