Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, Friday condemned last Saturday’s terrorist attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, which claimed the life of Ghanaian writer and diplomat, Prof. Kofi Awoonor.
Soyinka, while addressing newsmen at the Freedom Park on Broad Street, Lagos, said those who killed the writer were cowards.
“As for their claims to faith, they invoke divine authority solely as a hypocritical cover for innate psychopathic tendencies. Their deeds and utterances profane the very name of God,” he said.
According to the literary doyen, he was supposed to be in Nairobi for the same festival that Awoonor had gone to attend.
He added that recent events across the continent had shown that history repeats itself.
“A murdering minority pronounce themselves a superior class of beings to all others, assume powers to decide the mode of existence of others, of association, decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall shake hands with whom, even as daily colleagues, who shall dictate and who shall submit,” he said.
Soyinka called on the United Nations to compel its member countries to act against those whose actions negate its founding principles.
He said that the main issue was not between believers and unbelievers, but between those who violate the rights of others to believe, or not believe.
He described the late Awoonor as a passionate African, who gave primacy of place to values derived from his Ewe heritage.
“We mourn our colleague and brother, but first we denounce his killers, the virulent sub-species of humanity who bathe their hands in innocent blood. Only cowards turn deadly weapons against the unarmed, only the depraved glorify in, or justify the act. True warriors do not wage wars against the innocent.
“We call on those who claim to exercise the authority of a fatwa to pronounce that very doom, with all its moral weight, upon those who engage in this serial violation of the right to life; life is a God-given possession that only the blasphemous dare contradict, and the godless wantonly curtail,” he said.
The renowned Ghanaian poet was in the Kenyan capital for the Storymoja Hay Festival, a literary event put together to celebrate writing and storytelling in Nairobi. He was due to perform that Saturday evening as part of a pan-African poetry showcase. Unfortunately, he met his end in grisly tragic combustion.
Widely regarded as Ghana’s greatest contemporary poet, Awoonor belonged to the literary generation that flourished in the 50s and 60s, many of whom were published in the Heinemann African Writers Series edited by the late Professor Chinua Achebe.
Awoonor, 78, one of the 68 casualties of the Kenyan attack by some terrorists, died as a result of injuries he sustained during the attack. Born in Ghana in 1935, his first book of poems was published in 1964. He went on to publish several books of poems including, “The House by the Sea” which chronicled his time in detention in Ghana on death row in the 1970s. Best known for his novel, This Earth My Brother, his new book, Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, is supposed to be the lead book of the new African Poetry Book Series to appear early next year.
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