Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose missing overlooking the gate. Its back was turned to the world of spirits and
ghommids who inhabited the thick woods and chased home children who had
wandered too deeply in them for firewood, mushrooms and snails. The Canon’s
square white building was a bulwark against the menace and the siege of the
wood spirits. Its rear wall demarcated their territory, stopped them from taking
liberties with the world of humans. (Ak ́e,–)
One reason whyAk ́eis the unqualified critical success it is derives
from the fact that the growing protagonist never comes to feel that these
“worlds” are riven by incommensurable conflicts, that he has to take a
stand for one against the others. His parents are of course uncompro-
mising in the cause of Christianity, High Church Anglican variety, but
the growing Soyinka is powerfully drawn in as yet inexplicable ways to
the world of Yoruba rituals and festivals, as witnessed by the gratified,
moving poetic prose that he devotes to his account of his grandfather’s
ritual dedication of his grandson to the gods of his people. Far more
subliminally, the author-protagonist is drawn most especially to the third
“world” of spiritual idealities and essences which in fact embraces both
conflicting worlds of Christianity and Yoruba myths, rituals and festivals –
and more.Ak ́e, the text, derives from this harmonious, unsutured accep-
tance of those worlds of spirit and imagination.
All is not of course harmonious integration of disparate spiritual tra-
ditions and imaginative universes, or absence of social antagonisms in
Ak ́e. Nothing reveals this more than the fact that the last four chapters
of the book (Ak ́e,–) are almost entirely given to an account of the
historic Egba women’s revolt against both the local “native authority”
centralized in the person of the Alak ́e and the colonial British admin-
istration. Much of this section is narrated in the racy, dramatic prose
of an action or adventure narrative as the young Soyinka, now about
eleven years old, acts as an enthusiastic courier between spheres of ac-
tion of the embattled women and their patron, “Daodu” himself, the
legendary nationalist fighter and educational and social reformer. But
it is an “adventure” narrative in external form only, for the overeager,
young courier is attentive to, and prescient about the issues involved
in the struggle, and he weaves this awareness into his presentation of
the protagonists and antagonists in the struggle: the Alak ́e, some of his
“Ogboni” chiefs, and British colonial administrators and political offi-
cers on the one hand, and on the other hand, “Beere,” Daodu’s wife,
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, “Wild Christian,” the author’s mother, and
the other leaders of the women’s struggles.