Africa Is a Country

Wole Soyinka has opinions about social media

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Wole Soyinka has opinions about social media

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

The novelist and Nobel Prize winner on why he avoids social media entirely, saying he doesn’t tweet, blog, or engage with what he calls today’s increasingly promiscuous digital platforms.

Wole Soyinka giving remarks in Accra, 2014. Image credit Paul Kagame via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The Nobel laureate—despite granting interviews to blogs and having work published on sites like Sahara Reporters—fundamentally despises all forms of social media, as he tells the Nigerian diaspora website, Sahara Reporters:

“… Let me take this opportunity to announce yet again that I do not tweet, blog or whatever goes on in this increasingly promiscuous medium. I do not run a Facebook, even though I am aware that one or two serious-minded individuals/groups have instituted some such forum on their own, for the purpose of disseminating factual information on my activities. I neither contribute to, nor comment on the contents of their calendar … To speak generally, Internet abuse is getting to be a universal plague, one that goes beyond personal embarrassment and umbrage. I strongly recommend collective, professional action to protect the integrity of the medium, and save it from becoming a mere vomitorium for unprincipled scallywags with, or even with no particular axe to grind.”

 

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.