Ghanaian playwright Uncle Ebo Whyte says the yearly Nobel Prizes are a reminder that life often moves in cycles, after all six awards for 2026 were announced in October.
Speaking on Joy FM’s weekly “Food for Thought” programme on Monday, 19 October 2026, Whyte said that, at 72, he had lived long enough to conclude that life was “cyclical/repetitive”.
Some cycles are natural, such as the changing seasons. Ghana’s tropical climate does not experience sharply contrasting seasons, while temperate countries move through summer, autumn, winter and spring, which return at the same time each year.
The annual Nobel announcements are an example of a cycle created by people. The prizes cover Medicine/Physiology, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics. The winners in each of the six categories for 2026 have now been announced.
The awards were established by Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, armaments manufacturer and writer who died in 1896. His most famous invention was dynamite, and he also created the Bofors Steel Company before it became an armaments manufacturer.
Nobel’s reputation troubled him after the death of his younger brother Ludwig in 1888. Newspapers mistakenly published Alfred’s obituary, including the French description: “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (“The merchant of death is dead”). Another report stated: “Dr Alfred Nobel who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever, died yesterday.”
Concerned about how humanity would remember him, Nobel left his fortune to establish a foundation aimed at promoting peace and development. His 1895 will created five prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine, Literature and Peace. The first awards were presented in 1901, while Economics was added in 1968 by Sweden’s Central Bank.
The Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway, and the other awards in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2023, each winner received 11 million Swedish crowns (US$986,000), together with a gold-plated green-gold medal and a diploma.
Ghana’s only Nobel laureate is Kofi Annan, who shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations. Other African recipients include South African anti-apartheid figures Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai.
Maathai won in 2004 after leading the Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977, to plant more than fifty million trees in Kenya. Soyinka won the 1986 Literature Prize, becoming the first African to win a Nobel award outside the Peace category.
Whyte said these examples should encourage Ghanaian young people to pursue hard work, discipline, integrity, leadership, resilience and determination. He also criticised the destruction of trees by property developers and the environmental damage caused by “galamsey”, which he said was poisoning water with cadmium, cyanide, lead, arsenic and mercury.
He cited Tutu’s decision in 2008 to choose a modest manual Toyota Corolla over BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles offered by Warren Buffett. The money left over was given to poor people. Mamphela Ramphele, chairperson of the Desmond Tutu Intellectual Property Trust, said: “We hope this lesson … by the Arch about us not being tempted by opulence, by being sensitive to the least amongst us is the takeaway people (who have) seen that car will make.”
The writer, a former CEO of the African Peace Support Trainers Association in Nairobi and council chairman of Family Health University in Accra, urged Ghana’s leaders to act with integrity and humility. He said Nobel had turned a reputation as “the merchant of death” into a positive legacy, and warned that leaders must not waste their own opportunity to do the right thing.
