Notes to pages– Ashis Nandy’s under-appreciated book is easily one of the best on the subject
of the sources and contexts of subject-formation and self-invention under
colonialism. In this respect, Nandy’s book is to be compared with another
seminal book on the subject of self-invention, Stephen Greenblatt’sRenais-
sance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, University of Chicago Press,.
Greenblatt’s book shows the institutional and discursive constraints on what
appeared to be autonomous acts of self-fashioning of towering writers and
intellectuals of the European renaissance; Nandy also explores these mate-
rial and discursive constraints, but he emphasizes the important fact that in
colonized spaces, “self-fashioning” was as much collective projects as they
were focused or poignant acts of canonical figures. See Nandy,The Intimate
Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self Under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University
Press,.
A corruption of the phrase “peculiar mess,” the word occurs in the title
of Soyinka’s third book of autobiographical memoir,Ibadan: the ‘Penkelemes’
Ye a r s. It was coined by the popular supporters of a populist Ibadan politician,
Adegoke Adelabu, who had used the phrase “peculiar mess” in the Western
regional assembly to describe the volatile, scorched-earth political culture of
the first decade of independence.
Initially, Soyinka was surreptitiously and wickedly called “Kongi” behind his
back by many of his students and admirers in Nigeria. Kongi is, of course,
the dictator in his play,Kongi’s Harvest. Once Soyinka himself played the title
role in the film version of the play in, this lent effective consecration,
so it seems, to “Kongi” as Soyinka’s most widely used moniker.
For two interesting books on the subject of madness, misanthropy
and sociopathy in the personalities of enormously creative people, see
Albert Rothenberg,Creativity and Madness, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Press, and Hendrik M. Ruitenbeck (ed.),The Creative Imagination:
Psychoanalysis and the Genius of Inspiration, Chicago: Quadrangle Books,.
Ulli Beier (ed.),Orisa Liberates the Mind: Wole Soyinka in Conversation with Ulli
Beier, Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa,,–.
See Biodun Jeyifo, “What Is the Will of Ogun?” in Yemi Ogunbiyi (ed.),
Perspectives on Nigerian Literature:to the Present, Lagos: Guardian Books,
,–.
Isidore Okpewho,Myth in Africa, New York: Cambridge University Press,
,.
Martin Heidegger,On the Way to Language, New York: Harper and Row,
,.
J.L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press,.
For one of the most extensive and provocative theoretical elaborations on
the poststructuralist concept of articulation, see the third chapter of Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics, London: Verso,.
Elaine Fido, “The Roadand the Theatre of the Absurd,”Caribbean Journal
of African Studies(Spring),–; Segun Adekoya, “Re-planting the