Wole Soyinka
essays constitute a sort of vintage Soyinka literary criticism. Moreover,
almost in the accents of the historic Western avant-garde in its privi-
leging of the autonomy of the artistic process against the overpowering
pressure of a philistine bourgeoisie and the ravages of the marketplace,
these commentaries of Soyinka on his fellow writers in his early criti-
cal prose approach writers primarily from within, from the autonomous
space of the interiority of the artistic process and the subjectivity of the
artist. And since the immediate historic context is the first decade of
the post-independence era in Africa, Soyinka’s passionate solicitude for
the autonomy of the artistic process in these commentaries is made with
regard to formidable pressure of conformism that the flawed, myopic na-
tionalism of the period imposed on everyone, especially on writers and
intellectuals. It is perhaps not overstating the case to observe that Soyinka
was almost alone in insisting that the African writer ought to cultivate
and protect the uniqueness of his vision and sensibility apart from both
the “mass direction” and the conformist nationalism promoted by the
pseudo-bourgeoisie. Parallel to this insistence was Soyinka’s ferocious as-
saults against the pervasive “authority” of the loud, and aggressive racial
particularisms of the period, especially in poetry and literary-critical dis-
courses, characterized and derided by Soyinka in an early essay as a
form of narcissism, a form of self-manipulation and self-exoticization.
In place of this the Nigerian author advanced the notion of “indifferent
self-acceptance,” a sort of lived, unforced racial or cultural identity. The
assumption behind this was Soyinka’s suggestion that once racial iden-
tity becomes a label of a unique black African humanity and a seal of
unearned legitimacy, it breeds all kinds of distortions and simplifications.
And yet, in these early essays, in spite of his strictures against provin-
cialism and racial absolutism, Soyinka begins to explore “an African
world” of received paradigms and matrices of the artist and the cre-
ative process to which the African writer, in his view, must return. But
he was careful in these essays to emphasize that this “essence” of the
artist was different from the naive intuition touted by the rhapsodists of
N ́egritude; it is an “essence” inscribed in figures like Ogun, the Yoruba
god of war, the hunt, creativity and metallurgy, a god whose traditions of
praise poetry celebrate for his inquisitive, wandering spirit, his courage,
his solicitude for the weak and defenseless of society, and his mastery of
diverse arts and skills.
It is also the case that Soyinka in these essays often used the specific,
“local” textual exegeses of his literary criticism to elaborate the outlines
of a metacritical, “global” theory of artistic responsibility in times of