Speaking at his 80th birthday celebration in Abeokuta, Ogun State on Sunday, July 13, 2014, he disclosed that he ignorantly pulled the trigger of his father’s dane gun 70 years ago.
His words: “I used to go with my father when he hunted. It was a mere air gun, but was good enough for squirrels, the wild pigeon and occasional rabbit. I was just curious. One day, I sat in the house’s frontage waiting for him to come out of his bedroom, so I could accompany him.”
“I just felt there was something about that part of his gun which he used to pull. I tried the same motion and it just exploded; but he knew it was his fault so he never chided me. He knew he should never have left that gun loaded and he knew me enough to know that I had learnt that lesson and I didn’t need to be reminded of it. Of course, there was a sort of mutual standoff; I was not rebuked but he knew I was not going to do it again.”
The world would not have known the renowned playwright if his life had been short at 10. At 10, he still faced other challenges that would have dimmed his shine. One of such was coping with older boys who bullied him when he was a 10 year-old scholarship student at Government College, Ibadan.
“Those school mates of mine, they were bullies. They were terrifying because they looked big. Some of them, I am sure, had children already. Some had moustaches and so they shaved every morning.”
Soyinka described it as a good training because he defeated them with moral persistence.
“Whenever they turned on me, being really small, the bullying got really intense because these big boys could not stand the idea that this rondo (small) boy was sitting while others were standing. They couldn’t stand
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