Wole Soyinka
and, above all,Myth, Literature and the African World. Where the protago-
nists of the earlier group of works strenuously distance themselves from
the normative, customary institutions and practices of precolonial tradi-
tion and culture, the protagonist characters in this second group of works
are equally determined to locate themselves in, and celebrate these very
centres and matrices of collective tradition. Thus, that there does seem
to be a gulf between these two bodies of Soyinka’s imaginative writings
and essays is a product of both the distance between their respective
ideological discourses and the abruptness of the shift from one ideolog-
ical register to another. It is indeed a combination of this distance and
this abruptness that suggests an epistemological break between the early
anti-N ́egritudist Soyinka and the seeming neo-N ́egritudist theorist of the
second and third decades of the post-independence era.
Although the biographical facts which establish this point about
Soyinka are well known, they do call for a critical review. His early career
as writer and critic closely followed his return to Nigeria after years of so-
journ in England, first as an undergraduate and later as a fellow-traveler
in the celebrated revival in the British theatre of the period. Highly con-
scious of his situation as a “returnee” to the newly independent nation,
Soyinka began a comprehensive research into the indigenous traditions
of theatre in West Africa soon after his return; these years of his early
career saw him traveling extensively in Africa and Europe and these are
reflected in some of the critical essays. More crucial perhaps is the fact
that our author gradually reinvented himself as indeed one who never,
at least mentally, left “home” in the period of his sojourn abroad. And
from this emerged the intricate web of Soyinka’s self-presentation as a
cosmopolitan autochthon, an urbane but rooted, centered “returnee”
which is very palpable in his early critical prose and his creative works of
the period. Moreover, the intricacy of this intermixture defies any simple,
uncomplicated links to biography or chronology. Certainly, the sense of
a radical divide in the Nigerian author’s critical thought collapses in the
face of a careful reading of the totality of Soyinka’s critical prose. In place
of a decisive rupture, what is revealed by such a careful interpretive act is
a body of postcolonial critical discourse which neither avoids nor reifies
the dichotomies of local and metropolitan, African and Western, old and
new precisely because it is remarkably attentive to the changes acting
on these dichotomous categories and reconfiguring them in the course
a tumultuous historical period. Indeed, in one of the few instances of his
own reflections on this subject, Soyinka admits that a shift did take place
in his discourse on race and cultural politics in the earlys, but he