You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir
by Wole Soyinka
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A memoir by Africa's first Nobel laureate for literature continues the story that began in his childhood autobiography "Ake?" as Soyinka describes the adventures and mishaps of his adulthood, including his frequent exile from his homeland, his celebratedliterary work, and his advocacy for political and human rights.Tags
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Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka has written plays, poems and novels steeped in what Nigerian tradition there is and that of his own Yoruba people. Since he first rose to prominence in the early 1960s he has been centrally involved in the complex and dangerous world of Nigerian politics, which has led on occasion to both imprisonment and forced exile.
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is his third volume of memoirs, if his powerful 1972 prison notebook The Man Died is included as well as his 1981 childhood reminiscences, Aké the Years of Childhood.
Soyinka is an engaged writer, who is at the centre of all the stories he tells. Occasionally in a book that stretches to nearly 600 pages that leads to self-indulgence, and he is not one to show more avoid florid writing. However he is always an insightful commentator on Nigeria and it is undoubtedly true that he has often been near the centre of events…
He returned from studying abroad to travel around Nigeria researching traditional drama, and was amazed at the national borders colonialism had established, “Culture and language differed within each nation as frequently and profoundly as they found identities across the borders of such nation spaces; the arbitrariness and illogicality of their groupings hit any traveller in the face.”…
The expansion of his own political engagement, such as the symbolic stealing of a presidential speech, matches the descent of Nigeria into military dictatorship and the brutal Biafran war. Writing about the crazed logic of bureaucracy under military dictatorship, or the corruption of the anti-corruption soldiers gives a convincing feel of the times. This atmosphere is the book’s real strength…
His narrative can be frustrating and occasionally infuriating as it weaves poetically around his life, structured for the best punch line rather than clarity. But, in the end it tells you something about the history of Nigeria and modern Africa. It is anecdotal rather than historical, but it never claims otherwise.
Socialist Review, Issue 316, July 2007 https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/you-must-set-forth-dawn/ show less
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is his third volume of memoirs, if his powerful 1972 prison notebook The Man Died is included as well as his 1981 childhood reminiscences, Aké the Years of Childhood.
Soyinka is an engaged writer, who is at the centre of all the stories he tells. Occasionally in a book that stretches to nearly 600 pages that leads to self-indulgence, and he is not one to show more avoid florid writing. However he is always an insightful commentator on Nigeria and it is undoubtedly true that he has often been near the centre of events…
He returned from studying abroad to travel around Nigeria researching traditional drama, and was amazed at the national borders colonialism had established, “Culture and language differed within each nation as frequently and profoundly as they found identities across the borders of such nation spaces; the arbitrariness and illogicality of their groupings hit any traveller in the face.”…
The expansion of his own political engagement, such as the symbolic stealing of a presidential speech, matches the descent of Nigeria into military dictatorship and the brutal Biafran war. Writing about the crazed logic of bureaucracy under military dictatorship, or the corruption of the anti-corruption soldiers gives a convincing feel of the times. This atmosphere is the book’s real strength…
His narrative can be frustrating and occasionally infuriating as it weaves poetically around his life, structured for the best punch line rather than clarity. But, in the end it tells you something about the history of Nigeria and modern Africa. It is anecdotal rather than historical, but it never claims otherwise.
Socialist Review, Issue 316, July 2007 https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/you-must-set-forth-dawn/ show less
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Author Information
139+ Works 5,080 Members
Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, Ogun State of Nigeria on July 13, 1934. He attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before receiving a degree in English from the University of Leeds in England in 1958. He has held research and teaching appointments at several universities including the University of Ibadan, the University of show more Ife, Cornell University, Emory University, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Loyola Marymount. He is a distinguished playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, political activist, and literary scholar. His plays include The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and the Jewel, A Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides, A Play for Giants, Death and the King's Horsemen, From Zia with Love, The Beatification of Area Boy, and King Baabu. His collections of poetry include Idanre and Other Poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems. His novels include The Interpreters, which won the 1968 Jock Campbell Literary Award, and Season of Anomy. His autobiographical works include Ake: The Years of Childhood, Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Memoir of the Nigerian Crisis, and You Must Set Forth at Dawn. His literary essays collections include Myth, Literature and the African World and Art, Dialogue and Outrage. During the civil war in Nigeria, he appealed for cease-fire in an article. Accused of treason, he was held in solitary confinement for 22 months. Two of his works, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka and Poems from Prison, were secretly written on toilet paper and smuggled out of prison. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Sul far del giorno
- Original title
- You Must Set Forth at Dawn
- Original publication date
- 2006
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Reviews
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- Languages
- English, French, Italian, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
- 4
