A small campus bungalow in the University of Ìbàdàn has played an outsized role in the life of one man, one family, one university, and the nation.
It was in this house on Ebrohimie Road where, sometime in 1967, writer Wọlé Ṣóyínká was arrested after having returned home from a visit to Biafra for a personal intervention in the Nigerian Civil War that was just breaking out. — events already recounted in The Man Died (1971), You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006), and other works. It was there, too, that he returned to from jail when he was released 29 months later, after which he went into exile in 1971. He never returned to Ìbàdàn, choosing to take up a role at the University of Ifẹ̀ in 1976, where he retired in 1985, a year before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.
This house played host to many friends, family, and associates over the years while he was in solitary confinement, and features in his years of employment with the Ibadan University. And it was in that house where, in October 1969, after his release, he granted a famous interview to a journalist from Daily Times to express himself about the war and the events that got him locked up. Parts of the interview are also on YouTube. The portrait from that encounter made it to the cover of Ìbàdàn: The Penkelemes Years (1994).
