Wole Soyinka and David Diop

                                   Wole Soyinka 
was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, "The 1960 Masks" and in 1964, the "Orisun Theatre Company", in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

                               David Mandessi Diop
                   is a Poet from Senegal.(1927-1960)

David Diop was one of the most promising French West African young poets, whose short career, however, ended in an air-crash off Dakar in 1960. Diop lived an uprooted life, moving frequently from his childhood onwards between France and West Africa. In Paris Diop joinded the négritude literary movement, which championed and celebrated the uniqueness of black experience and heritage. Diop's work reflects his hatred of colonial rulers and his hope for an independent Africa.

"Africa tell me Africa
Is this you this back that is bent
This back that breaks under the weight of humiliation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying yes to the whip under the midday sun "
(from 'Africa')

David Diop was born in Bordeaux, France, July 9,1927 of a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. After his father died, he was raised by his mother. Diop had his primary education in Senegal, and then he attended the Lycée Marcelin Berthelot in Paris during World War II. At home Diop read the works of Aimé Césaire and debuted as a poet while still at school. Several of his poems were published in Léopold Senghor's famous Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948), which became an important landmark of modern black writing in French.

Reference:https://en.wikipedia.org