How I Escaped Nairobi Attack ~ Soyinka Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has said that the late Ghanaian diplomat and poet, Kofi Awoonor and himself could have been together at the Storymoja/Hay Literature Festival held in Nairobi, Kenya. He said he was invited to the same festival but could not attend. Awoonor was killed by terrorists last Saturday at the Westgate Shopping Mall shooting in Nairobi. Soyinka said two commitments: a public conversation with a very brave individual, Karima Bennoune, an Algerian national, whose trenchant publication - Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, and the annual conference of international investigators in Tunis, were responsible for his inability to attend the festival. He said: "My absence was particularly regrettable, because I had planned to make up for my failure to turn up for the immediate prior edition. Participant or absentee however, this is one edition we shall not soon forget. It was at least two days after the listing of Kofi Awoonor among the victims that I even recollected the fact that the Festival was ongoing at that very time. "With that realisation came another: that Kofi and I could have been splitting a bottle at that same watering hole in between events and at the end of each day. My feelings, I wish to state clearly, did not undergo any changes. The emotions of rage, hate and contempt remained on the same qualitative and quantitative levels," he added. Soyinka spoke in Lagos Saturday during a memorial reading session tagged Humanity and Against and held in honour of the late Ghanaian poet. He described the late Awoonor as a passionate African who gave primacy of place to values derived from his Ewe heritage. "That, in turn, means that he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of ecumenism towards other systems of belief and cultural usages - this being the scriptural ethos that permeates belief practices of most of this continent. 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," he added.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 08:05:24 +0000
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