"Aké: The Years of Childhood" gives us the story of Soyinka's boyhood before and during World War II in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria called Aké. A relentlessly curious child who loved books and getting into trouble, Soyinka grew up on a parsonage compound, raised by Christian parents and by a grandfather who introduced him to Yoruba spiritual traditions. His...

Ibadan does not pretend to be anything but faction, that much abused genre which attempts to fictionalize facts and events, the proportion of fact to fiction being totally at the discretion of the author. My adoption of the genre stops short of the actual invention of facts or events, however, or the deliberate distortion of the history or character of any known fi...