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Wole Soyinka ─ ​ Hatched from the Egg of Impunity: A FOWL CALLED BOKO HARAM

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

4 p.m.

Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell Street

THIS IS A TICKET ONLY EVENT AND ALL TICKETS ARE SOLD OUT. There will be a live stream of this event found here: Brown Live Webcast and overflow space with live webcast in McKinney Conference Room, 3rd Floor, Watson Institute for International Studies, 111 Thayer Street 

 

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Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be so honored.

BOKO HARAM is indeed a “homegrown” religious affliction – insofar as any social eruption, anywhere in today’s world, can be considered an insular development. Nor is Boko Haram a purely religious phenomenon. What has become familiar as a toxic brew of religious and politics in pursuit of power for its own sake has catapulted the Nigerian instance into a solution defying menace that threatens the fabric not just of Nigeria, but of both surrounding and distanced African nations. Many like to subsume its beginnings and expansion under social alienation, economic deprivation, governmental corruption. As always, there is some truth in that. The Nigerian instance was however largely born of impunity, the art of - literally - “getting away with murder”.

Africa Initiative
Watson Distinguished Speaker Series