Ousting monsters

When the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka fled Nigeria in 1994, and was sentenced to death in absentia by the military regime of Sani Abacha in 1997, he likened the "liminal but dynamic" state of the writer in exile to a parachutist's free fall. His limbo was ostensibly ended by Abacha's sudden death from a heart attack in 1998 and Nigeria's steps towards democracy. Yet for Soyinka, whose 1970s prison memoir famously proclaimed that "the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny", there can be no true home without justice.