A Quest for Dignity
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2004
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Nobel Laureate, playwright, poet and political activist Wole Soyinka explores the notion of dignity within a climate of fear.
Even in defeat, negotiating terms of surrender, a defeated nation pleads: 'Leave us something of our dignity'. Denied this little consideration, a doomed struggle is promptly resumed. What exactly is this 'dignity' that even nations enshrine in their constitutions and Bills of Human Rights? Is it a basic core of volition? Or is it a sense of freedom? Obviously human dignity involves both, and encompasses more. No matter the mask that is worn to hide the reality of fear, dignity remains incompatible with the entry of fear into the human psyche.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. This lecture in the series |
| 0:05.7 | Climate of Fear, given by Wolle Sheoenka, was originally broadcast in 2004. |
| 0:12.3 | Good evening and welcome to Leeds University, which this year is celebrating its centenary. We're |
| 0:17.3 | here for the fourth in the current series of Reith Lectures, an audience of academics, students, writers, politicians and people of the theatre have joined us in a modern auditorium created out of the old Leeds playhouse. Our lecturer is one of the university's most distinguished alumni, the poet, playwright, political activist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wolle Shoyinka. |
| 0:41.3 | He came here from his native Nigeria to study English in the mid-50s and maintained strong links with the city and the university ever since. |
| 0:50.3 | His play, the beatification of Area Boy, was staged at the new West Yorkshire Playhouse here in Leeds on the night in 1996 when his fellow countryman, the writer Ken Sarawiwa, was executed in Nigeria. |
| 1:04.5 | Professor Shoyinka has endured his own share of suffering in his homeland. |
| 1:09.2 | He was held for two years in solitary confinement, and only |
| 1:12.0 | in recent years has he been free to travel between his adopted place of exile, the United |
| 1:17.0 | States, and his African home. So far in this lecture series, he's explored the symptoms and |
| 1:24.4 | causes of the terror which threatens the world today. |
| 1:28.1 | Tonight he talks about the quest for dignity, |
| 1:31.2 | a quality which he believes could help us to emerge from this current climate of fear. |
| 1:37.0 | Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome our wreath lecturer 2004, Wolle Shoyinka. |
| 1:54.2 | Thank you very much. |
| 1:59.4 | The Times newspaper of London, Saturday, February 21 this year, carried the story of the suicide of a teenager in Belfast, Northern Ireland. |
| 2:12.7 | Apparently, it should have been a double suicide, but that youth, after yet another bout of humiliation |
| 2:19.6 | from his tormentors, decided that he simply could not wait. He was one of a close-knit group |
| 2:26.9 | of seven. The report continues, who had attended school together, and continued to spend all |
| 2:32.0 | their spare time together. |
| 2:36.8 | Of the seven, only two still survive. |
| 2:42.0 | The motor accident that earlier took the lives of three of them may not have been deliberate, |
... |
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