But for a stroke of luck, Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, would have been among the many useless within the terror assault that befell on the Nairobi Westgate mall in Kenya final weekend.
Speaking at a press convention on the Freedom Park, Victoria Island, Lagos, on Friday in honour of the late Ghanaian poet, Professor Kofi Awoonor who died within the assault, Soyinka led a bunch of eminent Nigerian writers to sentence the Nairobi bloodbath. Soyinka, who acknowledged.he, like Awoonor, was invited to the Storymoja/ Hay Literature Festival, acknowledged.he couldn’t attend due to different urgent engagements he had elsewhere.
“My absence was notably regrettable, as a result of I had deliberate to make up for my failure to show up for the fast prior version. Participant or absentee nevertheless, that is one version we will not quickly overlook,” acknowledged.Soyinka.
The iconic author mentioned, contemplating his shut relationship with Awoonor, he may need been on the identical place with him and will have been shot as nicely. He mentioned: “Kofi and I could have been splitting a bottle at that same watering hole in between events and at the end of each day.”
Condemning the usage of faith to commit atrocities, Soyinka, who spoke on the theme, “Humanity and Against,” mentioned: “Those who organised and carried out the outrage on innocent lives in Nairobi are carriers of the most lethal virus of corruption imaginable – corruption of the soul, corruption of the spirit, corruption of that animating humanistic essence that separates us from predatory beasts. I am no theologian of any religion, but I aver that these assailants delude themselves with vistas of paradise after life, that their delusion is born of the perverted reading of salvation and redemption.”
As the literary neighborhood mourned the deceased author, Soyinka felt constrained to denounce his killers, who he described as “the virulent sub-species of humanity who bathe their hands in innocent blood.”
He famous additional: “Only cowards turn deadly weapons against the unarmed, only the depraved glorify in, or justify the act. True warriors do not wage wars against the innocent. Profanity is the name given to the defilement of the sanctity of human life. We call on those who claim to exercise the authority of a fatwa to pronounce that very doom, with all its moral weight, upon those who engage in this serial violation of the right to life, life as a god-given possession that only the blasphemous dare contradict, and the godless wantonly curtail. This scalp that they have added to their collection was roof to a unique brain that a million of their kind can never replace.”
Lending his voice to the condemnation of the homicide of Awoonor, famend playwright, Professor JP Clark, acknowledged.the late Ghanaian author got here throughout as a non-conformist throughout his encounter with him at a pan Africa literary convention in Kampala, Ugunda, in 1962.
Saddened by his dying, Clark mentioned: “I was in a state of shock to hear that Kofi Awoonor could go like that by random bullets in a country far off. It really shows the absurdity of life.” He suggested all to do the very best they will whereas alive.