Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka gave his blessing Saturday to a small 19th-century brick house in a North Side alley, making it the city's second sanctuary for an exiled writer.

Soyinka's dedication concluded a lively ceremony of jazz and poetry on a stage that filled narrow Sampsonia Way between Monterey and Sherman in the Mexican War Streets, home of the Pittsburgh chapter of North America Cities of Asylum.

It drew about 300 people, wedged between the alley's garages, garbage cans and tiny houses.

Performing were drummer Roger Humphries, bassist Dwayne Dolphin and saxophonists Bruce Williams and Oliver Lake, joined by poetry from Toi Derricotte, Huang Xiang and Soyinka.

The Pittsburgh chapter two years ago took in the persecuted Chinese poet and his wife Zhang Ling to live on Sampsonia in a rehabilitated frame home decorated with Huang's verse. It has since renovated a second Sampsonia house to shelter another international writer. Yet to be named, that person will move in Nov. 1, several doors away from the poet's house.

Soyinka is a cofounder of the international Cities of Asylum program, which sponsors writers' sanctuaries primarily in Europe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, the first African to win the award.

Known originally for his plays set in Nigeria, the 72-year-old writer read a series of poems about the violence and unrest that have gripped Africa for decades.

In the poem, "Paid Ransom," he described Africa as "the corpse of hope laid out on the continent's permissive board" and lamented "the manhood of a continent lost."

A compelling reader with a deep, rich voice accented from his many years acquiring a British education, Soyinka noted that Nigerians living in America had met in Pittsburgh to plan protests in their homeland and said he appreciated that the North Side neighborhood is full of children.

"These are not the children I write about in my poems, mercifully," he said, referring to his images of "eyes (that) stare dead, the offspring of the dispossessed."

The audience was treated to a variety of poetic styles -- the traditional Soyinka approach, the conversational delivery of Derricotte, a major African-American poetic voice who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, and the dramatic arm-waving, foot-stomping declamations of Huang, accompanied by Lake on the sax. Poet and instructor Sharon McDermott read the poems in English before Huang performed them.

Introducing the artists was Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, honorary chairman of the concert.

Pitt's writing program has taken an active role in the local chapter, inviting Huang to teach classes. Nordenberg gave Soyinka a Pitt soccer-team jersey bearing his name, to recognize his enjoyment of the sport.

Henry Reese, cofounder of the Pittsburgh chapter along with his wife, Diane Samuels, presented Nordenberg with the group's Preserving Endangered Voices award. Also at the ceremony were officials of the North America program, novelist Richard Wiley and Carol C. Harter, former president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, headquarters of the program.

The renovated building at 404 Sampsonia is now called House Permutation, named for the Soyinka passage that is etched in the glass of its front door. The poet passed the time when he was jailed in his native Nigeria in 1967-1969 during civil war there by solving mathematical problems, such as the permutations of numbers.

A passage from his prison memoir, "The Man Died," was used for the etching, combined with a mosaic by Laura Jean McLaughlin and Bob Ziller. Wooden sculptures called "Spiritual Wings" by Pittsburgh artist Thad Mosley also distinguish the house front.