Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says he was abducted and robbed in Bucharest, Romania, while attending the Sibiu International Theatre Festival as a guest of honour.
Soyinka, who had been invited by Simona-Mirela Miculescu, president of the General Assembly of UNESCO, was to receive a Walk of Fame award at the festival.
Soyinka narrated how his anticipation for the festival turned to shock shortly after he arrived in Bucharest at about 12:10 am.
Having missed the party designated to receive him at the airport, He opted to take what seemed to be an official taxi headed to the Novotel Hotel, where he was scheduled to stay.
“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 told TheNews/PMNews.
“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.
“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.”
According to him, while the festival organisers were shocked and the police made efforts to apprehend the suspect, he never received any update on what happened afterwards.
Soyinka said he expected the culprit would be brought to him for confrontation, but the authorities appeared more interested in downplaying the incident.
“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,” he said.
Although still pained by the incident, Soyinka stressed that his concern goes beyond the personal impact.
“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,” he noted, adding that the issue was far bigger 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 noted that there were enough clues to suggest the act was not carried out by one person but by a larger network operating under the guise of an official taxi service, deliberately targeting unsuspecting 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 added.
