Wole Soyinka is a playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist born in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1934. Soyinka won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature with his debut novel, The Interpreters, becoming the first-ever African laureate and has since won many other prizes such as the Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award in 2009 and the Anisfield-Wolf book Award, Lifetime Achievement in 2012. A prominent political activist, Soyinka was imprisoned for nearly two years during the Nigerian Civil War and was later exiled. He continues to fight against government corruption and oppression worldwide. Percy Mtwa was born and bred in Wattville, Benoni. In 1979 director Gibson Kente gave him a role as singer/dancer in Mama and the Load, which played at the Market and Baxter Theatres and toured South Africa. Mbongeni Ngema was born in Umkumbane, Durban. He wrote and presented a play, Too Harsh, appeared in Kessie Govender's Working Class Hero, then wrote and, with Kessie's help, directed The Last Generation. In 1979 he came to Johannesburg and approached Gibson Kente for work, finally getting a character role in Mama and the Load, where he met Percy Mtwa with whom he would collaborate, along with Barney Simon, on Woza Albert. Barney Simon, founding Artistic Director of the Market Theatre, was born in Johannesburg. After backstaging for Joan Littlewood in the late 1950s, he joined Athol Fugard in Johannesburg's Dorkay House Rehearsal Room where The Blood Knot was first staged. He directed Fugard in Krapp's Last Tape and the first production of Fugard's own Hello and Goodbye. In 1974 he founded the Company with Mannie Manim, which made its home in Johannesburg's old Market in 1976. He was the three-time winner of the Breytenbach Epathlon for best director. Barney Simon died in 1995. Professor Ama Ata Aidoo (b. 1943) was a Ghanaian author and playwright. Having grown up in a Fante royal household, she attended Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost was produced in 1964, and published the following year, making her the first female African dramatist to be published. She is currently long term Visiting Professor and writer in residence of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Brown University, Rhode Island. Ama Ata Aidoo died in 2023. Femi Osofisan is one of the most regularly performed playwrights in Nigeria. He has been Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan since 1985 and, for a time, was the General Manager and Chief Executive of the National Theatre, Lagos. Osofisan has written over fifty plays, many of which have been performed across the world. Andrew Whaley is a leading Zimbabwean playwright. His plays have won major awards at the festivals of the National Theatre Organization, and include Chef's Breakfast, The Nyoka Tree, Platform 5, and The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco, which won the Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990. Born in 1944 in the southern Eritrean town of Adi Quala, Alemseged Tesfai is Eritrea's premier playwright. His play The Other War was the first Eritrean play to be published and the first to be translated into English.