Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose the lyrical eloquence and lacerating satire of Soyinka’s own “Unlimited
Liability Company” and “Etiko Revo Wetin,” the ballads he composed
and recorded as a long-playing record album in. And when Ofeyi
and Iriyise visit Aiyero, a socialist commune in the riverine delta (based
on the historic communalistic Aiyetoro village in the Ikale-Ilaje division
of Ondo state), the offer to Ofeyi of succession to the leadership of the
community as “Custodian of the Grain” upon the expected demise of
the present incumbent, as well as the adoption of Iriyise to a venerated
position among the commune’s women’s groups, is simply and inex-
plicably made, without the slightest information given by the narrator
as to what it is in Ofeyi and Iriyise that makes a tried and tested ide-
alistic community adopt them into the highest leadership positions of
their society. The pattern of discursive iteration, through densely poetic
and myth-encrusted prose, of these two characters as symbols embody-
ing the associations encoded in their names runs throughout the entire
narrative, thereby implying that this pattern suffices to secure their cred-
ibility as acting protagonists. One of the most astounding instances of the
pattern occurs when, in their Cross-River search for Iriyise, Ofeyi and
Zaccheus, his companion and a reluctant activist, having just had their
presence registered as witnesses to the mass slaughter of a neighborhood
of “aliens” in Cross-River by a mob of the locals aided by the police,
then go directly to demand of that same complicitous police force that a
raid be made on the house where Iriyise is allegedly being held in order
to free her. The strain on plausibility and artistic control in this narrative
sequence is taken beyond breaking point when we then learn that the
house in question is owned by Zaki Amuri, head of the Cartel, the brain
behind the mob killings and orchestrator of the complicity of the police
and security forces in the killings Ofeyi and Zaccheus had just witnessed!
(SOA,–)
The symbolization of Zaki Amuri, Batoki and Chief Biga, the unholy
triumvirate of the Cartel, as incarnate evil takes similar patterns as that
of Ofeyi and Iriyise as archetypes of the regenerative forces of nature,
although it involves a different method. For where Ofeyi and Iriyise
are invested with their symbolic essences not so much through action
and behavior but by evocative prose descriptions, the figures making
up the Cartel are presented in acts and behavior unambiguously and
one-sidedly evil. The scenes of Zaki Amuri and Batoki’s depravity and
venality are very graphically rendered – and they are mostly pure melo-
drama. Since, as we shall demonstrate later, some of these same scenes
are reprised in Soyinka’s nonfictional memoir,Ibadan, this presents a