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

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.