Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings the continent, especially in East and West Africa. The source identified
for this trend is the same everywhere: imitative appropriation of out-
moded, cumbersome or incongruous Western theatre forms and prac-
tices as symbols of progress or “modernness.” And the perpetrators, in
Soyinka’s view, are amateurs and enthusiasts made up of expatriates and
their pseudo-bourgeois local cohorts, as well as the new apparatchiks
of state bureaucracies responsible for national policies regarding culture
and the arts. “Towards a True Theatre” is Soyinka’s shortest critical es-
say, but even within this brevity, the critic is at pains to complicate and
finesse his call for a spirit of novelty and experimentation in the “new”
arts and literature(s) of the continent; specifically, he is careful to point
out that beyond the ludicrousness of the imitation of dubious “modern”
Western theatrical influences, there is something far more insidious:
I am not of course trying to create a morality for theatrical selectiveness.The
Merry Widowhas its place on the Nigerian scene as a piece of exoticism; the
crime is that it is the forces ofThe Merry Widowwhich have upheld what we may
call the Arts Theatre mentality...By all means, let us be accommodating – and
I say this genuinely – there is room anywhere, and at any stage of development,
for every sort of theatre. But when Anouilh and (for God’s sake!) Christopher
Fry possess audience mentality and budding student talent in traps from which
the British theatre is only slowly extricating itself, then it is probably time for a
little intolerance against the octopine symbol of the Arts Theatre (ADO,–)
What is at stake, Soyinka argues in this passage, is the misdirection
of creative energies – especially of young, talented student actors and
fledgling playwrights – through the importation of outmoded foreign
models which are touted as symbols of “modernness.”
“From a Common Backcloth” considerably expanded the terms of this
critique. The “backcloth” metaphor in the title of the essay refers to the
stock of ideas, themes and imagery from which the “new” African litera-
ture could draw and on which it could legitimately base its identity. This
motif of a “backcloth” lends Soyinka much figural play as he argues force-
fully for the rejection of both the “imposed back cloth of primitivism”
foisted on African writing by supercilious, “primitivizing” foreign criti-
cal pundits, and the “wishful backcloth” of an unspoilt African human
nature, a presumed closeness to the heart of Being which, as N ́egritudist
theorists averred, will be Africa’s special contribution to world civiliza-
tion. Indeed, the thrust of the essay is provided by Soyinka’s contention
that the most powerful individual talents in the emergent African liter-
ature had already laid to rest the primitivist and exoticist rubrics still
being touted by foreign “promoters” of African literature. Sentiments