Premium News
Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has given a detailed account of how he was abducted and robbed in Bucharest, Romania, when he visited that country recently to attend the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, FITS, one of the world’s largest theatre festivals.
Soyinka made this known in an exclusive interview with TheNEWS/ on Tuesday, September 9 in Lagos.
At that fiesta, which Soyinka attended on the invitation of the President of General Assembly of UNESCO, Amb. Simona-Mirela Miculescu, he, as the Guest of Honour, was to receive a star on the Walk of Fame award.
But, no sooner had he landed in Bucharest at 12:10 am in high spirits, in anticipation of the festival where he was to be honoured and feted by fellow writers than things turned awry.
Soyinka said he and the party which was supposed to pick him missed each other at the airport.
“I was to stay overnight in Bucharest and then take a five-mile drive to Sibiu. And so we missed each other somehow. As the airport was emptying, I headed for the taxi ride,” Soyinka said.
He then took an official taxi to Novotel, a hotel in Bucharest, where he was supposed to spend the night before leaving for Sibiu, venue of the festival the next morning.
But instead the driver, who apparently belonged to a criminal gang, took Soyinka to a dingy place devoid of humans, where he robbed him through a POS machine, after forcing him to reveal his PIN.
“So I got into the taxi and the man drove and drove and finally we got to a spot. It was now close to 1 o’clock in the dead of the night. And I thought we were in the hotel. Then he brought out his POS. A conversation took place (I narrate all of that in the book).
“Anyway, the bottom line is that I was in effect abducted, robbed and deposited in this strange place. I had to enter it without seeing the POS because this man kept hiding it. He was insisting ‘enter your pin, enter your pin.’
“That drama lasted inside the taxi between 25 and 30 minutes. I was deliberately entering the wrong pin, playing for time, hoping people would come out maybe from the hotel or be strolling around. It was one of those times when everybody refused to come out. Completely bare where I was. No sign.
“I didn’t discover it wasn’t a hotel until I finally got down. I was still playing for time, hoping somebody would come out of the hotel, maybe smoking cigarette, even a street worker or whatever. So, it became a battle of wills inside the car, which approached violence – he wondering who I was, what I was and I playing for time, hoping somebody would come along.
“And then you can imagine all sorts of imagination in my head. Why had he dropped me in this particular place? Was it a gang-infested area? Let’s just say it was a weird and not very comfortable kind of situation.
“Eventually, that night, anyway, I got to the hotel. I was picked up by a car and taken to Sibiu,” Soyinka said, recounting the melodrama which he rightly described as surreal.
“Even as I am speaking to you now, there is a certain aspect of that misadventure which I find very difficult to believe. Unreal. There is something surreal about it,” Soyinka lamented.
Though according to him, the festival organisers were shocked and the police did all they could to nab the criminal, he didn’t get to hear about what happened afterwards.
Soyinka said he was expecting that they would bring the felon to him for confrontation. But they seemed more concerned with just dousing the whole event as much as possible.
“And then there was this dangerous melodrama hanging over the whole place. So, I watched as they were trying to handle it. There were some certain aspects that bothered me tremendously and which I have set out in the next edition of Intervention Series, which Bookcraft is going to publish very soon.”
Soyinka said though he is pained, it is not about him but the whole notion of crime and punishment not just against the individual but against the community.
“For me, it was not just me as an individual who has been assaulted and really threatened. It was the whole community. I haven’t bothered to look closely at my account to see whether the money has been refunded,” Soyinka noted, adding that the issue was more than the money stolen.
“This is the least aspect of it. Not that I like to lose money. But for me it’s much smaller.”
Soyinka also said there were sufficient clues in the narrative to show that it wasn’t just this individual but there was a network under an official taxi ride, a network which obviously preys on innocent visitors.
“So the affair is not concluded. I have written about it to get it off my chest. But it’s a very fundamental issue,” Soyinka maintained.
