Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has revealed he was abducted and robbed in Bucharest, Romania, during a recent trip to attend the renowned Sibiu International Theatre Festival (FITS).
The festival, one of the largest performing arts events in the world, attracts thousands of artists and audiences annually.
Soyinka, who had been invited as a special guest, said his ordeal unfolded shortly after he arrived in the Romanian capital.
Speaking in an interview withTheNEWS, the playwright recalled landing in Bucharest at 12:10 a.m. in high spirits before losing contact with his hosts at the airport.
Left without guidance, he boarded what seemed to be an official taxi bound for the Novotel Hotel, where he was to stay.
Instead of taking him to the hotel, however, the driver diverted to a deserted and dimly lit area.
There, Soyinka was coerced into surrendering his bank details.
“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),” he said.
“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.’”
The encounter lasted about half an hour, during which Soyinka deliberately entered the wrong pin in an attempt to stall the driver and attract attention.
“It was one of those times when everybody refused to come out. Completely bare where I was. No sign,” he said.
He described the situation as a “battle of wills” that nearly escalated into violence.
“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.”
Soyinka eventually made it to his hotel later that night, after being collected by another vehicle and transported to
Sibiu.
Despite the unsettling incident, he proceeded with his participation at the festival.