SOURCE: Mutua, Makau wa. “Can Nigeria Be One?” Wilson Quarterly 20, no. 3 (summer 1996): 91-3.

In the following review, Mutua argues that The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis is a powerful nonfiction account of political repression in contemporary Nigeria and Soyinka's “most anguished polemic to date.”

When Wole Soyinka all but pronounces the death of his native Nigeria, the world should listen. Not only is Soyinka Africa's best-known writer; Nigeria is in many ways the epitome of the modern African state—rich in people and resources, yet devastated by political misrule and ethnic divisiveness.

Born in 1934 and educated in Nigeria and England, Soyinka became in 1986 the first African to win the Nobel Prize in literature. He is best known for such plays as The Lion and the Jewel (1959) and The Trials of Brother Jero (1961), which combine elements of Yoruba ritual with Western stagecraft...