Ake: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1982. Random House. 0394528077. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Bob Silverman.

DESCRIPTION - Already hailed in England as ‘an exhilaratingly glad contribution to the literature of childhood . . . .a marvellously rich and amusing book' (New Society), AkE enchants. It is the brilliantly written autobiography covering the first eleven years in the life of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist and literary critic Wole Soyinka. The time is roughly 1934 to 1944. The place is a sprawling parsonage compound in a small town in western Nigeria. Here an endlessly daydreaming, bookish, inquisitive child lives in a world where Yoruba customs and beliefs are as real as the teachings of the Christian missionaries, a world where daemons and spirits of the forest are as intrusive as Jonah in the belly of the whale. Here is young Soyinka being formed by and responding to his parents: his mother, sometimes tender, sometimes violent, was called ‘Wild Christian' because of her all too fervent faith in the revelations of the Bible; but she was haunted by the passions and traditions of her people. His father, Essay, headmaster of a Christian grammar school, was an intensely argumentative man given to spending whole days and nights sparring verbally with his friend the bookseller. Here is young Soyinka, frightened by the supernatural, learning Yoruba lore from a friendly uncle; slipping in and out of mischief at a British grammar school; being baffled by the ways of adults; strutting his stuff vis-å-vis other children; feeling hurt, persecuted and guilty; and, above all, observing the life around him: Nigerian sights and sounds and succulent meals. He walks off the edge of the world as he had known it, following a police band too far; he reacts movingly to the death of his sister on her very first birthday; he thinks that Bukola, the bookseller's daughter who, because of her fainting spells, is considered abiku - belonging to both the realms of the living and of the dead - is going too far to get her own way; he listens to radio for the first time and daily anticipates the arrival of Hitler; he is intrigued by Paa Adan, a demented old warrior who prowls the streets of AkE, armed with his magical gourd and stick, on the lookout for the Führer; he is caught up in a flurry of excitement serving as a courier in a women's uprising against high taxes. In this loving evocation of vanished innocence, all is so exotic, all is so familiar. ‘AkE is a charming, cheering and almost idyllic book' (Sunday Times of London). About the Author WOLE SOYINKA is professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife, Nigeria. He holds an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and has been accorded major literary prizes in England, including the highly prestigious Thomas Whitting Award. His previous works published in America are, among others, Collected Plays, the memoir The Man Died and the work of criticism Myth, Literature and the African World.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. 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. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with 'the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it'. During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.

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