Wole Soyinka: Boko Haram must be destroyed

Born in 1934 in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka is the author of more than twenty plays, ten volumes of poetry, two novels, seven collections of essays and five autobiographical works. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was the first black African man to win the prestigious prize

His latest book, Of Africa, is a 200-page polemic that attempts to understand the contradictory nature of African politics. Two important questions that arise from Soyinka’s book are: what is Africa? And what do we understand of its history? Soyinka expends considerable effort in his book discussing how the nihilist nature of fundamentalist Islam is destroying societies in certain African nations: particularly in Somali, Mali, and Nigeria.

In 1967 during the Nigerian civil war, Soyinka was kept in solitary confinement for 22 months for attempting to broker a ceasefire between the eastern and western forces. Even though he was denied access to pen or paper, he improvised writing materials, and smuggled out Idanre