Wole Soyinka
to be tempered by an apparent Russian spirituality, underplaying the super-
man rhetoric in the common onslaught on a reactionary social condition
(ADO,)
“Climates of Art” evinces an even more elaborate use of the extended
conceit than its companion piece, “The External Encounter.” The ge-
ographical metaphor of the title of the essay is transcoded to cover the
extremely wide and variable cultural “weather conditions” that artists
and their publics have to endure in the modern world. Beyond the well-
known contexts of censorship, repression and terror that define the reality
of many artists and intellectuals in the developing world, the essay is es-
pecially poignant in invoking the climate of terror in Idi Amin’s Uganda
which consumed so many of the best crop of the country’s artists and in-
tellectuals. Against such severely inclement artistic and cultural “weather
conditions,” the essay recalls the “climate” of new possibilities and ex-
panded horizons which opened up when thecordon sanitaireimposed by
the different colonial empires on their territories began to be lifted in the
s ands with the coming of political independence. Indeed, in
sections of the essay where Soyinka gives a personal, anecdotal account of
his own first encounter with black writers and artists from other parts of
Africa and the African diaspora – artists working in a broad spectrum
of media of expression and genres of literature whose existence Soyinka
and his West African cohorts had simply been unaware of – we have
one of the most affecting and graceful evocations in his critical prose of
a “Black World” of shared histories, values and sentiments which arose
out of an indisputably racialized experience, but is nonetheless an inte-
gral part of the movement on five continents to give modernity a truly
nonracial, transcultural and radical-democratic vocation. “The outside
world,” says Soyinka, “is not so outside” in our contemporary world. If
this seems to be a beguiling view of modern art and its publics, it needs
to be pointed out that this essay is imbued with a deep sense both of the
horrible things that have gone wrong on a global scale in the twentieth
century, and of possible future misuse of the vast capacities now avail-
able in modern civilization for instant human self-annihilation or slow,
inexorable planetary entropy. The most sensitive and prescient of the
world’s artists, Soyinka suggests, gain access to the human and spiritual
costs of these conditions of modern life often by operating as the uncon-
scious medium of truths and potentialities buried far below the surface
of the visible, empirical world or lying beyond the horizon of predictable
expectations.