WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

 Wole Soyinka

consciously builds on the axiomatics of chanted, performed oral poetry
in its extensive use of a single image, idea or theme repeated in rising and
falling rhythms in alternation. This is why, in terms of pure narrativity,
there is little movement in the entiresections,stanzas andlines
of the poem. In place of a movement between unfolding historic episodes
in the confrontation of black Africa with apartheid and its legacies, what
we encounter in the poem is basically a prolonged, detailed exploration
of two moments: the present time of readying and honing the collective
will of the continent for the final battle with apartheid, a present time
very much like Walter Benjamin’s famous notion of “messianic time”;a
retrospective time of the last great stand of the southern African peoples
against the white invaders under the rallying banner of the amaZulu
and their monarch, Shaka. For the former, Soyinka returns to “Idanre”
as a sort of prolegomenon to re-animate Ogun, but this time both the
external profile of the god’s attributes and the plunge into the deity’s
inner psychic states are expressed in much clearer, much sharper lyric
and narrative poetry:

Pleas are ended in the Court of Rights. Hope

Has fled the Cape miscalled – Good Hope

We speak no more of mind or grace denied

Armed in secret knowledge as of old.

In time of race, no beauty slights the duicker’s

in time of strength, the elephant stands alone

In time of hunt, the lion’s grace is holy

In time of flight, the egret mocks the envious

In time of strife, none vies with Him

Of seven paths, Ogun, who to right a wrong

Emptied reservoirs of blood in heaven

Yet raged with thirst – I read

His savage beauty on black brows

In depths of molten bronze aflame

Beyond their eyes’ fixated distances –

And tremble!

(OA,–)

The last twelve lines of this concluding stanza of “Induction,” the first
section ofOgun Abibiman, are direct borrowings, appropriately worked
over for a new context, from traditionalijalachants in praise of Ogun.
Incidentally, the same lines are repeated as the penultimate stanza of
the entire poem (OA,). The repetition and variations on the con-
stative phrase, “In time of,” all complemented by imagery from the
world of nature, is the kind of discreet folkloricism deftly deployed in