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With apologies to Andy Warhol, in the future, we won't all be famous for 15 minutes. Some of us will be a lot more famous than others.

It was this past Wednesday's edition of the Edmonton Journal that set me wondering about the peculiar nature of fame, circa 1999.

Our front page story announced that the Provincial Museum of Alberta had landed a touring show of Linda McCartney photos. It's a true coup. Edmonton will be the only Canadian stop for this much-ballyhooed exhibit, Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era.

On the bottom of page B4, a modest story announced that Wole Soyinka would be coming to Edmonton in February, for a symposium on African culture.

I can't fault the news judgment of my colleagues. They're right. McCartney is news. Soyinka isn't. It's the whys and wherefores of that fact I find fascinating.

Wole Soyinka is, arguably, the finest African writer of this century. He's a poet, playwright, director, novelist, essayist, scholar and translator, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature.

Soyinka's writing is funny and lyrical. He's fascinated with everything from the parallels between Greek and African mythology, to the evolution of the English language, to the workings of human memory.

Soyinka is no ivory tower academic. He's dedicated his life to the fight for democracy and civil rights in his native Nigeria, wielding his talent, wit, and moral stature to oppose the successive military dictators and kleptocrats who've squandered Nigeria's potential. He was jailed briefly in 1965, then again in 1967, for two years of torturous solitary confinement.

Regimes in Nigeria changed. But Soyinka's ideals didn't. About five years ago, he challenged the authority of another military tyrant, and fled the country under sentence of death. Friends smuggled the then-60-year old writer out of the country in a packing crate. He showed up in Paris a few days later and gave a defiant, hilarious press conference in which he blasted the Nigerian government and mocked the melodrama of his own escape.

Now Nigeria is, again, struggling towards democracy, and Soyinka, who's been living and teaching in the U.S., is returning, not with political ambitions, but with simple hopes of lending a hand.

By way of contrast, Linda McCartney was a professional groupie, a second-rate photographer and a fifth-rate musician, who campaigned to stamp out recreational fishing and marketed a line of vegetarian TV dinners.

It says it all that the first annual Linda McCartney Memorial Award for outstanding commitment to animal rights has just been awarded to Pamela Lee Anderson, a starlet heretofore better known for breast implants and dirty home movies than humanitarianism.

OK, so it's not a fair comparison. Who among us can measure up to Wole Soyinka's creative and moral achievements? Yet Linda McCartney has entered our cultural pantheon. Wole Soyinka has not. And the reasons why tell us a lot about the mechanics of celebrity.

Nigeria and its problems are a long way from North America. And Soyinka doesn't write pop songs, but "serious" literature.

McCartney, on the other hand, lived her professional and personal life on the public stage, wed to one of the world's most famous men, Paul McCartney, the Beatle everyone wanted to marry.

In a milieu where lurid serial divorce was the norm, the McCartneys seemed blessed with a fairy-tale love story. Barring the fact they were bazillionaires, they seemed like an ordinary, everyday family.

And of course, Linda McCartney died young, and tragically, of breast cancer, an ordinary, everyday killer.

North American boomers related to Linda McCartney. They "knew" her, in the same weird, media-induced way they "knew" Lady Diana and JFK Jr. Her posthumous fame has little to with her talents or ideals, and everything to do with the cult of celebrity her photography celebrated.

I can't blame McCartney's fans for being excited at the chance to see her famous photos. Indeed, I applaud the Provincial Museum of Alberta for landing a show that promises to make it a lot of money.

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Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka will be the star attraction at next February's Africa Society conference in Edmonton, organizers announced Tuesday.

The Nigerian-born poet, essayist and dramatist speaks at the Jubilee Auditorium Feb. 25.

Soyinka, a vigorous critic of the succession of military dictatorships that ruled Nigeria until elections were held earlier this year, is also one of the world's most prominent advocates of human rights.

In 1986, he became the first of the three Africans who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Soyinka is best known for his searing prison memoir. The Man Died, an account of his solitary confinement in a tiny cell for more than two years during the 1967-69 Nigerian civil war.

Yet Soyinka first made his mark on the literary scene as a poet. The luminous craftsmanship of his 1960s collection Idanre took the English language into new realms, in evoking specifically African archtypes and making them a part of the anglophone experience.

Now a professor of arts at Emory University in Atlanta, Soyinka has also taught at the universities of Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Cambridge. Born into the Yoruba culture, the 65-year-old Nobel laureate studied Greek, English and history at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria before going to England, where one of his first plays was performed in 1958.

His Nobel Prize citation described Soyinka as "one of the finest poetical playwrights that have written in English," but the writer looks upon the award with a different perspective.

"A lot of people will find this difficult to believe," he said in an interview after winning the Nobel, "but for me it was just another prize, only bigger and more demanding on me in terms of what you give back, because everybody wants something as a result of that prize. It has such a prestige and such a hold on people's imagination in all corners and on all levels that you become the property of the world. I don't regret it, don't misunderstand me, but it is a mixed blessing."

Soyinka, who has been imprisoned and exiled by various Nigerian governments is, now able to return to his native country, but it is far from clear that democracy is entrenched. Although he is recognized as a leading figure of opposition to dictatorship, he has fended off calls to enter active politics, saying he would only help establish democracy in Nigeria and then "settle down to a normal life of writing and directing and spasmodic teaching here and there."

Tickets for Soyinka's lecture are $10 and go on sale Sept. 21 through Ticketmaster.

The Africa Society is an Edmonton-based scholarly organization that aims to promote a more positive image of Africa.

The February conference is expected to draw hundreds of scholars from all over the world "to discuss issues of global concern to Africa and the developing world in the 21st century," says Athabasca University professor Malinda Smith, one of the conference organizers.