AP Photo

Seated under the portrait of a local maharajah, Wole Soyinka—as regal of face and mien as the potentate in the painting—leaned toward me and uttered words so harsh that I sat bolt upright: "England is a cesspit."

We were in India at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where he, a Nobel laureate for literature and vigorous activist for democracy in his native land, was the guest of honor. I'd seized the opportunity to talk to Mr. Soyinka, the world's most famous Nigerian, about the only other person who might tussle with him for that title: Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young man who boarded a flight in Amsterdam on Christmas Day with a bomb in his underpants.