Wole Soyinka to Deliver Keynote Address at African Humanities Assembly

Frankie Fouganthin/Wikimedia
1986 Nobel Prize winner in Literature Wole Soyinka.
3 February 2020
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American Council of Learned Societies (New York)
announcement

Wole Soyinka, 1986 Nobel laureate in literature, will deliver the keynote address at the Fourth Regional Assembly of the African Humanities Program (AHP).  Opening the three-day Assembly, the address will take place at the Auditorium of the National Universities Commission in Abuja on February 11, 2020 at 10am.  The public is cordially invited.

A passionate promoter of the role of the humanities in contemporary life, Professor Soyinka has throughout his distinguished career championed writing that inspires individual self-examination and collective self-understanding.  He has called for the retrieval of suppressed, misconstrued, or forgotten African histories and cultures.

Since 2008 the African Humanities Program has responded to Professor Soyinka's call by encouraging and enabling African scholars to retrieve the record of the past and to trace the sinuosities of linguistic diversity and cultural creation in the present.  In Nigeria and throughout the continent, over 400 AHP Fellows along with their mentors, colleagues, and students have built a scholarly infrastructure for the humanities and arts that sustains and ties together dozens of world-class institutions of higher education.

Professor Soyinka comments, "The publications of the African Humanities Program have greatly expanded and deepened a continent's knowledge of herself, and her place in a rapidly evolving world. We have genuine cause to applaud the work of a new generation of African humanist scholars."

Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has funded the African Humanities Program working closely with the American Council of Learned Societies, offers this appreciation: "The work of AHP Fellows re-collects the past, clarifies the present, and lays the foundation for flourishing humanities research and writing in the future.  Their work is an inspiration to scholars everywhere."

For information on the Regional Assembly of the African Humanities Program and the keynote address by Professor Wole Soyinka, please contact the AHP Local Organizing Committee –

  • Professor Abubakar Aliyu Liman
    Dean, Faculty of Arts, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria
    Phone: +2348034515966
    Email: abunaliliman@gmail.com
  • Professor Tracie Chima Utoh-Ezeajugh
    Director, Centre for Arts, Culture and Humanities, Nnamdi Azikiwe University
    Phone: +234(0)8034502382
    Email: traciechima@yahoo.co.uk     
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