Nobel laureate Prof Wole Soyinka has cancelled a school engagement in Anambra to protest the killing of a pregnant woman and her four children in the state.
The pregnant woman Harira Jubril and her four children were recently shot dead in broad daylight.
In a statement on Saturday, Soyinka also said the incident must be condemned, and that the perpetrators should be denounced and exposed to prevent recurrence.
“We must begin somewhere, ‘draw a line’ – however individual and limited. I totally repudiate the killing of guests, of the unarmed, of innocents, the vulnerable, indeed, the murder of humanity,” he said.
Soyinka wondered how such a crime could be perpetrated by a human.
“The anticipated question surfaced again and again: What kind of mind is capable of such bestiality? And yet it happens, again and again,” he said.
“Sometimes I undergo the feeling that I actually know them, that I have encountered them, have heard them, and perhaps even read them,” he noted.
Announcing the cancellation of his engagement in Anambra, he said, “This time, I believe the decision is right, the moment is compelling. In empathy with those innocents whose scholastic careers have been so brutally annulled, I serve notice of cancellation of that engagement with the Anambra school, scheduled for August.
“The deaths of those innocents cannot be reversed, but we must begin, even yesterday, the process of reversing the mental trajectory that makes death from innocence the current norm of national existence.”
