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Aké:
The Years of Childhood is a memoir by multiple award
winning Nigerian and Noble Prize Winner Wole Soyinka that
was first published in 1981. It tells the story of Soyinka's boyhood before
and during World War II in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria called Aké,
where the author spent the first 12 years of his life. When the book was
first published, the New York Times reviewer wrote:
"Playwright,
poet, novelist, polemical essayist and now autobiographer, Mr. Soyinka is
unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest. In Ake
he has produced an account of his childhood as a Yoruba in western Nigeria
that is destined to become a classic of African autobiography, indeed a
classic of childhood memoirs wherever and whenever produced....Through
recollection, restoration and re-creation, he conveys a personal vision that
was formed by the childhood world that he now returns to evoke and exalt in
his autobiography. This is the ideal circle of autobiography at its best. It
is what makes Ake, in addition to its other great virtues, the best
available introduction to the work of one of the liveliest, most exciting
writers in the world today. Aké: The Years of Childhood
was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1983. In 1995 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a
10-part abridgement (by Margaret Busby) in the Book at Bedtime series,
read by Colin McFarlane.
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