Madmen and Specialists: A Play by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1971. Hill & Wang. 0809067080. 96 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Alice Brickner.
DESCRIPTION - Wole Soyinka's newest full-length play, Madmen and Specialists, is set in the context of war and the aftermath of war. Dr. Bero is a medical specialist who goes to the front as a doctor and there changes professions to become an intelligence specialist. The ' 'madmen' of the play's title are Dr. Bero's father and his followers in the mocking cult of ‘As.' This cult is an ironic expression of horror at his son's venality and at the triumph of expediency and power lust that makes dehumanization possible. ‘As is and the System is its mainstay though it wear a hundred masks and a thousand outward forms.' Madmen and Specialists is a powerful, dramatic statement, perhaps more universal in language and application than any of Soyinka's previous works. According to the author, the play ‘has to do with a problem in my own society, the betrayal of vocation for the attraction of power in one form or another.' An early version of the play was staged in August 1970 during the Playwrights' Workshop Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Waterford, Connecticut. The present version had its premi&re at Ibadan, Nigeria, in March 1971. Earlier plays by Soyinka include A Dance of the Forest, The Strong Breed, the Swamp-Dwellers, The Trials of Brother Jero, The Lion and the Jewel, Cam-wood on the Leaves, Kongi's Harvest, and The Road.
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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