Wole Soyinka
in the world of Kafka’s totally hapless, lost souls, or the world of the
robotized workers of Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” it is nonetheless true
that the search for a coherent, stable selfhood, a selfhood harmoniously
integrated into the human and natural environment, is more applicable
to “lesser” works likeThe Strong BreedandThe Swamp Dwellersthan to
the great dramatic parables likeThe RoadandMadmen and Specialists.
More tellingly, in the autobiographical memoir,Ibadan, it is in spite of the
collapse, not the redoubtable support, of all the institutions and sources
of “home” and “homecoming” that the protagonist struggles heroically
with a small band of collaborators against the festering and destructive
“penkelemes” of the Nigerian postcolony.
It is part of Soyinka’s significance as a postcolonial writer that in his
works he has explored these problems of self-writing or self-constitution
with a tacit but pervasive understanding that the issues are not beyond
commensurable and productive syntheses, that the postcolonial writer
can plot her way through the maze of the conflicting claims of the local
and the foreign, the autochthonous and the modern, the familiar and
the totally unprecedented and unanticipated precisely by the choices
and selections of paradigms and matrices from the African and Western
traditions, as well as other literary traditions of the world.
In the following concluding half of the present chapter, and on the
basis of the critical and theoretical issues outlined above, I subject the
textual production of Soyinka’s personality to the sort of careful scrutiny
it has hardly received in critical commentary on his works, his life and
career. In other words, I place the authorial “self” of Soyinka’s works and
the “self-presentation” immanent in his radical activism under scrutiny,
seeking to elucidate its constitution as a process that dialogically moves
back and forth between its inscriptions in literary texts and its embod-
ied incarnations in the extraordinary writer-intellectual that the world
knows as Wole Soyinka and that his band of acolytes and admirers in
Nigeria knows as “Kongi.”Concretely, I explore two distinct but com-
plementary paradigms by which Soyinka in his fictional and nonfictional
works has sought to negotiate the great tension between the two sides of
the problem. The first of these is the paradigm, or arc, of a complexly
and subliminally “representative” self whose authority and originality
receive their greatest validation from access to the repressed recesses of
collective memory, as codified in myths, rituals and other cultural matri-
ces. This paradigm, I would argue, provides the textual and ideological
base for Soyinka’s great solicitude for the vitality of a collective African
cultural and literary modernity. The second paradigm, or arc, is that of