Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings unabashed theorists of racial superiority and denigrators of the African history
and being? (Soyinka,,)
In these and other essays then, Soyinka repeatedly insists on the enor-
mous impact of the ethnocentric epistemology of European discourses
on race and culture, not only on European writers and intellectuals them-
selves, but more crucially, on Africans and other non-European peoples
as well. However, Soyinka is at pains in these essays to avoid a mere in-
version of Eurocentrism, he is anxious to recuperate an “African world”
whose self-constitution precedes and survives the Eurocentric epistemo-
logical onslaught. And because his invocation of this “African world”
combines personal testimony with radical-democratic claims, it reads
simultaneously like the personal credo of one artist and a brief on behalf
of an entire continent before the tribunal of the world’s community of
letters and culture. This is particularly evident in the following passage
from hisNobel Lecture:
The world which is so conveniently traduced by apartheid thought is of course
that which I so wholeheartedly embrace – and that is my choice, among several
options, of the significance of my presence here. It is a world that nourishes my
being, one that is so self-sufficient, so replete in all aspects of its productivity,
so confident in itself and its density that it experiences no fear in reaching out
to others and in responding to the reach of others. It is the hearthstone of
our creative existence. It constitutes the prism of our world perception, and
this means that our sight need not be and has never been permanently turned
inward (Soyinka,,–)
This passage illustrates well the radical shift in perspective, tone
and subject matter that we encounter between the earliest essays and
Soyinka’s essays of thes ands. Where the earliest essays, as we
have seen, had attacked aggressive racial self-assertions and insisted on
“indifferent self-acceptance,” where indeed these early essays had implic-
itly but eloquently problematized any African literary-critical discourse
based onrace, the essays of thes ands – essays of the “middle
period” of Soyinka’s critical prose – assert the reality and vitality of “a
Black world” of Africa and the African diaspora. They also assert the
need to recuperate those precolonial, pre-contact traditions that have
survived devaluation by foreign waves of conquests, enslavement and
colonization and are thus vital for creative adaptation to the challenges
of modernity. Correspondingly, Soyinka in these “middle period” es-
says enters into both a sustained interest in the long history of Euro-
centric discourses on African peoples and cultures,andcontemporary