Wole Soyinka
corrosive of African spiritual self-confidence as the theorists of N ́egritude
had insisted. In the light of Soyinka’s reformulation of the issue in this
manner, it would seem that his “race retrieval” project isneo-N ́egritudist
to the extent that it is a response to this so-called “second epoch of colo-
nization,” whereas classical Senghorian N ́egritude had been a response
to the “first epoch of colonization.” It is in this response, in its forms,
contents and contours, that Soyinka locates what he calls the project of
“race retrieval.”
In this respect,Myth, Literature and the African Worldrepresents a turning
point in Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings, a sort of sometimes
awkwardly articulated, but richly suggestive prolegomenon to the third
phase of Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings – his essays of the
mid to lates and earlys such as “Climates of Art” (), “Of
Berlin and Other Walls” (), “New Frontiers for Old” () and
“The Credo of Being and Nothingness” (), and in particular his
third book of literary and cultural analysis,The Burden of Memory and the
Muse of Forgiveness.
If no other single book of postcolonial African literary-critical dis-
course has generated as much discussion asMyth, Literature and the African
Wo rl d, with the possible exception perhaps of Ngugi being Thiong’o’s
Decolonizing the Mind, the explanation for this lies as much in the man-
ner in which Soyinka frames the argument as in the subject matter of
the book. For it is almost impossible not to respond to the many memo-
rable rhetorical and metaphoric flourishes of its argumentation. Two of
these are worthy of mention, especially as they pertain to the important
issue of the ideological and aesthetic distance that, beginning with the
writings of this second phase of his critical thought, Soyinka begins to
urge between his ideas and constructs of poetics and literary epistemol-
ogy and Western modernist and avantgarde ideas and practices. First,
there is the extended conceit of modern European literary and cultural
history as a steam-engine locomotive lurching from station to station of
soon-to-be-discarded movements – naturalism, symbolism, surrealism,
cubism, expressionism etc. – each of which is however, in successive revi-
sionisms proclaimed as ultimate verities of Experience or Truth (MLAW,
–) Second, there is the wildly satirical fantasy with which Soyinka
ends the last essay in the book in which the ghost of Ren ́e Descartes,
foraging in the African bush of “prelogical mentality” for confirmation
of his ratiocinated existence, is bearded by an African “innocent” who
overwhelms the Cartesian cogito with “native” wit and logic (–). The
critical assault on Western humanist and modernist or avantgarde values