Wole Soyinka
historical Shaka is shown, if not adequately in the poem itself, in the
commentary that he enters on the Zulu monarch in his glossary to the
poem:
Shaka: King of the amaZulu, easily Africa’s most renowned nation builder.
A military and socio-organizational genius, he suffered from what, from this
distance, we can only surmise as manic depression. It resulted in the decimation
of his own people, a history which reminds one of a similar lapse in Ogun’s own
leadership of men (OA,)
But it is not clear,in the poem, that Soyinka escapes from a charge he once
leveled at the N ́egritude poets in his essay, “And After the Narcissist?.”
This is the charge of confusing the “totemic poet” with the “poet’s totem.”
By this he meant that in speaking for, or on behalf of a whole people
or “race,” the poet often confuses his own subjectivity, his own selfhood
for the collective racial selfhood touted by the N ́egritude poets. InOgun
Abibiman, the cast of protagonists, of speaking voices is exactly three:
Ogun, Shaka and the poet-chronicler-celebrant. Consequently the
“racial burden,” such as it is, falls on the mirror-images of one another
projected by these three protagonists. It is normally a tall representa-
tional and epistemological order forone manto represent the collective
will of a “race” or a continent without the sacrifice, ultimately, of ideo-
logical progressivism and philosophical consistency. Of the instances in
Ogun Abibimanwhen the flaws that result from this problem are starkly re-
vealed, none is more astounding than the following lines wherein Shaka’s
self-examination for the causes of his defeat from within (his own generals
and rival chieftains) and from without (the white invaders) is expressed
in imagery and tropes that reduce the complexity of history and the
multiplicity of causes to a rather conservative phallocratism:
The task must gain completion, our fount
Of being cleansed from termites’ spittle –
In this alone I seek my own completion.
Shall I be plain? The blade driven
True to paths of treachery – my trusting back –
This gangrene seeps, not through Shaka’s heart
But in his loins. The sere bequest yet haunts
Descendants of the amaZulu, empty husks
Worm-hollowed in place of bursting germ.
The purifying path lies in this knowledge –
The termites that would eat the kingdom
First build their nest
In the loin-cloth of the king ()