The Open Sore of a Continent

On November 10, 1995, the Nigerian military government under General Sani Abacha executed dissident writer Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other activists, and the international community reacted with outrage. The response was quick, decisive, and nearly unanimous: Nigeria is an outcast in the global village. The events that led up to Saro-Wiwa's execution mark Nigeria's decline from a post-colonial success story to its current military dictatorship, and few writers have been more outspoken in decrying and lamenting this decline than Nobel Prize laureate and Nigerian exile Wole Soyinka. In this volume Soyinka, whose own Nigerian passport was confiscated in 1994, explores the history and future of Nigeria. He explains the shifting dramatis personae of Nigerian history and politics , arguing that "a glance at the mildewed tapestry of the stubbornly unfinished nation edifice" is necessary to explain where Nigeria can go next. In the process of elucidating the Nigerian crisis, Soyinka opens readers to the broader questions of nationhood, identity, and the general state of African culture and politics at the end of the 20th century. He examines the different ways in which a nation can be