Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Let's say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don't think we have a new Nigeria yet.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the potential for a better future but acknowledges the current reality is still lacking.
Wole Soyinka expresses a sense of hope regarding the future of Nigeria, suggesting that there are opportunities and possibilities for transformation. However, he candidly admits that the changes necessary for a truly 'new Nigeria' have not yet materialized, emphasizing a gap between aspiration and reality. This highlights the importance of recognizing both the prospects for improvement and the need for continued efforts towards achieving meaningful change.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about social change, one could reference this quote to highlight the challenges ahead.
More from Wole Soyinka
All quotes βTrading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
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The solution of this country's problems lies in black hands.
A revolution resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy.
If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.
Everything has changed, except our way of thinking.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States - old as well as new - North as well as South.
If you want to see a rainbow you have to learn to see the rain.