An excerpt from a speech in June at the New York Public Library in which the great writer Wole Soyinka links the following figures: Harlem’s Father Divine; the Yoruba diety Shango; Mohamed Bouazizi (the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire thus triggering a people’s revolution earlier this year); the now-deposed Ivorian President, Laurent Gbagbo; and finally, Robert Mugabe, who is “still riding it out on his own wall, blotting out the horizon for others with his grossly inflated ego.”

The full lecture here.

Via Bombastic Elements