There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?

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.