ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Furore erupts over allegations of Wole Soyinka’s ties to CIA
British scholar writes that Nobel laureate was supported by three organisations linked to intelligence agency
At the end of 2020 Caroline Davis, a British scholar based at England’s Oxford Brookes University, published the book African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing. A chapter titled “Wole Soyinka, the Transcription Centre, and the CIA” has caused a storm of controversy.
In it, Davis alleges that Africa’s first Nobel literature laureate was supported by three US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded organisations: the US-centred Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the Farfield Foundation, as well as the London-based Transcription Centre. She further claimed this assistance helped his meteoric rise to international prominence...
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