But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing.

He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. He produced his new satire The Trials of Brother Jero. In 1973 the National Theatre London commissioned and premiered the play The Bacchae of Euripides.

Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer notable especially as a playwright and poet; he was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature the first person in Africa and the diaspora to be so honoured. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford Harvard and Yale. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.