Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has revealed he was abducted and robbed in Bucharest, Romania, when he visited to attend the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, FITS, one of the world’s largest theatre festivals held in June.
In an interview with TheNEWS/PMNEWS on Tuesday, Soyinka said he was abducted by his Taxi driver from his airport to the hotel during the visit.
Prof. Soyinka who attended the event on the invitation of the President of General Assembly of UNESCO, Amb. Simona-Mirela Miculescu, as the Guest of Honour and was to receive a star on the Walk of Fame award said he and the party which was supposed to pick him missed each other at the airport and things soon turned awry.
Harrowing Experience
“I was to stay overnight in Bucharest and then take a five-mile drive to Sibiu. And so we missed each other somehow. As the airport was emptying, I headed for the taxi ride.
“So I got into the taxi and the man drove and drove and finally we got to a spot. It was now close to 1 o’clock in the dead of the night. And I thought we were in the hotel. Then he brought out his POS. A conversation took place (I narrate all of that in the book).
“Anyway, the bottom line is that I was in effect abducted, robbed and deposited in this strange place. I had to enter it without seeing the POS because this man kept hiding it. He was insisting ‘enter your pin, enter your pin.’
“That drama lasted inside the taxi between 25 and 30 minutes. I was deliberately entering the wrong pin, playing for time, hoping people would come out maybe from the hotel or be strolling around. It was one of those times when everybody refused to come out. Completely bare where I was. No sign.
“I didn’t discover it wasn’t a hotel until I finally got down. I was still playing for time, hoping somebody would come out of the hotel, maybe smoking cigarette, even a street worker or whatever. So, it became a battle of wills inside the car, which approached violence – he wondering who I was, what I was and I playing for time, hoping somebody would come along.
“And then you can imagine all sorts of imagination in my head. Why had he dropped me in this particular place? Was it a gang-infested area? Let’s just say it was a weird and not very comfortable kind of situation.
“Eventually, that night, anyway, I got to the hotel. I was picked up by a car and taken to Sibiu,” Soyinka said
Prof. Soyinka however revealed the festival organisers were shocked and the police did all they could to nab the criminal, but he didn’t get to hear about what happened afterwards.
He noted he had documented the whole experience in the next edition of his book, Intervention Series, which Bookcraft is going to publish very soon.
Soyinka said though he is pained, it is not about him but the whole notion of crime and punishment not just against the individual but against the community.
“For me, it was not just me as an individual who has been assaulted and really threatened. It was the whole community. I haven’t bothered to look closely at my account to see whether the money has been refunded,” Soyinka noted, adding that the issue was more than the money stolen.
Soyinka also said there were sufficient clues in the narrative to show that it wasn’t just this individual but there was a network under an official taxi ride, a network which obviously preys on innocent visitors.