Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings race, culture and nationalism, the Soyinka of works of the mid-s
such asPoems of Black Africa(),Death and the King’s Horseman()
andOgun Abibiman,(), and the essays collected inMyth Literature and
the African World() evinces an assertive, if extremely complex neo-
N ́egritudinist temper. In the first group of imaginative works and essays,
so strong is the critique of the romanticization of African precolonial
traditions and the African past that Soyinka escapes the charge of ide-
ological anti-nationalism or cultural deracination only because nearly
all of these works and essays also contain powerful, if critical affirma-
tions of the positive, humanistic aspects of that same precolonial past
and its cultural traditions. Stated differently, if none of the protagonist
characters of these works who embody a searing indictment of tradi-
tion can be remotely deemed deracinated or alienated “natives”, it is
nonetheless true that they do wage ferocious assaults on mystification
and complacency toward the ambiguous legacies of the past. InA Dance,
this role is embodied in Forest Head who organizes the entire sprawling
plot of the play around a determination to confront the play’s central
characters, not with the glorious past they demand of him, but with the
corruptions and brutalities which disfigured that past, especially the past
of their great empires.The Strong BreedandThe Swamp Dwellersboth con-
tain naturalistic versions of the epic, allegorical indictments ofA Dance;
in both plays, official guardians and priestly functionaries on whom the
legitimacy of cultural tradition depends are shown to be ruthless and
petty-minded toward any questioning, any exposure of their compro-
mised, self-serving manipulation of tradition. The relationship of the
plural, collective protagonists ofThe Interpretersto the past and to tradi-
tion is more complexly differentiated, but the single-mindedness with
which these “interpreters” pursuetheirown appropriations of tradition
in defiance of normative, conventional views and practices is entirely
consistent with the pattern established by the earlier works. The disdain-
ful musings of the “interpreters,” the novel’s protagonists, on romantic
nationalist myth-making, and specifically on N ́egritude, is a major part
of the ideological discourse of the novel, a discourse that pervades all of
Soyinka’s early critical essays.
In sharp contrast to this profile, the works of thes and earlys
are nothing if not Neo-Negritudinist in their evaluation of the African
past and of precolonial African traditions. In Soyinka’s critical writings,
the identification and valorization of a distinct “Black World” is first the-
orized in the Preface toPoems of Black Africa; it assumes vigorous thematic
and figural inscriptions inDeath and the King’s Horseman,Ogun Abibiman