A social activist with wide-ranging concern for the welfare of his society, Wole Soyinka is on record as saying that it was the death toll among students and colleagues which prompted him to become involved in road safety. These victims were among the grim statistics of accidents; for example, in 1988 a total of 9,077 people were killed on Nigerian roads, and 24,413 were injured.2 But it is clear from Soyinka's writing that his interest in ‘the road’, and the rich characters it throws up and crushes under foot, predates the slaughter of his students. Early poems such as ‘Epitaph for Say Tokyo Kid’, and prose pieces such as ‘Oga Look Properly’, testify to this, as does the work of the mid-1960s, which includes the satirical revue sketch ‘Obstacle Race’ (about the hazards facing drivers in Nigeria), his first novel, The Interpreters (London, 1965), with its memorable description of the death of Sekoni in a motor accident, and above all his play entitled The Road (London, 1965). When these are linked with Soyinka's interest in the god of the road, Ogun, it was not surprising to find a whole section of his first collection of verse described as ‘of the road’.
