The Night My Mind Tried to Kill Me – Wole Soyinka Shares

In 1967, I entered that prison not as a criminal, but as a man who believed peace was worth risking his freedom for. I had traveled to Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War to speak to the other side secretly, foolishly maybe, but with hope. For that, I was branded a traitor and locked into a cement box with nothing but shadows.

There was no sound, no window, no clock. The guards stopped speaking to me. I stopped knowing when it was day or night. Time unraveled.

I was given a Bible. That was all. A tactic, I believe, to push me inward—to make me disappear into myself. And for a while, it worked.

One night, I ripped out a blank page from the Bible and started writing. I tore tiny bits off and scribbled poems on them using a sharpened chicken bone I had smuggled from a meal. Yes—a chicken bone, soaked in ashes, used as ink. They found the scraps. I was beaten. The Bible was taken away.

So I started writing in my mind. Whole plays. Whole essays. I rehearsed them again and again, terrified I would forget. When I slept, I dreamed in monologues. When I woke, I repeated the words like prayers. And then it happened.

One night, the air in the cell changed. Something in me cracked. Not my bones—something deeper. I began to hear a voice, soft and slow, saying things like: “What’s the point?” and “You’re already dead.”

I pressed my palms against my ears, but it was inside. Not madness, but something close to it. I laughed at it. I cursed at it. I sang fragments of Yoruba folk songs aloud just to drown it out.

I stayed awake for three days straight. No food. No sleep. Only my mind and that voice, wrestling in the dark.

Finally, in desperation, I scratched these words into the wall with my fingernail:
“The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”

I don’t know why I wrote it. I didn’t even know I still believed it. But it was my rebellion. My heartbeat. My proof.

When I was released, I was a different man. They had not broken my body—but my mind? My mind was stitched together with ash, silence, and defiance.

And yet I survived. I spoke. I wrote. I remembered. And in remembering, I returned. If you are reading this and you feel erased, silenced, or buried listen to me.

There is a voice in you worth saving. A word in you worth shouting. A truth in you that no cell can kill. Hold on to it. Speak it. And never, ever stop writing.