Wole Soyinka
Are you now the crossword puzzle expert?
Chess? Ah, no! Subversion lurks among
Chess pieces. Structured clash of black and white,
Equal ranged and paced? An equal board? No!
Not on Robben Island.
(ME,)These lines come from the first poem of the volume, “Your Logic
Frightens Me, Mandela.” The careful, astute student of Soyinka’s writ-
ings may detect in the lines echoes of the praise singer, Olohun Iyo’s
praise chants to Elesin Oba inDeath and the King’s Horseman, especially in
the manner in which the apostrophes to the heroism of the protagonist
takes the form of repeated rhetorical questions whose imagery derives
from a threatened or fallen pastoral lifeworld. (“Do you grow food? Do
you make friends with mice and lizards? Measure the growth of grass/For
time’s unhurried pace?”). This feeling is enhanced by the fact that in this
and the other poems of the section, the poet as interlocutor and rhap-
sodist nearly always speaks in the accents of a “griot,” a bard of the racial
“tribe.” But if this is true, it is no less true that unlike Olohun Iyo inDeath
and the King’s Horseman, the bard who celebrates Mandela in these poems
is a modernist, ironizing “griot” whose locutions come from an acute
consciousness of a continent, a world which has been “wrenched from
its grooves.” This is why in “Your Logic Frightens Me, Mandela,” we see
a reversal of the restorative ethic of protagonist heroism which powers
the plot ofDeath and the King’s Horseman. For in that play, the loss of nerve
or will of the hero wrenches the metaphysical order of the world from
its course; in this poem, the heroic protagonist is completely self-present
in his will and volition and only this portends restorative bounty to a
“will-voided” racial community which parasitically feeds on the will of
the protagonist hero:
Your bounty threatens me, Mandela, that taut
Drumskin of your heart on which our millions
Dance. I fear we latch, fat leeches
On your veins. Our daily imprecisions
Dull keen edges of your will.
Compromises deplete your acts’s repletion –
Feeding will-voided stomachs of a continent,
What will be left of you, Mandela?
(ME,)Since nearly all the poems in this section ofMandela’s Earthare sharply
focused on events, personalities and institutions in South Africa of the