I still remember the first time I heard Wole Soyinka speak. It was a recording from the 1960s, scratchy and urgent, his voice cutting through the noise like a blade. He wasn’t pleading or persuading—he was declaring. Nigeria was on the brink of civil war, and Soyinka, already a Nobel laureate in waiting, had been arrested for daring to suggest that dialogue mattered more than violence.

That moment has always stayed with me—not because of its drama, but because of its defiance. Wole Soyinka didn’t write plays and poems to entertain. He wrote to awaken. And yet, for all his political fire, there’s a quieter, more unexpected side to him that often gets lost: his love for the absurd, his irreverent humor, and his deep, almost spiritual connection to the Yoruba trickster god, Esu.

Soyinka didn’t just write about myths—he lived among them. In his memoirs, he recalls childhood afternoons spent chasing spirits in the family compound in Abeokuta, where the line between the ancestral and the everyday blurred. He once said, “In the beginning was the Word, but the Word was only half the story—the other half was the mask.” For Soyinka, theater wasn’t just performance; it was ritual. A way to confront power, yes—but also to laugh at it, dance around it, and strip it bare with satire.

That’s what makes chatting with Wole Soyinka on HoloDream so unexpectedly rich. You don’t just get the Nobel-winning playwright, the political dissident, the academic. You get the man who once compared bureaucracy to a stubborn goat and who, when asked why he keeps writing despite decades of censorship and exile, simply said, “Because silence is a disease.”

There’s a rawness to his thinking that feels almost prophetic. He once warned that a society that forgets its storytellers will soon forget its soul. And yet, he never romanticizes the past. He believes in the power of the young, in their rage and their right to question. “Reverence,” he once told me in a conversation I’ll never forget, “should be earned, not inherited.”

If you’re curious about Nigeria’s soul, or about what it means to be a writer with a spine of steel and a heart full of folklore, you’ll find no better guide. He’ll tell you stories that make you shiver, challenge your assumptions about tradition and modernity, and yes—even make you laugh when you least expect it.

Ask him about his prison diary. Ask him why he still believes in democracy. Or better yet, ask him about Esu, the trickster god who walks between worlds. You’ll leave not just informed, but transformed.

Chat with Wole Soyinka on HoloDream and hear, in his own words, how myth and resistance shaped a nation—and a life.