WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment 

the heady and pervasive racialization that decisively shaped N ́egritude
and to a lesser extent marked protest poetry in Anglophone Africa had
become a spent force bywhenOgun Abibimanburst on the literary
scene with the force of a thunderstorm, with its reprise of race as a fount
of political community, its insistence on historic redress of ancient and
modern wrongs against black people, and its project of articulating the
deepest promptings of the collective psyche of a continent. The gloss that
Soyinka provides on the wordAbibimanis explicit on these points:

Abibiman: The Black nation; the Land of the Black Peoples; the Black World;
that which pertains to, the matter, the affair of Black peoples. (OA,)

In its conception,Ogun Abibimanmay have been going against the grain
of cultural politics and ideological discourses when it was published,
but by seizing on a specific event which did cause ripples throughout
Africa, it gave substance and compelling force to its immersion in racial
myths of heroic, redemptive action by messianic “race men” like the
two protagonists of the poem, Ogun and Shaka. This event was the
declaration by the late Samora Machel, then president of the nation-
state of Mozambique, that from that year, the people of his nation
were placing themselves in readiness for war against the illegal white
supremacist regime in Rhodesia and the bastion of state racism further
south. Moreover,Ogun Abibimansought and found emotive, symbolic
force for racial mobilization by exposing the deeply racialist, deeply
ethnocentric universalism of the supporters and backers of apartheid in
the West.
A poem of course works or fails not primarily on account of the circum-
stances of its conception and composition, but on the basis of its achieved
effect or impact. All the same, Soyinka seems to have taken care to bring
auspicious political and cultural events to bear on his apparent objective
in writing this poem, this being the ideological mobilization of an entire
continent to give apartheid the fight of its life. One of these events is of
course the poem’s origin in Samora Machel’s historic declaration. Other
auspicious material quarried by Soyinka in the poem is the tradition of
the racial ethnopoetics of N ́egritude in its classical period in thes
ands.The mobilization of these two events works to enhance the
desired impact ofOgun Abibiman. Perhaps the most striking expression of
this is in the heightened aural and performative idiom and tone that the
poem appropriates from N ́egritude poetry of thes and from Yoruba
ijalapoetry. Thus, though on one levelOgun Abibimanis highly literary, it
is a poem very much intended to be spoken aloud and performed. It very