The banner headline on the front page of the African Sun Times (December 1-7, 2014) announced: "Soyinka: How I Survived Prostate Cancer." Wanting to know how Nigerian playwright/poet/essayist Wole Soyinka achieved this medical miracle, I immediately went to the story, which reported on remarks he made at a press conference in his hometown of Abeokuta, Nigeria.
According to the article, Soyinka, a 1986 Nobel laureate in literature, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in December of 2013. (Soyinka a few paragraphs later stated it was in November.) He claimed he was cured in October of 2014. But the article neglected to give specifics about Soyinka's treatment other than to quote the 80-year-old luminary as saying "There are many ways of managing cancer; even diet. I have had to drink a lot of water and as many of you know, water and I are not really friends."
He went on to state that "It [prostate cancer] is not a death sentence and it is curable. I have undergone the treatment."
If Soyinka, a brilliant and articulate man, went to the trouble of giving a press conference about his prostate cancer cure, he must have given the attendees more information about his treatment options than was reported in the article. The African Sun Times, published in East Orange, New Jersey, has unfortunately done its readers a disservice by publishing what can only be called shoddy and incomplete journalism.
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