Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings “African attitudes to race and culture” is the quarry in our author’s pro-
jection of the necessity and the scope of his project of “race retrieval.”
The energy, the vision of the whole book is devoted obsessively to the
subject of how African intellectuals have approached the massive historic
penetration of Eurocentric epistemologies into Africa itself, into its ideas
of itself, ideas of its peoples and societies about their histories and cultures.
In other words,Myth, Literature and the African Worldis only tangentially
concerned with what Soyinka identifies as the long history of the vehe-
ment denials of humanity or worth of Africa and Africans by European
philosophers, historians, anthropologists and writers. The central focus
of the book is, rather, the effects of this long tradition of Eurocentric
discourses, in Africa itself, and on African writers and intellectuals.
Now, on the surface, this focus seems nothing more than a revisit-
ing of the decades old contention of leading figures of intellectual Pan-
Africanism like Edward Wilmot Blyden, J.E. Casely-Hayford and Kobina
Sekyi that Africa must shake off its presumed intellectual and spiritual
indenture to Europe and revitalize “pre-contact,” precolonial African
orders of knowledge.Also, Soyinka’s premises here seem, again on the
surface, to be a rather belated discovery, on his part, that in the wake
of the colonial conquest, Africa had been colonized spiritually and in-
tellectually, the effects of these particular aspects of colonization being
much deeper and more decisive than the economic and political aspects.
But this entirely misses the point of Soyinka’s premises inMyth, Literature
and the African Worldand many of his subsequent critical essays, for his
contention is that while the historic fact of spiritual and intellectual col-
onization had all along been known and in many instances resisted, this
awareness and the resistances it generated had, except in a few cases,
not gone to the roots of the problem. Even more onerous than this, in
Soyinka’s view, is the suspicion that the effects of the spiritual and in-
tellectual domination of Africa by Eurocentric orders of knowledge in
Africa were being consolidated and deepened in the post-independence
period, this time in the name of a new, putatively post-imperial uni-
versalism, what Soyinka calls, as we have seen, “a universal-humanoid
abstraction.” Indeed, Soyinka calls this a “second epoch of coloniza-
tion” (MLAW, x) We can thus surmise that a keen perception of this
underlying premise of the “neo-N ́egritudist” turn in Soyinka’s critical
writings shows how distant he is from his early essays where one central
underlying premise had been the certitude that Africa and Africans had
not been as culturally and spiritually orphaned by colonization as the
N ́egritudist poets had lamented, that indeed, colonialism had not been as