by Wole Soyinka (Author)

Written in 1971, Madmen and Specialists is one of Soyinka's most excoriating portrayals of abusers and abused in the new Nigeria ushered in by Biafra and the civil war of 1967-70. Set in the surgery of a doctor, the play is populated by mendicants and the insane, all fodder for experimentation by a shape-shifting doctor whose experiments may be more sinister than they at first appear.

Author Biography

Wole Soyinka--playwright, novelist, poet and polemical essayist--was born in Nigeria in 1934. Educated there and at Leeds University, he worked in the British theatre before returning to West Africa in 1960. In 1986 he became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is currently Woodruff Professor of the Arts, Emory University, Atlanta.