The Books Blog has an interview with Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Soyinka is worth listening to for his ambivalence towards nationalism, his tolerant secularism and his recollection of solitary confinement during Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s. But his comments on Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group that is terrorising northern and central Nigeria, are worth quoting here on a weekend of bloodshed in the Middle East.
‘I look at Boko Haram not just as a terrorist group, but also as a criminal gang, and a bunch of psychopaths. You don’t enter into dialogue with drug lords and criminals. It might be possible, for example, to enter into dialogue with an organization like MEND, in the Niger Delta — even though I disapproved of the blanket nature of their ideology.
Boko Haram is a violent machine, created by people who are out of control.
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