Wole Soyinka
history and development of Black Africa, should be appertainingonly to the
European world(MLAW,) (My emphasis)
It is not part of Soyinka’s purpose in this book to inquire into the fac-
tors making for, on the one hand, the apparent consensus among “the
intelligentsia of the black world” that European-Christian incursion into
Africa involved “enforced exocentricity,” and, on the other hand, the
absence of such unanimity with regard to Arab-Islamic penetration of
Black Africa. It suffices for Soyinka’s purposes in the book to enlist the
voices of writers and intellectuals who take the view that the story of
the Arab-Islamic incursion into Africa south of the Sahara entailed as
much of an “enforced exocentricity” as that produced by European-
Christian colonization. Two of the most powerful textual examples of
this view, Yambo Oulouguem’sBound to Violenceand Ayi Kwei Armah’s
Two Thousand Seasons, provide Soyinka’s exegetical efforts with some of
the most controversially dehumanizing portraits of Europeans and Arabs
and their respective civilizations, and one of Soyinka’s moves inMyth,
Literature and the African Worldis to square off the “vehemence” ofBound to
ViolenceandTwo Thousand Seasonswith the “vehemence” of the racist nar-
ratives and discourses on Africa and Africans that were for centuries pro-
duced in Europe and the Arab world. At any rate, what concerns Soyinka
beyond this violent settling of accounts in Ouloguem’s and Armah’s writ-
ings is the presumed pay off from their iconoclasm againstallalien gods
and matrices: the chance to reconstruct what was and is indigenous to
Africa as a necessary component of the reconstruction of Africa in the
modern world.
Of the four essays (with the appendix, “The Fourth Stage,” an “early”
essay) which make up the contents ofMyth, Literature and the African World,
only the last two, “Ideology and the Social Vision: the Religious Factor”
and “Ideology and the Social Vision: the Secular Ideal,” can be said
to effectively demonstrate that many African writers and intellectuals
are indeed obsessed by a need to reconstruct, in many diverse ways,
a self-apprehended “African world” consisting of indigenously derived
traditions of world apprehension, of reflection on history and experi-
ence, and with its own unique cultural and artistic sensibilities. In these
two essays, Soyinka provides readings of a wide range of African writers
including William Conton, Lewis Nkosi, Richard Rive, Dennis Brutus,
Tchicaya U’Tamsi, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Chinua Achebe, Mongo
Beti, Yambo Oulouguem, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ousmane Sembene and
Camara Laye. These are all, as in his early essays, male writers, and the