Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment post-Soweto period, this construction of Mandela in the mold of the
Coriolanus complex may be excused as an expression of the poet’s de-
spair at the ebb of revolutionary currents of thes. This retreat from
the revolutionary momentum of the encirclement of apartheid in the
immediate post-Soweto period saw the embrace, covertly and overtly, of
“Dialogue” and “constructive engagement” with the apartheid regime
by some influential African governments; in effect South African politics
became very much an active internal dimension of the politics of the
African nation-states to the north. And this is why in nearly all the other
poems in this section, Soyinka no longer writes of southern Africa from
the seemingly unbreachable distance that had produced the stillbirth of
The Invention. With the additional factor of the internationalization of
the struggle against apartheid and the special intimacy afforded by the
revolutions in the media and the communications industry, Soyinka’s
perspectives in these poems achieve a convincing imaginative immer-
sion into the storm centre of the South African liberation struggle which
he had not hitherto been able to achieve in his previous literary efforts,
includingOgun Abibiman. At any rate, these poems teach a lesson about
political poetry that is rare in Soyinka’s previous volumes of poems: ide-
ology, ethical principle or life-affirming values, though crucial, cannot
substitute for finely observed rendition of the human reality affirmed or
protested. “Funeral Sermon, Soweto” is perhaps the most successful in
this regard and to say this is also to insist that the mode of reception
appropriate for such political poetry is not one which looks for instant or
clamorous effects, but one which makes great demands on the reader’s
concentration and imaginative sympathy. For as it gradually builds up
a vast profile of diverse funerary rites and obsequies for the wealthy,
the powerful and the hegemons of different times and places, the poem
subtly and gradually gives a new and startling edge to the politicization
of funerals in that period of post-Soweto South Africa. The irony de-
ployed is palpable and extensive but it is unforced. As deeply moving
as it is, it also subtly calls for renewed opposition to apartheid even in
the ironically capitulationist accents that the funeral homily was forced
to adopt because those funerals had to be “allowed” by the bureaucrats
and law-keepers of the apartheid Reich:
We wish to bury our dead. Let all take note,
Our dead were none of the eternal hoarders –
Does the buyer of nothing seek after-sales service?
Not as prophetic intuitions, or sly
Subversive chant do we invoke these ancient