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Published: September 28, 2007

“He embodies our university’s mission”

Loyola Marymount awards professorship to man who says, “I don't have the sort of temperament that submits to Christianity…”

The first African to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature has joined the faculty at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles as the President’s Marymount Institute Professor in Residence, according to a university news release.

The Nigerian-born playwright, Wole Soyinka, 73, won his Nobel Prize in 1986. He has published plays, essays, novels, poems, and historical and academic works. Soyinka has taught at Cambridge University in England and Harvard in the United States. For appealing for a cease-fire during the Nigerian civil war, the Nigerian government accused Soyinka of conspiring with the Biafra rebels and arrested him in 1967; he was held as a political prisoner for 22 months. A defender of traditional African religion, Soyinka has been critical of the Catholic Church, in part, for its opposition to abortion.

In a 1997 interview with Isokan Yoruba Magazine, Soyinka spoke on the religion of the Yoruba people. Soyinka’s mother was Catholic, but he had contacts with the Yoruba religion as a boy. He said when he was 11, he “couldn’t believe in the Christian god and for me that meant I was an atheist.” But he found the traditional Yoruba religion different.

“Traditional religion is not only accommodating, it is liberating…whenever a new phenomenon impinged on the consciousness of the Yoruba -- whether a historical event, a technological or scientific encounter -- they do not bring down the barriers -- close the doors,” said Soyinka.

Religions like Christianity, said Soyinka, are not so accommodating. “Until today,” he said, “Catholics do not cope with the experience and the reality of abortion! They just shut the wall firmly against it. They fail to address the real problems of it; they refuse to adjust any of their tenets.”

Unlike Yoruba, which shows its “total self confidence” by accommodating the beliefs of various religious systems, Christianity, said Soyinka, is insecure. “The person who needs to convert others is a creature of total insecurity,” he said. He called Christianity and Islam “elaborate structures superstition.”

In an interview published in the May 5, 2007 British newspaper the Telegraph, Soyinka said he considered himself "fortunate to have attended a university that had what I call a 'pagan professor’...he reinforced the strengths of traditional beliefs at a time when they were under siege from Christianity and Islam, and also by a very false sense of what Western civilisation consists of.

"I don't have the sort of temperament that submits to Christianity or Islam,” he said. Ogun, the god of war and metal and of implacable will and disguises, said Soyinka, “has become a metaphor for my creative existence.”

“Through his words and actions, Mr. Soyinka has transformed the world and embodies our university’s mission,” said Loyola Marymount president, Jesuit Fr. Robert B. Lawton, in a university press release. “It is an honor to have Mr. Soyinka at LMU.”

© California Catholic Daily 2007. All Rights Reserved.