Wole Soyinka
orisa can only live through people – by mounting somebody’s head – you
could go so far as to say that when the orisa fails to manifest himself in
this way through his priests and worshipers, he ceases to exist. If the priest
who personifies Ogun is an unusually powerful “Olorisa’, he can modify
the image of Ogun. So that even in Yoruba tradition Ogun consists of a
number of interrelated personalities.Any traditional priest would accord you the
right to live Ogun your own way, in fact, they would think it the normal thing to do.You
create Ogun – or perhaps, you are sensitive to other aspects of his being.
Because Ogun is a very complex being.
: Yes, indeed.. .(My emphasis)
Given the pervasiveness of the binary cultural stereotype of what many
commentators have called the encounter of a “communalistic” Africa
with the “individualistic” West, the powerful cultural sanction that
Yoruba culture gives to individuality – as indicated in the highlighted
remarks of Beier in this exchange with Soyinka – will come as a surprise
to many students of the Nigerian author’s writings who have one-sidedly
ascribed Soyinka’s assertiveness on the individual autonomy of the artist
to the influence of Western individualism. What is involved here, I would
argue, is the conflation of the distinct processes and coordinates ofindivid-
uation,individualityandindividualism. To the remarks of Beier in the quote
above we should take note of the ringing celebration ofindividualityin the
third epigraph to this chapter, the gnostic aphorism from Ifa divinatory
lore:Ori kan nuun ni; iyato kan nuun ni. (That is one soul/person; that is one
difference).
As stated earlier in this discussion, the diverse textual appropriations
of aspects of the Ogun myths in Soyinka’s works could be said to cohere
around what is perhaps the “ur-text” of mythic lore in Yoruba cosmol-
ogy, that of the Orisanla-Atunda primal confrontation. Let us recall its
particular articulation in the narrator’s description of Kola’s painting of
his friends as avatars of the “orisa” inThe Interpreters:
Of the first apostate rolling the boulder down the back of the unsuspecting
deity... and shattering him into fragments which were picked up and pieced
together with devotion...(TI,)
Atunda (or Atooda in other versions of the myth), rebellious slave and
archetypal rebel, rolls a rock down on Orisanla, the father of the gods in
the Yoruba pantheon. This act of “apostasy” which dismembers the orig-
inal Oneness, inaugurates fragmentation and heterogeneity and what
Soyinka in “The Fourth Stage” calls “the separation of self from essence.”
In our author’s highly idiosyncratic appropriation of this myth, Ogun
is the deity who, among all the gods in the pantheon, accepts fully the