 We are here to protest the banning of books. We're here to celebrate freedom of expression Which we enjoy to a large measure in San Francisco I would like to change the reading that I'm listed for and instead read a passage by the 1986 Nobel Prize winner from Nigeria, Wally Soyinka It's from his a letter to compatriots. I Address this book to the people to whom I belong not to the new elite Not to that broad stratum of privileged slaves who prop up the marble palaces of today's tyrants I testify for my personal experience and in so doing accuse them of the crime of war profiteering. I Do not mean in material terms that fact is too well-known Too easily absorbed into the shock system of a materialist society There is however another form of profiteering a Greater humiliation which appears too tenuous to challenge the will of a war-worry people and this is power profiteering from the common disaster and mutual sacrifice of war and The greatest insult to a people's intelligence is if as the supreme irony Such power profiteers are not free of a measure of culpability In the fundamental causes of the war itself My testimony is that only the degree remains arguable the fact of guilt is obvious and Self-acknowledged by today's power profiteers their present excesses and mutual condonement of crime have made Unnecessary the uncompromising content of this book for the first step toward the dethronement of terror Is the deflation of its hypocritical self-righteousness? It is only the first step In any people that submit willingly to the daily humiliation of fear The man dies