Wole Soyinka at 80 and the Quest for the Ori Olokun of Ife

The first African Nobel Laureate in Literature Prof.
Wole Soyinka is 80 years old today, born on July
13, 1934. And this enigmatic and phenomenal
genius is famous for his dare devil exploits
including the one that landed him in jail.
In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria
Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a
demand for the cancellation of the Western
Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the
Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal
government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in
solitary confinement for two years after he
secretly and unofficially met with the military
governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the
Southeastern town of Enugu (August 1967), to try
to avert civil war. Go and read his "The Man
Died" for his prison notes. But his quest for the
return of the classic masterpiece Ori Olokun of Ife
would make a thriller for the movies.
In 1978, Wole Soyinka was made aware of the
existence of a bronze head in a private collection
in Brazil – similar to the disputed one discovered
by the famous German archaeologist Leo
Frobenius (29 June 1873 – 9 August 1938) in
1910, which now stood in the Ife Museum, but of
far greater quality. In his memoir "You Must Set
Forth at Dawn" (2007), Soyinka recalls how, in a
spirit of cultural duty, and with the knowledge of
the Nigerian authorities, he mounted a kind of
guerrilla raid with a group of friends, stealing the
object from the apartment in question in near-
farcical circumstances, and removing it to the
Senegalese capital Dakar, where experts
proclaimed it genuine. Suspicious, however, of the
lightness of the object, Soyinka examined it
further to find the letters “BM” stamped on the
back: it was a British Museum replica, once sold
in the museum’s shop. Soyinka then declared the
British Museum’s head to be the real 'Ori
Olokun", even though it was excavated 18 years
after Frobenius’s original discovery.