Nigeria is suffering greater carnage at the hands of Islamist group Boko Haram than it did during a secessionist civil war, yet this has ironically made the country’s break-up less likely, Nigerian Nobel Literature Laureate Wole Soyinka said.

In an interview he granted Reuters at his home near the southwestern city of Abeokuta, Soyinka said the horrors inflicted by the militants had shown Nigerians across the mostly Muslim north and Christian south that sticking together might be the only way to avoid even greater sectarian slaughter.

The bloodshed was now worse than during the 1967-70 Biafra war when a secessionist attempt by the eastern Igbo people nearly tore Nigeria up into ethnic regions, he added.

“We have never been confronted with butchery on this scale, even during the civil war,” Soyinka said in the interview conducted yesterday.

“There were atrocities [during Biafra] but we never had such a near predictable level of carnage and this is what is horrifying,” said the writer, who was imprisoned for two years in solitary confinement by the military regime during the war on charges of aiding the Biafrans.

The Nobel Laureate who turns 80 in two weeks disagreed with Nigerian commentators who predict that Boko Haram’s atrocious religion-coloured campaign may split the country, 100 years after British colonial rulers cobbled Nigeria together from their northern and southern protectorates.

“I think ironically it’s less likely now,” Soyinka said. “For the first time, a sense of belonging is predominating. It’s either we stick together now or we break up, and we know it would be not in a pleasant way.”

According to the elder statesman, “The [Boko Haram] forces that would like to see this nation break up are the very forces which will not be satisfied having their enclave. [We] are confronted with an enemy that will never be satisfied with the space it has.”

Soyinka blamed successive governments for allowing religious fanaticism to undermine Nigeria’s broadly secular constitution, starting with former President Olusegun Obasanjo allowing some states to declare Sharia law in the early 2000s.

“When the specter of Sharia first came up, for political reasons, this was allowed to hold, instead of the president defending the constitution,” he said.

Soyinka sees both Christianity and Islam as foreign impositions.

“We cannot ignore the negative impact which both have had on African society,” he told Reuters. “They are imperialist forces: intervening, arrogant. Modern Africa has been distorted.”

He added that while the leadership of Boko Haram needed to be “decapitated completely,” little had been done to present an alternative ideological vision to their “deluded” followers, driven largely by economic destitution and despair.

•Photo shows Prof. Soyinka.