10 Questions for Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka, 71, was the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986. The author of some 20 plays, seven novels and several collections of poetry, he has also been an outspoken critic of Nigerian despots since the 1960s and mediated between indigenous people and oil companies in the Niger Delta. His latest work, a memoir, is titled You Must Set Forth at Dawn . Last week, he met Time's Andrew Purvis and Regine Wosnitza in Berlin.

Why did you decide to write a new memoir and what have you learned from it? That...