Those who killed Awoonor are cowards – Soyinka

Professor Wole Soyinka
 

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on Friday condemned last Saturday’s terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, capital of Kenya.

The attack led to the death of prominent Ghanaian writer and diplomat, Prof. Kofi Awoonor.

In a meeting with journalists at the Freedom Park on Broad Street, Lagos, Soyinka described those who led the assault on the mall, killing the writer and scores of other victims, as “human aberrations”.

He said they are carriers of a lethal virus that corrupts the human soul and spirit.

“As for their claims to faith, they invoke divine authority solely as a hypocritical cover for innate psychopathic tendencies. Their deeds and utterances profane the very name of God,” he said.

Soyinka said that he was supposed to be in Nairobi for the same festival that Awoonor had gone to attend. He noted that not since the Apartheid era, Africa had been plunged into a crisis of the same magnitude as foisted by Islamic insurgents.

He added that recent events across the continent had shown that history re-asserts itself.

“A murdering minority pronounce themselves a superior class of beings to all others, assume powers to decide the mode of existence of others, of association, decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall shake hands with whom, even as daily colleagues, who shall dictate and who shall submit,” he said.

Soyinka called on the United Nations to compel its member countries to act against those whose actions negated its founding principles.

He said that the true divide was not between believers and unbelievers, but between those who violated the rights of others to believe, or not believe.

He described late Awoonor as a passionate African, who gave primacy of place to values derived from his Ewe heritage.

“We mourn our colleague and brother, but first we denounce his killers, the virulent sub-species of humanity who bathe their hands in innocent blood. Only cowards turn deadly weapons against the unarmed, only the depraved glorify in, or justify the act. True warriors do not wage wars against the innocent.

“We call on those who claim to exercise the authority of a fatwa to pronounce that very doom, with all its moral weight, upon those who engage in this serial violation of the right to life; life as a god-given possession that only the blasphemous dare contradict, and the godless wantonly curtail,” he said.