WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

Notes

.      

:  ,     

 

Bernth Lindfors, “The Early Writings of Wole Soyinka” in James Gibbs (ed.),
Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, London: Heinemann and Washington, DC:
Three Continents Press,,–.
InThe Interpreters, the motif of the mock-serious joke is built into an elaborate
scatological satire and social commentary in the journalist Biodun Sagoe’s
philosophy of “voidancy”; inThe Road, nearly all the songs and jokes of the
denizens of the motor-parks and the highways are ribald and subversive of
authority, respectability or piety.
See Soyinka’s review of J.P. Clark’sAmerica, Their America, “A Maverick in
America,”Ibadan,( June),,–. For Clark’s angry response see his
“Letter to the Editor,”Ibadan,(October),,.
Penelope Gilliat, “A Nigerian Original” in James Gibbs (ed.),Critical Perspectives
on Wole Soyinka, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press,,–.
The sixteen countries were the Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad,
Congo Republic, Dahomey (now Benin), Gabon, Mauritania, Cote D’Voire,
Malagasy, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Togo and Upper Volta
(now Burkina Fasso).
Political independence from colonial rule came to different parts of Africa
and the developing world in waves and cycles. In Africa, Liberia was never
colonized and except for Mussolini’s brief incursion into Ethiopia, that coun-
try was also uncolonized. Egypt became independent in, thirty-four
years before Ghana, whereas independence did not come to the Portuguese
colonies until thes and to Zimbabwe in.
For a comprehensive but highly problematic profile of the African postcolony,
see Achille Mbembe,On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California Press,
.
These aspects of his early career and development are extensively explored
by Soyinka himself inIbadan: the ‘Penkelemes’ Years.
For substantial discussions of these cultural and literary currents, see Kofi
Awoonor,The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture and Literature

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