How I Escaped Terrorists Bullets In Kenya’s Shopping Mall Attack – Soyinka



Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka,has revealed how he escaped being killed in last weekend’s terror attack at the Nairobi Westgate mall in Kenya.Speaking at a press conference at the Freedom Park, Victoria Island, Lagos, today in honour of late Ghanaian poet, Professor Kofi Awoonor who was killed in the attack, Soyinka said he would have been killed along with his friend, Awoonor but for mother luck that prevented him from being at the same Storymoja/ Hay Literature Festival which he was billed to attend.

Leading a horde of other literary icons to condemn the Kenya terror attack, Soyinka 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. Kofi and I could have been splitting a bottle at that same watering hole in between events and at the end of each day.”

His speech at the event reads in full: “I am certain there are others who, like me, received invitations to the recent edition of the Storymoja/Hay Literature Festival in Nairobi, but could not attend. 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 realization 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. Those are the feelings I have retained since the Boko Haram onslaught overtook the northern part of our nation. I expect them to remain at the same level until I draw my last breath, hopefully in peaceful circumstances like Chinua Achebe, or else violently like Kofi. As becomes daily clarified in contemporary existence, none of us has much control over these matters.

Two earlier commitments were responsible for my inability to attend the Festival. One was a public conversation with a very brave individual, Karima Bennoune, an Algerian national, whose trenchant publication – YOUR FATWA DOES NOT APPLY HERE – is of harrowing pertinence to the events of Nairobi, a pertinence that continues to ravage our, and other nations. The other preventive factor was the annual conference of International Investigators in Tunis, doing battle with the monster of Corruption. The link of the former event is obvious enough, but if you think the latter has no relevance to what has happened in Nairobi, or is taking place in the northern part of this nation, permit me to correct you.