By Njoroge Achebe, YeyeNews.com, October 5, 2021
Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nigeria’s Chimamanda Adichie, and Isa Pantami are amongs the five shortlisted candidates for this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. On Thursday, the Swedish Academy will announce the 2021 winner. Sources closed to the Academy told YeyeNews.com that the three Africans are on the shortlist of five people. The other two are said to be from America and Jamaica.
“The Swedish Academy is determined to give it to a black writer this year,” one of our sources noted. “It will be in honor of Black Lives Matter.”
The surprising nominee, the Nigeria’s Minister for Communication and Digital Economy Isa Pantami was shortlisted for what the Academy considered the poetry of his sermons. If he won, it would be a replica of what happened in 2016 when the Academy chose American musician Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize in Literature. “The Academy is trying so hard to show that it is not biased against Muslims,” our source continued. “So it is considering a young and influential Muslim to honor and encourage young ones to participate in the literature of any form. If Pantami does not get it, it would only be because of the controversies surrounding his support for the Taliban in his sermons.”
The odds were high that Adichie would win the coveted prize until his recent speech at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany, criticizing Europe for its colonial past. While some influential European patrons of the art admired her courage, others were said to have felt insulted. “If she is this arrogant now,” one patron present at the hall told YeyeNews.com, “imagine what she would say if we give her the Nobel Prize. She frankly failed the test.”
Long-time observers of the Swedish Academy told YeyeNews.com that it would be another heartbreak for Ngugi. “The Academy has since moved on,” she said. “he would join one of those celebrated writers who would never win the Nobel. And he is in good company with writers Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah. His sin really was in advocating that Africans should abandon European languages and write in their native tongue. How do you expect Europe to reward such a man with a Nobel Prize?”
The winner of this year’s prize will take home over $1.145 million dollars. “I bet you, Isa Pantami will not mind getting his hands on that money,” our source concluded. “It will save him from going to FUTO in 600 days to teach Biafrans cybersecurity.”
