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. . .
The artist has always
functioned in African society as the record of the mores and experience of his
society
and
as the voice of vision in his own time. It is time for him to respond
to this essence of himself (
ADO
,
–
)
The urgency and eloquence of this passage, addressed in its particular
context to the last gathering of African writers before the outbreak of
the Nigerian civil war, are qualities which pervade all of Soyinka’s early
critical essays. The
tone
of his unique, idiosyncratic critical voice was
not of course always this desperate in the essays. On occasion Soyinka
could combine a playful wit with high seriousness, as is evident in the
following now widely savored short take on Achebe’s mastery of the art
of narrative:
It is doubtful if Achebe’s forte lies in the ability to spit occasionally, or to laugh
from the belly when the situation demands it, but he must learn at least to be
less prodigal with his stance of a lofty equipose. For this has bred the greatest
objection to his work, this feeling of unrelieved competence
. . .
(
ADO
,
)
Always in these essays, Soyinka’s delineations of the evolving personal
stylistic and thematic signatures of his fellow African writers are sharp,
and often couched in as memorable turns of phrase as the witticism
concerning Achebe’s “unrelieved competence.” Soyinka pays close, inti-
mate attention to language, the medium of literature, in these essays and
Wole Soyinka
he gives as much attention to matters of craft, technique and the spe-
cial pleasures of the text, the
literariness
that, in his opinion, distinguishes
“good” writers from the “inferior” literateurs. His enthusiasms for the
former are always expressed in a way calculated to infect the reader, and
there is never any doubt that he has
read
what he writes about and cares
that others should read with the same mix of submission and vigilance
that he brings to the authors and texts under his critical purview. This
purview, as we have seen, comes with an insistence on high, utopian and
uncompromising principles for a “literature of rediscovery.” But in an-
other sense, Soyinka insists in these essays that the literature of “young”
nations just freed from colonial domination, is, first and foremost, and
like literature everywhere, its own justification when practiced with skill
and with integrity of artistic vision.
At the end of Soyinka’s first collected volume of critical essays,
Myth,
Literature and the African World
(
), the author makes the following asser-
tion in concluding a wide-ranging critique of N´egritude and its responses
to centuries of Western discourses on Africans in particular, and “race”
in general:
(This) problem does not apply to N´egritudinists alone. African intellectualism
in general, and therefore attitudes to race, culture, have failed to come to grips
with the very foundations of Eurocentric epistemology (
MLAW
,
)
Twelve years later, and on two different occasions, Soyinka again re-
turned to this theme of the crucial need for African postcolonial critical
discourse to engage the question of ethnocentric Western epistemolo-
gies, of the very conditions and possibility of discourse and knowledge of
Africa and Africans as they have been shaped by Eurocentrism. First, in
the essay “The External Encounter: Ambivalence in African Arts and
Literature” which was delivered at Cornell University, the Nigerian au-
thor directs some urgent cautionary remarks to “those African writers
and even would be aesthetic theorists, (who are) blithely unconscious
how their instincts have been shaped by centuries of European histori-
cism and intellectual canons for which the African reality provided only
the occasional, marginal, race-motivated fodder (ADO,
).” This in-
terrogation of “historicism and (other) intellectual canons” is taken up
again, complete with named “culprits,” when Soyinka returns to this
theme in his Nobel lecture, “This Past Must Address Its Present”:
Gobineau is a notorious name, but how many students of European thought
today, even among us Africans, recall that several of the most revered names
in European philosophy – Hegel, Locke, Hume, Voltaire – an endless list, were
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