Wole Soyinka at the Hay Festival

May 24 - June 3, 2007

The Hay Festival is an international festival production company based in Wales. (I've never heard of it before but it sounds damned interesting!) It's been dubbed "The Woodstock of the Mind" by Bill Clinton.

From The Guardian: "The voice of conscience"

... on his way to give a lecture at the Guardian Hay festival at the weekend; and his subject is international culpability over what's happening in Darfur. Soyinka presided as chief judge at a mock trial last November when Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir was found guilty in absentia of crimes against humanity in Darfur. For the playwright, poet and novelist, who is also an actor-director, the symbolic court was "play-acting, but of a very serious kind". During the tribunal set up by Genocide Watch, Soyinka heard searing testimony, he says, from "witnesses flown out from southern Sudan, people whose families had been killed, or who had been raped or seen relatives raped or maimed - some broke down. They testified to the war crimes of the Janjaweed [the government's proxy militia], saying they raided villages and killed Nuba at any time."