Wole Soyinka became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, mainly on the strength of his book Death and the King's Horseman. He has had rather a love-hate affair with his native land, Nigeria, from which he was exiled in 1994 and only returned there two years ago. This account of his childhood and school days is affectionate and rather nostalgic, a backward look at the days of Anglican missionaries and schools which applied European ideas of discipline in the old way (he greatly disappointed his own school principal by saying, when asked for his opinion, that he did not think caning a good method of character training). His mother, incidentally, went by the extraordinary name of "Wild Christian." There are some memorable vignettes, such as the description of killing and eating a snake and the stoning of a naked young woman suspected of witchcraft.