Vintage Postcard Black Writers PHOTOGRAPHS BY JILL KREMENTZ WOLE SOYINKA, Stockholm, Sweden, May 1973 Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in literature. A poet, playwright, and novelist, he has unflinchingly chronicled the turmoil of modern postcolonial Nigeria as well as his own traditional Yoruban culture. Following threats on his life by Nigeria's ruling military regime, Soyinka left that country in 1994 and became a spokesman for the return of democracy there.