This is a rare photo of Professor Wole Soyinka and his wife, Folake. Soyinka married Folake Doherty in 1989.
In an interview with TheNEWS when Soyinka turned 80 in 2014, Folake described her husband as a good cook. Read her funny response below:
“He is not a big eater. Even when he eats, it is always in small quantities. The boys always want to go out to eat with him because they usually end up eating his food. He likes salami, pasta, moin-moin cooked in leaves especially the stray part that hides between the folded leaves. He doesn’t eat much and I guess that’s why he is so slim.
He cooks and he is quite good at it. He even cooked about two days ago. When the boys were really little, one day in California, he called us all to the kitchen and said he wanted to have a family meeting. They were so young I don’t even think they had any concept of what a family meeting was. He lined all three according to their heights and asked me to sit. He said he has something to tell us and he was only going to say it once. He whipped out some cooking utensils, moved them around noisily inside the pot, threw some up, caught them, performed a few tricks and then told us to listen up. He said there were only three people in the world that can cook pasta like he does one is dead, the other lives in Sicily, Italy, and he is the third one and he is going to cook something the likes of which we had never eaten. He cooked pasta that day and we truly enjoyed it. True dramatist! Now when all else fails, he cooks pasta.”
CREDIT: ETHNIC AFRICAN STORIES
