Wole Soyinka
own critical thought, as we will presently demonstrate, is an obsessive
concern that, with few notable exceptions, the writings of his generation,
the so-called “literature of rediscovery” – together with the writings of
the generation of Senghor and the whole N ́egritude movement – was
bogged down permanently in Fanon’s second phase, the phase of a na-
tivist counterdiscourse to Western paradigms and discourses. This point
provides a useful bridgehead to our exploration of this first phase of
Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings.
By the time Soyinka launched his career as a critic and theorist, the
N ́egritude writers and the critical pundits of the “rediscovery” phase of
contemporary African literature, of whom L.S. Senghor and Alioune
Diop are major figures, had established what they deemed appropriate,
empowering responses to the binarisms of “indigenous” and “foreign,”
African and Western, “traditional” and “modern” and other questions
of the challenge of capitalist modernity to Africa.In the main, and with
few but significant exceptions, these responses rested on the thesis of a
fundamental clash of world-views, an incommensurable antithesis be-
tween African and European cultural traditions, an antithesis thought
resolvable only through abstract syntheses of the best attributes and val-
ues of both traditions.The critique single-mindedly sustained through
virtually all of Soyinka’s early critical essays challenged these claims
and questioned the validity of their aesthetic ramifications. The essays in
question are “Towards a True Theatre,” “From a Common Back cloth,”
“And After the Narcissist?,” “The Writer in Modern African State” and
“The Fourth Stage.” Each of these five essays addressed a specific, dif-
ferent subject, or group of issues or writers, but they all converged upon
a sustained and penetrating questioning of the ideas, premises and atti-
tudes which sought to celebrate and legitimate the so-called postcolonial
“literature of rediscovery.” It should, of course, be emphasized that these
essays are in the main in basic agreement with the implied “renaissance”
or “cultural reawakening” inherent in the notion of a “rediscovery” af-
ter the long night of colonial cultural subjugation; what these essays
vigorously contested were the superficialities and the paradoxes of self-
negation in apparent self-assertion in the postures, attitudes and ideas of
the standard bearers and pundits of “rediscovery.”
“Towards a True Theatre” is the most programmatic of these early
essays, as the title implies. The “falsehood” negatively suggested in this
title is wittily spelt out in Soyinka’s dryly sarcastic delineation of the atmo-
sphere of “preciosity” and “sterility” which the author sees as gradually
pervading the new “National Theatre” and “Arts Theatre” movements of