This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series, Climate of Fear, given by Wolle Sheoenka, was originally broadcast in 2004.

Good evening. For this, the third lecture in the series, we've come to Bristol to the IMAX Theatre, built in the city's harborside development.

It's a place dedicated to the art of communication in the 21st century, and as such, it's

exactly the right setting for tonight's lecture. The title is the rhetoric that binds and blinds,

the argument that language can stoke the flames of bigotry and conflict in a climate of fear.

Words matter to our lecturer. He's a poet and playwright and winner of the Nobel Prize for

literature. During the two years he was imprisoned in Nigeria, much of it in solitary confinement,

he used pilfered scraps of paper to jot down his thoughts. It was, he wrote later, all that kept him sane.

Since then, he's been a fierce campaigner for the rights of artists, authors and journalists

to tell the truth as they see it without fear.

Will you please welcome, ladies and gentlemen, our wreath lecturer 2004, Wally Shoyinka.

Thank you very much.

I propose to address this topic from two directions.

One, the political, the other the religious.

However, in many parts of the world, and indeed for far too long in history, both proved

to be merely two sides of a spinning coin whose trajectory is the control of human lives, in short, power.

We only need to observe the sanctimoniousness that often characterizes one, the political,

and the sacrosanctity that is claimed as the foundation of the other, the religious,

even when it extends its constituency to the political and mundane.

A religious leader whips up his citizens in a frenzy of fear,

whose tenor is that their very existence, and only incidentally that of this state, is threatened. In the historical condition that is aroused in the populace,

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