If it wasn’t for Soyinka’s influence, Gates says he wouldn’t be a professor today.
“He just was so dynamic, he made me fall in love with African literature,” Gates says. “I mean, he really opened up the wonders of African literature to me. He really encouraged me.”
Soyinka published one of the essays Gates wrote for his supervision—the equivalent of a tutorial at Harvard—in the journal Transition, of which he was chief editor.
“I was 23 years old,” Gates recalls. “Once I saw that publication, it was a long essay on the Harlem Renaissance, I was launched on my way to being a literary scholar, so I owe him quite a lot.”
Gates says he is very familiar with everything Soyinka has written. “I’m a Soyinka scholar,” he says. “It’s one of my passionate intellectual areas.” He calls Death and the King’s Horseman “as great a play as any ever written” and says it will continue to be read 1000 years from now alongside Hamlet and other classics.
“He wrote it while I was his student,” Gates recalls. “I was invited as a student to hear a reading of it by a group of actors from London who came up to Cambridge. It was just me and another student who were in the audience, as it were. So I feel very much a part of that play because I was there while it was being written.”
There is no doubt in Gates’ mind that Soyinka deserved to be the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Being with Soyinka is a bit like I imagine having had the privilege of being with Shakespeare four centuries ago,” Gates says. “After all, as many Africans point out, they have the same initials.”
He adds, “He’s one of my best friends. He’s my older daughter’s godfather, and he’s very, very dear to me.”
Gates says Soyinka will give one or two public lectures in the spring “so that the members of the broader community can have access to him.”
When asked what the topics of the lectures will be, Soyinka says, “I’m rather spontaneous about things like that. All I can guarantee you is that it won’t be during the intensest period of winter.”
“Don’t bother to look for me when winter descends,” he says with a laugh. “Don’t even look for me.”
—Staff writer Andrew C. Esensten can be reached at esenst@fas.harvard.edu.