The Changing Mask of Fear

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2004

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Nigerian born writer, Wole Soyinka, is a playwright, poet and a political activist. His novel, The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, recounts his experience of his unlawful imprisonment and the effects of solitary confinement over a period of 22 months during the Nigerian Civil war. Subsequently he has been an outspoken critic of many military dictators and in 1986 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In his first lecture, Wole Soyinka considers the changes since the Cold War, the nature of fear and its impact on individuals and society. He explores how fear is used for positive motives as well as negative and how it's changed over time. He outlines that there is a new era of fear that pre-dates the events of 11th September. Wole Soyinka explains why for him 1989 was the moment when the world first appeared to have stood still.

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 Sheainka, was originally broadcast in 2004.
0:12.3	Good evening and welcome to the Royal Institution in London for the first in the BBC's annual
0:17.1	lectures named after its first Director-General and founding father of public service
0:21.6	broadcasting in Britain, John Reith. I'm joined by an audience of writers, thinkers, academics and
0:28.0	politicians gathered to hear our Reith lecturer 2004, the poet, playwright and lifelong political
0:34.7	activists Wolle Shoyinka. Now approaching his 70th birthday, it's been his
0:40.5	life's work to oppose tyranny and oppression through the power of his writing, which in
0:46.0	1986 won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. His opposition to the regime in his native
0:52.8	Nigeria led to his imprisonment there in 1967.
0:57.6	He spent most of his more than two-year incarceration in solitary confinement, preserving his sanity by writing on scraps of paper later to become a book and, of course, a testament to the power of man's instinct for survival. These days he's based
1:14.3	both in the United States and in Nigeria. He's a university professor in IFA and in Nevada. He's
1:21.2	no stranger here in the UK either. He's a graduate of Leeds University and an early product of the
1:27.4	Royal Court Theatre in London where he directed some of his first plays.
1:32.0	So, artist, activist and passionate advocate for freedom and justice, he's more than qualified to take, as his theme for this year's Reith Lectures,
1:42.0	a subject which since the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers
1:45.3	two and a half years ago has become a universal theme, the climate of fear. With the first
1:52.0	of these lectures entitled The Changing Mask of Fear, ladies and gentlemen, would you welcome, please,
1:57.4	Wally Shoyinka.
2:08.9	Thank you. please Wally Shoyinka. I have taken myself back to the late 70s when at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts,
2:16.5	I delivered a lecture under the title, Climates of Art.
2:20.9	Introducing that lecture, I made the following admission. I quote,
	...

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