Wole Soyinka to relocate to South Africa

The esteemed Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka is relocating to South Africa. He is expected to join the University of Johannesburg as Distinguished visiting professor.

Soyinka is one of Africa’s most acclaimed voices, and the university hopes he will guide the fraught national debate on “the decolonization and the Africanization of knowledge” in South Africa’s Eurocentric higher education system.

His plays, poems and novels have been the narratives of post-colonial Africa for several generations.

The 83-year-old spent the last 20 years living in the United States as a scholar in residence at New York University’s Institute of African Affairs until Trump won the 2016 election.

“The horror of it all was to see these hundreds of thousands of people in the process of applaud when he outlined his feelings. Then I just said: I do not want to live here,” Soyinka said.

Unable to reconcile with the political direction which the United States took, Soyinka after the election tore his green card and moved from the country.

The professor plans to relocate to South Africa, a country also struggling with the treatment of foreigners especially Africans.