Wole Soyinka
author’s focus on the world of adults in this memoir of his childhood. For
I think it is fair to say that this comes from the adult author’s retrospec-
tive realization that for the growing, evolving consciousness of a deeply
observant and sensitive child who is preternaturally prone to following
his own perceptions and intuitions wherever, and as far as they may lead
him, the “reality principle” is that constituted by the world of adults. Or,
more precisely,worlds.
Within the first three pages ofAk ́e, we are introduced to the three
composite “worlds” which will vie for his imaginative, spiritual and
moral allegiance: the world of Africanized, middle-class Christianity;
the “pagan” world of Yoruba rites, festivals, beliefs and practices which
stands as a powerful redoubt to colonial and Christian incursions; and
a spirit world of supernatural beings who are invisible but are nonethe-
less felt as active presences, this being generally symbolic of the eternal
world of the imagination and the spirit. Indeed, these three “worlds” are
encountered within the space of the second and third paragraphs of the
first chapter of the memoir and in a profile written in a narrative voice
which tries to mirror the consciousness of the two-year-old child, a child
highly receptive to the ideas and sensibilities contained in each of these
three “worlds”:
On a misty day, the steep rise toward Itoko would join the sky. If God did not
actually live there, there was little doubt that he descended first on its crest, then
took his one gigantic stride over those babbling markets – which dared to sell
on Sundays – into St. Peter’s Church, afterwards visiting the parsonage for tea
with the Canon. There was the small consolation that, in spite of the temptation
to arrive on horseback, he never stopped first at the Chief’s who was known
to be a pagan; certainly the Chief was never seen at a church service except
at the anniversaries of the Alake’s coronation. Instead God strode straight into
St. Peter’s for morning service, paused briefly at the afternoon service, but
reserved his most formal, exotic presence for the evening service which, in his
honour, was always held in the English tongue. The organ took on a dark,
smoky sonority at evening service, and there was no doubt that the organ was
adapting its normal sounds to accompany God’s own sepulchral responses, with
its timbre of theeg ́ug ́un, to those prayers that were offered to him.
Only the Canon’s residence could have housed the weekly Guest. For one
thing, it was the only storey-building in the parsonage square and stolid as the
Canon himself, riddled with black wooden-framed windows. Bishops Court was
also a storey-building but only pupils lived in it, so it was not a house. From the
upper floor of the Canon’s home onealmostlooked the top of It ́ok `o straight
in its pagan eye. It stood at the highest lived-in point of the parsonage, just