Wole Soyinka @80

The Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, who turns 80 today, has garnered a great deal of honor in his active life as a man of letters and a statesman. Since the early 1960's when he stepped into the world of action. writing plays, poems and essays on the order of genius and declaring his forcefully impressive gestures in politics of human assertion, he has attracted controversy and validation in equal measures. Not one to do things by half-measures, Soyinka has remained active on all levels. He is a man about whom it is difficult not to speak in superlatives.

Fully dedicated to the cause of humanity in all its complexity and uncertainty, he has always and simply accepted his destiny which he memorably characterized as that of "a lightening rod" in the days before his self-imposed exile from General Sani Abacha regime in Nigeria. 

Here's a man who at the old age of eighty, still strikes as if he is a young sapling, a man fully deserving the encomium that have been pouring out for him in the past several weeks, and more.

At the end of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon hopes for a World of people who are fully humanized and totally dis-alienated.

Without question, Soyinka has fulfilled that hope. Happy Birthday Sir...