Wole Soyinka
text of revealed truth, one grasps the centre of one’s spirituality by re-
ducing the spirituality of religious Others to – nothing. On this topic,
“The Credo of Being and Nothingness” is at once a keen, well-informed
observer’s report on the state of religious extremism and fanaticism in
Nigeria and a wide-ranging reflection on the tendency toward regres-
sive, militant fundamentalism in communities dominated by competing
monopolistic monotheisms in the modern world. In this respect, the
essay implicitly but forcefully critiques the unacknowledged theologi-
cal or doctrinal predisposition toward exclusivism in all the dominant
monotheistic religions of the world, a predisposition which, in Soyinka’s
opinion, haunts these religions’ efforts at ecumenism and mutual
tolerance.
From the foregoing, it can be readily perceived that “The Credo of
Being and Nothingness” deserves attention as a vigorous restatement of
many of the radical-humanist, intercultural and internationalist themes
of Soyinka’s essays of thes. But the essay is also noteworthy in its
articulation of ideas and tropes fundamental to the crystallization of
Soyinka’s sensibility as an artist, and of his unique personality as an
activist intellectual. Thus, though delivered as an address to a mostly
Christian group of scholars and students who, moreover, expected a
partisan condemnation by Soyinka of the upsurge of Islamic fundamen-
talism in Northern Nigeria, “The Credo of Being and Nothingness”
turns out instead to be a deliberate celebration of radical agnosticism
and “pagan,” animistic spirituality. Indeed, while for most liberal and
radical intellectuals mobilized against religious extremism, secularism or
atheism constitute the necessary bulwarks, Soyinka in this essay holds up
the model of the poeticized agnosticism of the twelfth century Persian
poet and mystic, Omar Khayyam, who enjoined the liberal enjoyment
of wine as an antidote to the killjoy repressiveness of organized religion
and asserted: “to be free from belief and unbelief is my religion.” “Omar
Khayyam,” Soyinka observes, “scoffed at the reification of the ineffable”
in the organized monotheistic religions. This idea provides a link with
Soyinka’s affirmation in this essay of the value of Africa’s spiritual and
religious heritage for the modern world; this African spiritual heritage, in
Soyinka’s view, also derives from a radical refusal to “reify the ineffable”
into revealed dogmas which fuel the supremacist myths and salvationist
zealousness of cultures which set out to dominate and colonize others.
Indeed, the concluding words of this essay are worth quoting in the way
in which they seem to sum up Soyinka’s ideas on the tremendous residual
capacities in the heritage of spirit and imagination in Africa to meet the