Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, poet, and Nobel Laureate, wrote drama and verse deeply engaged with the Yoruba mythological tradition and with the physical reality of tropical Nigeria, including its insect life, parasitic diseases, and the bodily realities of a tropical environment. His poem collections and plays of the 1960s and 1970s draw on a world where malaria, yellow fever, and various parasitic infections are environmental constants, and where the Yoruba cosmological tradition had developed sophisticated ways of understanding the relationship between humans and the non-human world.

Soyinka's work brought an African and specifically Yoruba perspective to the literary engagement with insects and parasites, challenging the Eurocentric tradition of insect poetry by situating the insect-human relationship within non-Western cosmological frameworks. His Nobel Prize (1986) drew international attention to African literary traditions in which the insect world was not merely a source of comic or satirical imagery but a spiritually significant presence. Soyinka's work expanded the international parasite poetry tradition to include the perspectives of those for whom mosquitoes and their diseases were not historical memories but daily realities.