Wole Soyinka
heirloom available to the African writer and artist. Above all else, it
is largely on account of this deliberate act of making very explicit and
even clamorous what had been mostly implicit, mostly taken for granted
in his earlier critical writings that Soyinka’s “middle period” critical prose
can be described asneo-N ́egritudist.
Neo-N ́egritudist: the prefix needs as much emphasis as possible if we are
to gauge accurately the distance between the “racialization” that informs
Soyinka’s essays on literature and culture in what we may designate his
“race retrieval” essays and the original views and attitudes of “classical,”
Senghorian N ́egritude. For one thing, Soyinka in these “middle period”
essays continues the uncompromising and sustained critical assault on
N ́egritude that he had begun in his very first essay, “The Future of West
African Writing” and reprised in other essays of the first phase such as
“And After the Narcissist?” and “The Writer in a Modern African State.”
Indeed, the resumed critique of N ́egritude in these essays of thes and
s now assumes a precise ideological and political expression which
is calculated to widen the gap between Soyinka’s concepts of an “African
world” and those advanced by the poets and theorists of N ́egritude:
The search for a racial identity was conducted by and for a minuscule mi-
nority of uprooted individuals, not merely in Paris but in the metropolis of
the French colonies. At the same time as this historical phenomenon was tak-
ing place, a drive through the real Africa, among the real populace of the
African world would have revealed that these millions had never at any time
had cause to question the existence of their – N ́egritude. This is why, even in a
country like Senegal where N ́egritude is the official ideology of the regime, it
remains a curiosity for the bulk of the population and an increasingly shopworn
and dissociated expression even among the younger intellectuals and literateurs
(MLAW,)
This particular quote comes from the final, perorative pages ofMyth,
Literature and the African Worldwherein Soyinka extends his critique of
Senghorian N ́egritude to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous “Orphee Noir,” the
historic “Preface to N ́egritude.” Almost in the same accents in which
Fanon had famously criticised Sartre’s essay on N ́egritude inBlack Skins,
White Masks, Soyinka savages Sartre’s celebration of N ́egitude in the
essay as the very quintessence of a Eurocentric, logocentric and ethno-
centric “universalism,” one that, in “good faith,” completely effaces the
historic and cultural specificity of non-Western Others.Significantly,
Soyinka’s critique here is not confined to N ́egritude and its liberal or left-
wing European promoters and cohorts; nothing short of contemporary