Education Quote by Wole Soyinka

Soyinka’s line sounds almost disarmingly modest, but it’s also a quiet manifesto about how art actually travels: through attention, apprenticeship, and a kind of disciplined theft. “Just to look” understates the labor here. He’s not praising passive consumption; he’s describing scrutiny as practice. For a dramatist, looking means reading the architecture of scenes, listening for where a line turns, noticing how power shifts when a character enters or exits. Craft is less mystery than method, and methods are visible if you train your eye.

The subtext pushes against two romantic myths at once: the solitary genius who invents from nowhere, and the classroom fantasy that craft can be poured into you through rules alone. Soyinka, who emerged from a Nigerian theatre scene negotiating colonial education, Yoruba performance traditions, and European dramatic canons, is attuned to how influence works across borders. “The work of others” is a plural world: predecessors, rivals, elders, even oppressors. Studying them becomes both toolkit and resistance, a way to master the forms that once claimed authority over you and then bend them to local histories and political urgency.

There’s also an ethical nudge: your taste is part of your training. What you choose to “look at” shapes what you’re capable of making, and what you refuse to look at narrows your range. In a culture obsessed with originality as branding, Soyinka offers something tougher: originality as a consequence of close reading, not a prerequisite.