ISSN 2747-2671 (online) PINISI JOURNAL OF ART, HUMANITY AND SOCIAL STUDIES Vol. 2 No. 3, 2022 107 Wole Soyinka, Nigeria, and the Contradictions of the Nigerian Civil War Adedoyin Aguoru Lecturer, department of English, University of Ibadan, Oduduwa Road, 200132, Ibadan, Nigeria * Correspondent Author: doyinaguoru77@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Wole Soyinka’s role as an activist, an anti-war advocate, and an opposition diplomat earned him a reputation beyond the theoretical and creative enterprise of most of his contemporaries. His most dynamic initiative was, perhaps, his daredevil intervention and visit to Biafra to hold talks for a détente during the Nigerian Civil War. Soyinka became a national figure because of his consequent incarceration by the Nigerian government that could not condone his political orientation and his anti-war advocacy. Soyinka’s foresight on the 1960 independence, his advocacy against the recurring conflicts that led to the Nigerian Civil War and terrifying consequences, run through his critical, nonfictional, fictional and biographical writing. This paper examines Soyinka’s agency and resistance to war, and his efforts towards conflict resolution during the Nigerian Civil War. It engages the Soyinka biography, particularly his prison notes, as a source of reading Soyinka’s participation and his portrayal of the politics of the Nigerian Civil War as well as the contradictions of war locally and globally. In The Man Died, Soyinka is the incarcerated victim of war. In Madmen and Specialists, Soyinka is the absurd dramatist who shocks his audience with the realities and consequences of war on stage. Soyinka as an anti–war advocate, an opposition diplomat and social critic, constructs his world through his creative writings and his critical interventions. Keywords: Nigerian Civil War; Contradictions of War; Wole Soyinka; Drama; Biographical narratives. 1. INTRODUCTION Several of the essays on the Nigerian Civil War have focused on the causes, the duration, and the consequences of the war as well as the potential recurrence of such a war in Nigeria. There are diverse perspectives on the consequences of the melding of different nations into the Nigerian Nation State in 1914, which are regarded as the underlying cause of conflicts in Nigeria (Aguoru, 2013). Theories and ideologies in international relations recognise the importance and the continued implication of conflict in bringing diverse ethnicities together as an entity. This blending of ethnicities into a nation state has distinct characteristics of either an ethnic group or a nation (Ziring, 1995). On the one hand, an ethnic group is made up of people who share a common language, folk art, myths, religious experiences, history, and territory. All of this points to differences in how people live among themselves, perceive territorial issues, develop cohesive coping mechanisms in the face of external threats, demonstrate solidarity, and internally come to terms with their identity (Ziring, 1995). On the other hand, and depending on ideological views, ethnicity places emphasis on "imagined communities," psychological factors, and temporal dimensions of ethnic concerns. Ethnicity is usually sustained by an existing nation-state, creating a more expansive idea of culture, national identity, and economic life (p. 40). These basic elements are politicised to manage solidarity and promote loyalty to the national state. The general notion of a nation-state is that which is a "melting pot or mosaic of peoples", and the more narrowly conceived ethno-nations can each call upon their citizenry to blindly kill in defence of a common heritage (or be killed as an act of self- preservation). These are reoccurring indices in Nigeria,