Wole Soyinka
encounter in these early critical essays. It is thus no wonder that in taking
up his critical lances as the nemesis of the N ́egritude cult of blacks as
nature’s innocents, Soyinkaappearedto be going in the extreme opposite
direction, that of a rejection, on the basis of an abstract universalism, of
any form, or expression, of an African cultural particularism:
The consideration which brings me, personally, down to earth is the thought
of the Angolan or South African writer, either in exile or making his last feeble
twitches before the inexorable maul of a desperate regime ends him. It is this
exercise of trying to read his mind when he is confronted by the operation of
the human factor in black states in which he had fixed his sights and which
always represented, at the very least, a temporary haven. And he sees, and he
understands for the first time that, given equal opportunity, the black tin god a
few thousand miles north of him would degrade and dehumanize his victim as
capably as Vorster or Governor Wallace. This fact has been ever-present, this
knowledge is not new, and the only wonder is that the romancer, the intellectual
myth-maker, has successfully deleted this black portion of a common human
equation...We, whose humanity the poets celebrated before the proof, whose
lyric innocence was daily questioned by the very pages of newspapers, are now
being forced by disaster, not foresight, to a reconsideration of our relationship
to the outer world. It seems to me that the time has now come when the African
writer must have the courage to determine what alone can be salvaged from
the recurrent cycle of human stupidity (ADO,)
Passages such as this abound in Soyinka’s early critical prose, and taken
out of context – as they have been, in some notable critical instances–
they give an entirely distorted view of his positions and attitudes as be-
ing one-sidedly and reductively universalistic. For Soyinka is abundantly
particularistic in delineating the cultural and social conditions of African
writing in his reflections on artistic responsibility in these early essays.
In the essay from which this last passage is excerpted, “The Writer in
a Modern African State,” there is a comparison of the collective situ-
ation of black South African writers with that of their East and West
African counterparts, there is an extended profile of the transition from
colonial to post-independence relations as a backdrop to the formation
of the African writer’s sense of a public, “continental” mandate, and
there is an evocation of the pervasive dislocation of the Nigerian artistic
community in the country’s slide to civil war. There is even in the essay
a harsh indictment of the hypocritical, benign paternalism of Western
critics and publishers which had the indirect effect, in Soyinka’s view,
of fanning the embers of social and political conflagration by their en-
couragement of euphoria, complacency and irrelevance in this “new”
literature from Africa. Taken together, it is the sum of such historicizing