Wole Soyinka
of thes ands, the former is the most important essay on art and
the process of artistic creation while the latter is Soyinka’s most important
reflection on religion and human spirituality in the closing decades of
the twentieth century. The discussion or argumentation in each of these
essays is constructed around a central paradox, respectively of art and re-
ligious spirituality. A comparison of these respective paradoxes provides
an insight into the ambiguities and paradoxes of Soyinka’s own artistic
personality and his activist vision. Additionally, each of these paradoxes –
of artistic creation and religious creeds – builds on the same use of ex-
tended conceits that we have identified as a central feature of Soyinka’s
essayisticoeuvre; this time, the particular conceits are elaborated around
the terms “frontier” and “credo” in the title of each respective essay.
If allowance is made for a somewhat excessive verbal and metaphoric
play on the word “frontier” and its synonyms and analogues in “New
Frontiers for Old,” it becomes possible to appreciate the fact that the
central paradox of artistic creation argued in the essay manages to give
old or familiar ideas about art new and startlingly original reformula-
tions. The artist or writer, Soyinka urges, necessarily lives the paradox
of, on the one hand, the certainty of frontiers (which operate as effec-
tive barriers) and, on the other hand, the insistence that the frontier, the
barrier, must be crossed and exceeded. This is highly suggestive of old
debates between classical art and the anti-classical, avant-garde revolts it
always provokes or generates. In Soyinka’s reformulation of this age-old
dialectic, the artist who is happy, even exultant, to work within the aus-
tere restraints or “barriers” of classical genres and styles does so because
she knows that the power of the classics – whose conditions of produc-
tion have vanished or become attenuated – can only be “answered” by
the creation of new, vital forms. This line of reasoning provides Soyinka
in this essay with his most powerful and convincing arguments for the
appropriation of the “classics” of African art in sculpture, music, perfor-
mance arts, oral poetic and narrative idioms, and the vast repository of
ritual and mythic lore as models which spur the contemporary arts to
create new forms approaching or even exceeding the achievements of
the masterpieces of the classical traditions. This indeed is the underlying
signification of the essay’s title – “New Frontiers For Old” – and in a
vigorous presentation of the distinction between the worthy, productive
“frontiers” of the classics and the unworthy and crippling “frontiers” of
pseudo-tradition, Soyinka in this essay provides some very authoritative
and knowledgeable commentary on the state of diverse media and forms
of artistic expression in contemporary Africa, most notably on painting.