WS@83: Celebration begins July 13, focuses on intolerance

The annual event celebrating Professor Wole Soyinka’s accomplishments as a global citizen and eminent promoter of the good of humanity will focus on intolerance.

THE 2017 Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange Project (WSICE) with the theme Intolerance: The Burden of our Moral and National Conscience will hold in Abeokuta, Ogun State, from July 12 to 15.

Held since 2010 to mark the birthday of the Nobel Laureate, who clocks 83 this year, the WSICE is promoted by Alhaji Teju Kareem’s ZMirage Multimedia Company and Professor Segun Ojewuyi’s Global New Haven based in the US.

This year’s event will feature essay writing competition, creative workshops, tour of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library and Olumo Rock, movie screenings, a stage play and the advocacy night.

Explaining the choice of the theme, executive producer, Teju Kareem, disclosed that it  was chosen based on the conviction that “intolerance in all its ramifications destroys the very fabric of our humanity, reduces us as human beings, upstages our moral conscience and counteracts our claim of desiring a community of civilized people.”

The essay contest, featuring 83 students tackling the theme in a reality television-like setting will happen on July 13 with Kareem explaining that “our aim this year is to explore in totality, with the help of the young minds in our midst, the reasons for intolerance and ways to stop it from destroying our attempt at nation building.”

On July 14, 1000 students from Ogun State schools will join the 83 contestants for a workshop at the Ijegba Forest Theatre, an amphitheatre built inside the bush close to Soyinka’s residence. The 83 students will thereafter be hosted by Governor Ibikunle Amosun. Many of the students will later that day have their wish of meeting the Nobel Laureate in flesh fulfilled when he hosts them at his country home in the Ijegba Forest.

Aside the meetings with Governor Amosun and Professor Soyinka, the students will also be taken on a tour of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library and Olumo Rock. There will also be a movie screening and a stage performance of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.

The Advocacy Night of the 8th WSICE will happen in the Ijegba Forest and will feature the screening of a documentary on ‘Samarkand and Other Markets I have known’, which highlights the value of tolerance.

Discussants at the session, cutting across religious, political and cultural divides, will address the theme Intolerance: The Burden of our Moral and National Conscience before the night ends on a light note with an excerpt from ‘Obi at’ Orogbo’ and music.