Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings acting on the production and reception of artistic works everywhere in
the contemporary world. Like most of his essays of thes ands,
these two essays make the vastness of this subject matter manageable
only by the sheer poetic license of Soyinka’s use of extended, elaborate,
but also powerfully evocative conceits. In “The External Encounter” this
entails the animation of two African sculptural masterpieces – a Bakota
ancestral guardian figure and a Nimba mask – as representations of the
sensibilities of a different (African) earth “trapped” in an alien space
in the museums of Dresden. In this captive alien space, these avatars
of a separate African cultural earth watch with supreme self-possession
and ironic wisdom their reception by their hosts as quaint, “primitive”
objects – until their “discovery” in the explosive impact of African and
Polynesian art on the European modernist imagination between the
s and thes. Most of the essay is then given to speculations
on what these two magnificent African sculptural masks, animated as
ancestral presences and “replete” in their own cultural and spiritual be-
ings, would say to the changing, divergent patterns of responses to the
African cultural heritage from the late nineteenth century to the present,
among Europeans and Africans themselves. Among the essay’s most
enthralling deployment of this extended metaphor are Soyinka’s de-
lineations of the extremisms in exhibitionism, gratuitous shock effects,
racial exclusivism and bizarre fantasies and cults of power and aggres-
sion that resulted from some European modernist appropriations of
African techniques of image distortion and stylization, as in the cases
of the most infamous fascist and sadomasochistic theorists of Futurism
and Abstract Expressionism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Oscar
Kokoschska. Equally provocative is Soyinka’s characterization of those
African critics he terms “Neo-Tarzanists,” who decry artistic experimen-
tation and stylization as “unAfrican.” In his acerbic view, these African
“Neo-Tarzanists” are the unwitting offshoots of the early, pre-modernist
European incomprehension of the world-view and the techniques of
composition which produced the African sculptural masterpieces and
their parallels in African oral and performing arts. By this extraordinar-
ily provocative line of thinking, Vassily Kandinsky, almost alone among
the Abstract Expressionists, turns out to be far more “African” than the
“Neo-Tarzanists” and “primevalists” among modern African artists and
writers:
If African art and philosophy had any truthful, authentic contact point with
the Expressionist movement, it is probably through the Russian Kandinsky,
not surprisingly perhaps since...his theoretical pronouncements appeared