Wole Soyinka
If it seems serendipitous that the third and fourth of Soyinka’s five vol-
umes of poetry,Ogun AbibimanandMandela’s Earth, are primarily based
on Africa’s own “deep South” and its tragic history, it ought to be re-
membered that the erstwhile South African apartheid regime, with its
“master race” ideology, its institutions of state racism, and its universally
condemned laws, policies and practices, had always obsessed Soyinka
as a writer and activist. As a fledgling playwright, he wrote and tried to
stage a play on apartheid,The Invention, but the effort was aborted be-
cause Soyinka himself realized that try as much as he would, he could not
write about South Africa authentically and credibly because he lacked
the intimacy, the human and existential immersion in the actualities
of life under the apartheid regime. Thereafter, he shifted his searing
indictment of apartheid to the more pliable genre of the essay, produc-
ing powerful and eloquent critical vignettes of the South African racist
nightmare in such diverse pieces as “The Writer in the Modern African
State,” parts ofMyth, Literature and the African World, his Nobel acceptance
speech, “This Past Must Address Its Present” and “Climates of Art.” It
therefore seems that these two particular volumes of Soyinka’s poems
return to the challenge that had bucked him inThe Invention, this time
not in the medium of drama, but through sub-genres of poetry like the
hybridized mix of the lyric, the epic and the neotraditional Yorubaijala
chant.Mandela’s Earthof course contains a lot else beside the poems on
South Africa; indeed of all the volumes of Soyinka’s poetry, this is the
least organized around a cluster of associated themes.
The group of poems which giveOgun Abibimanits title is not only
the opening section of the volume, it is also the longest. Additionally,
in some of the pieces in this volume we see a new, higher level of po-
litical poetry than in any previous effort by Soyinka in that sub-genre.
Bywhen the collection was published, Frantz Fanon’s prophetic
prediction that race as a powerful mobilizing political ideology would
become less and less effective than it had been in the heyday of anti-
colonialism throughout Africa, that indeed it would become more and
more cut off from the realities and dilemmas of postcolonial Africa, had
been extensively confirmed nearly everywhere on the continent.Race
did remain a powerful ideological and discursive marker in Southern
Africa, but even there the realities of “independent” Africa to the north
did substantially redound on debates within the liberation movements
in southern Africa by giving class an increasingly decisive pertinence
which had been nearly invisible in the anticolonial struggles of the pre-
and post Second World War periods. In literature, especially in poetry,