A Nigerian author and professor, Kole Omotoso, has passed on.
Omotoso died at the age of 80 in South Africa where he had been sick for a while, a family source told PremiumTimes.
Omotoso’s family is set to release a statement announcing his death later on Wednesday.
He was a novelist, playwright, and critic who wrote from a Yoruba perspective and coupled the folklore he learned as a child with his adult studies in Arabic and English.
His major themes included interracial marriage, comic aspects of the Biafran-Nigerian conflict, and the human condition—as exemplified in friendship between the Yoruba and the Igbo and in relationships between children and parents.
Omotoso wrote fiction, drama, and criticism. His novels include The Edifice (1971), The Combat (1972), Fella’s Choice and Sacrifice (both 1974), The Scales (1976), To Borrow a Wandering Leaf (1978), and Just Before Dawn (1988); his plays The Curse (1976) and Shadows in the Horizon (1977); and his single volume of short stories Miracles and Other Stories (1973; rev. ed. 1978).
From the 1980s, Omotoso took an increasingly public role as an African intellectual; among the many works of nonfiction he contributed are; The Form of the African Novel (1979, reprinted (1986), Season of Migration to the South: Africa’s Crises Reconsidered (1994), and Woza Africa (1997; Come on, Africa!: Music Goes to War).
