Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has “narrated how he was abducted and robbed” while visiting Bucharest, Romania, to attend the Sibiu International Theatre Festival.
In an interview with TheNEWS, the playwright recounted that upon his arrival at 12:10 a.m., he was “in high spirits,” but events took a “dramatic turn” when he missed his party at the airport.
He then boarded what he believed was an official taxi, but the driver diverted to a “deserted, dimly lit area,” where the “global icon” was “coerced into surrendering his bank details.”
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“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),” he said.
“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,” he said.
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