Ogun and Soyinka

Rhodes University
The Two-Faced Ogun: Postcolonial Intellectuals and the Positioning of Wole Soyinka
Author(s): Brenda Cooper
Source: English in Africa, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Oct., 1995), pp. 44-69
Published by: Rhodes University
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The Two-faced Ogun:
Postcolonial Intellectuals and the
Positioning of Wole Soyinka
Brenda Cooper
"the beginning of all understanding is classification"

Hayden White, 1978.
The question that I am asking in this article is: Within the debates about
postcolonial writing, globally and generally, where do African writers,
specifically, fit in? Two tributary questions flow from this source. Firstly,
is the term 'postcolonial' a valid and helpful one? If so, secondly, do
African writers fit into a distinctive space on the postcolonial map? I will
attempt to answer these questions theoretically in the first part of the paper
and then in the second part to apply some of these answers to an analysis
of developments in Wole Soyinka's writing.
These theoretical questions presuppose that knowledge arises out of
thinking structurally and holistically, and so it is with a justification of the
enterprise of classification itself that I will begin.
I use the term 'holistic* and distinguish it from the negative
connotations that have stuck to the term 'totality.' Whole refers to
wholeness as in health and strength, as in hole, or the gulf, the space
between, or as in holy, spiritual and sacred. Holistic thinking is the
recognition that global social, political and economic structures and
determining systems fundamentally affect human lives and creativity. It is
at the same time the humility to accept that knowledge of those structures
and systems is always mediated, debatable and partial. It is the certainty
that nothing stands still and that structures are in perpetual motion, that
systems undergo regular transformation. It is, finally, the acknowledge-
ment and celebration of the idiosyncratic, the unpredictable and the
inexplicable, which illuminates the insights revealed by structures.
English in Africa 22 No.2 (October 1995)
THE TWO-FACED OGUN 45
My attempts at classification, then, will be supported by tw

probably mixed) metaphorical pillars. Firstly, the boundary, as i
border post. This boundary is undeniably a fence, an identifiable
which nonetheless has a gate which admits traffic. In fact, the bord
has, by definition, the double function of identifying difference as
accommodating commerce, movement and transactions across it
The second metaphorical pillar is the kaleidoscope, which p
changing pictures, new configurations, wild, beautiful but none
never random patterns, depending on the movement of the instrum
changing times, the different contexts.
I am now standing at a border post looking through my kaleid
into the vast territory which was once colonised by many diff
colonisers, over different periods of time and spanning di
continents. What is to be seen?
First of all I see in this vast territory, with all its differences, common
features that give rise to what can be called a postcolonial landscape. This
is not to erase some very valid objections to the term that have been
raised. Anne McClintock, for example, articulately describes what she
sees as the pitfalls of an embracing concept of 'postcolonialism.' For her,
it simplifies and distorts those complex differences, reinforcing binary
thinking by reorienting "the globe once more around a single, binary
opposition: colonial/post-colonial" (292):
'post-colonialism' ... is unevenly developed globally. Argentina,

formally independent of imperial Spain for over a century and a half,
is not 'post-colonial' in the same way as Hong Kong (destined to be
independent of Britain only in 1997). Nor is Brazil 'post-colonial' in
the same way as Zimbabwe. Can most of the world's countries be
said, in any meaningful or theoretically rigprous sense, to share a
single 'common past,' or a single common 'condition,' called 'the
post-colonial condition,' or 'post-coloniality'? (294)
The significant historical and cultural differences between countries that

were once colonised is fundamental and undeniable. And this is where
kaleidoscope thinking has to come in. Looked at from one angle, and with
a particular set of issues and questions in mind, what is most significant is
these differences. Looked at from another angle, and never forgetting
those differences, the pieces rearrange themselves to show the
simultaneous existence of similarities.
I will attempt to classify the many different postcolonialisms into

identifiable and concrete different tendencies and positions, styles and
46 BRENDA COOPER
politics. In other words, I will suggest that these differen

historically, as well as out of the writer's distinctive talent. M
position, for example, is that African writers tend to inhabit certa
on the postcolonial map and not others and that this is for h
reasons. This is bearing in mind all the time that the internal post
boundaries that I will be proposing are in the nature of border pos
admitting traffic, movement and change, exceptions and surprises
The framework, the supporting structure, for my classifica
whole is that I am looking at one particular class of postcoloni
and intellectuals - an elite. We do not need to go into the whol
debate as to whether they are 'petty bourgeois* or whatever. It is s
to note that the very vast majority of the postcolonial writers and
with whom I am concerned are privileged members of their so
general they have degrees, usually including those from institution
the globe. When we break down this class into different tende
categories it cannot be overemphasised that we are talki
intra-class divisions of highly educated, well-travelled literati.
Within this elite class of postcolonial writers and intellectuals th
two major border posts which I call cosmopolitan and decolon
will first sketch the difference between the two, and then elabora
complexity of the postcolonial cultural situation by constructin
subdivisions within both the cosmopolitan and decolonising pos
will suggest that African writers tend to travel within one o
subdivision of the decolonising position. There is no simple p
politically between the cosmopolitans and decolonisers; no bin
and bad. While these categories do relate crucially to polit
ideological positions, we will see, for example, that oppo
imperialism cuts across them.
Cosmopolitanism and Decolonisation

And I lost in the morning mist
of an age at a riverside keep
wandering in the mystic rhythm
of jungle drums and the concerto. (Okara 121)
Nearly three decades have passed since Okara's "Piano and Dru
published. The 'piano and drums' syndrome provided an e
symbolic shorthand for the compelling theme of the clashing o
- the foreign, colonial invasion of indigenous African lifesty
values. The poem stereotyped and distorted images of Africa and

but in doing so, it expressed powerfully and poignantly the reality
many African intellectuals saw their personal fates and their con
history. The poem also accurately expressed the shock of the c
encounter before its incorporation into the fabric of post-colonial li
Today the imagery is radically outdated. 'Culture clash' no lon
resonance with the reality of life in the African city or of Af
intellectuals teaching in New York, winning Nobel Prizes or fu
writer-in-residencies in London or Paris. What is the more appr
symbolic shorthand? Salman Rushdie "rejoices" in his "mongre
as an image contrasting with the 'piano and drums':
The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the

transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations o
human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices i
mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange
hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters th
world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world
and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for
change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our
mongrel selves.
(Rushdie, In Good Faith 4)
When Rushdie is not rejoicing, he writes an awareness into his fiction t
there is no turning back:
He had fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of
the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger,
a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully
against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and
begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his
skin. Chamcha picked up a stone and began to batter at the glass.
At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked
surface of the stranger's body, and when Chamcha tried to pick
off the broken shards the other began to scream, because chunks
of his flesh were coming away with the glass.
(Rushdie, The Satanic Verses 33-4)
Saladin is neither drum nor piano, but a new, hybrid instrument which
be smashed and destroyed if the futile attempt at unravelling its multi
parts is made.
Do African writers and intellectuals partake of this postcolonial g
phenomenon of acknowledgement of cultural fusion, of syncretic
Surely Rushdie's sentiments can be applied to African writers if, as I th
48 BRENDA COOPER
is the case, "the nature of post-colonial experience" in ge

"syncretic and hybridized"? (Ashcroft et al. 41).
Internationally known African writers like Wole Soyinka, C
Achebe or Ngugi wa Thiong'o do not tend to characterise their r
the same way as do most of the other 'famous' postcolonial wri
intellectuals from elsewhere in the Third World, such as Rushdie,
Marquez, Said or Spivak. The ideology and politics, the creative imagery
and symbols, the language and self-conception of the African writers,
while not internally uniform, are identifiably distinct from those of what
Timothy Brennan has called the "Third World cosmopolitans." Brennan
explains that he
began this book by looking at a group of literary celebrities from the

Third World who all seemed to share something. Originally, this
included Mario Vargas Llosa, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Isabel
Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bharati Mukherjee, and a few
others - a group I would come to call 'Third-World cosmopolitans.'
(viii)
Brennan also emphasises that these cosmopolitans are not an internally
uniform group and later I will outline specific subdivisions within it. For
example, politically "they do not share the same positions on the
contentious topics of socialism, NATO or the debt crisis," but they do,
among other things, share, and this is the crucial connection between
them, "a declaration of cultural 'hybridity' - a hybridity claimed to offer
certain advantages in negotiating the collisions of language, race and art"
(Brennan 35). They "belong together, quote one another and enter the
public sphere as a distinct community without a name. They do not yet
have a name because we are accustomed to grouping authors by language
and national origin, rather than by position or social function" (34). As
much as identifying with each other, they have been identified and unified
by the publishing industries and thence "in the minds of the Western
public" (35).
Brennan is aware that he has excluded an African celebrity like Wole
Soyinka from his list. However, he individualises Soyinka's difference,
instead of understanding it structurally:
Wilson Harris of Guyana and Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, for example,

are not grouped here because, while their creative sensibilities are
equally 'hybrid,' they have not entered the international scene with
the same pedagogical force. In spite of Soyinka's winning of the
Nobel Prize and the relatively high level of critical interest in Harris's
work, their books are simply too difficult for the parochial tastes of
the Western public - too rooted in alien histories and mythological
systems of their own making. They are not 'in-between* in the same
way. (35)
Rushdie, the quintessential cosmopolitan, does not write books that can be
described as easy reads, and Soyinka 's Nobel Prize has to count as
entering the international scene forcefully. Soyinka is not "in-between in
the same way" because he, and most African writers like him, do not
'declare' their hybridity, but assert an African nationalism that depends on
excavating a precolonial cultural past which, in different ways, they
exhume as the basis for purging their societies of the evils of cultural
imperialism. In this way, they propose to 'dcolonise' their cultures.
Again I need to emphasise that while African writers like Soyinka,
Achebe, Aidoo, Armah and Ngugi are radically dissimilar, they share
(albeit different versions of) this underlying nationalism. I will only have
the space to substantiate this here in relation to Wole Soyinka but have
discussed Aidoo, Armah and Ngugi elsewhere.1
In their The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin propose
various models for accounting for "the special character of post-colonial
texts." These include nationalist- and race-based models along with those
which "argue for features such as hybridity and syncreticity as constitutive
elements of all post-colonial literatures." They shy away from describing
these models as "specific and discrete schools of thought" because "in any
discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operating at
the same time" (Ashcroft et al. 15). That qualification adds necessary
nuance but does not obliterate the existence of those different 'models,'
which I am calling border posts to avoid static and rigid distinctions.
Ashcroft et al. are nervous of confronting the implications of their own
contrast between the cultural politics which attempts the "'decolonizing'
[of] the culture," with that of cultural syncreticity" (29-30).
Brennan too implies that there is another politico-cultural 'tendency,'
which fundamentally contrasts with the cosmopolitan writers. How does
he describe the origins and development of these cosmopolitans and what
does he, albeit in rough sketch only, suggest contrasts with them? Under
the heading Cosmopolitanism as the Enemy, Brennan suggests that "one
has to see how the concept has been formed historically." More
importantly, I think, he traces how it has changed politically and links the
politics of cosmopolitanism to its aesthetics. Brennan attributes
identification of the emergence of the '"cosmopolitan intellectual'" to
50 BRENDA COOPER
Antonio Granisci, who defined such an intellectual as "the

"poised against the vital work of creating 'national culture'" (
Brennan 40). "Against" is the keyword here in the sense of 'in o
to'; Granisci developed the "dichotomy between the cosmopoli
activist intellectual." For Granisci, then, the concept of the cosm
was a negative one, implying a superficial or "picturesque attachme
cultural miscellany based on empire." Most centrally, Granisci '
lay with "the cosmopolitan challenge to national culture" (q
Brennan 49-50).
Brennan suggests that a fundamental shift has taken place in the
of cosmopolitanism as Granisci saw it, as a result of "the great
immigrations to the metropolitan centres":
These immigrations - in the United States of Mukherjee and th

Britain of Rushdie, for example - have in a sense muted the nationa
question, not only because they have happened in the wake of (an
partly as a result of) formal independence, but because they hav
been motivated by economic and cultural opportunity or flight fro
repression. In that way they deny the old pattern of need to create
national mythos in the country of origin. (Brennan 50)
What Brennan does not emphasise, and what has not ch

fundamentally, is the "muted" attitude to "the national question." I
words, by moving away from the framework of national libe
cosmopolitans "violate an important Third-World rhetorical mod
Notwithstanding all their internal differences, I think it is true
that, if anything, the internationally known African writers have
more rather than less involved in issues of recapturing a local
culture based on a constructed precolonial past, as time passes
winning of political independence recedes into history.
It is now appropriate to propose some subdivisions that will h
enhance both the meaning of the two categories as well
heterogeneity of the postcolonial cultural terrain.
Within the decolonising tendency, there are at least three im
trends. Firstly there is the cultural nationalism that is vi
anti-foreigner, fiercely Manichean, polarising society into them
white and black, good and bad, played out on local national or
grounds and which has to be seen as reverse, reactive racialism
that the middle to later fiction of Ayi Kwei Annah and the A
Aidoo of Our Sister Killjoy fits into this trend. Secondly there is th
moderate cultural nationalism that seeks quite elite solutions to
problems, usually through the medium of myth. This we will see in

development of Wole Soyinka's writing although his early work seem
to be much more cosmopolitan than that of other African writers. It can
seen in Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and also in Ngugi
Matagari although Ngugi will be travelling towards what can be cal
the third trend, which is the literature of national liberation, the writin
which aligns itself with organised national liberation struggles.
Similarly there are, I think, at least three cosmopolitan positions. First
there are the apologists for colonialism, of which V.S. Naipaul is oft
cited as the most notorious example." Secondly there are the syncreti
migrants who, like Rushdie, celebrate their mongrel selves. Thirdly, and
put this one tentatively, there is the cosmopolitan Manichean posit
which entirely recognises and embraces hybridity, which is far remo
from and even hostile to nationalism, but which has returned to a
Manichean position now on a global scale. I think the polarity turns on
racial divisions rather than on national boundaries. The 'us' becomes all
the shades of black, brown and yellow that are not white and 'they' are,
obviously, whites. I put it tentatively because here I think there are few if
any writers who wholly occupy this space. It most often emerges as an
attitude or flavour in the mainstream syncretists. The best example of it
that comes to mind is Edward Said's recent book, Culture and
Imperialism (1993) or perhaps the position that Michael Ondaatje takes in
his The English Patient (1993), which is passionately opposed to
nationalism, and ultimately centred around history as racial struggle.
Without these subdivisions, Brennan's most helpful formulations,
which originated my classifications in the first place, give rise to
unnecessary distortion and simplification. For example, he makes the
sweeping comparison "between the new cosmopolitanism and what
Barbara Harlow has called 'resistance literature/ the literature of the
independence movements." The latter, supposedly, engages overtly in
highly political struggles which "privilege the vision of the oppressed and
argue that process lies in organising from below" (Brennan 52). Along
these lines, he suggests that:
attempts to deal with the human effects of decolonisation have

produced their own aesthetic emphases, which are different from
those of the cosmopolitan Third-World writers. It is, of course, not
possible to discuss this vision 'as a whole' since it is not monolithic.
But in general it focuses on a decisive valorisation of 'the people'
52 BRENDA COOPER
and an insistence on 'national culture' - in the sense that culture
itself is meaningless if not considered 'in its national aspect/ (54)
This is in contrast to "writers like Rushdie, Vargas Llosa, Mukherjee and

Allende" who reject the view of the centrality of the masses "although
they are deeply aware of it. To a great extent their work is specifically
addressed to it, and against it" (Bremian 52). In other words, Brennan
links an insistence on "national culture" with "a decisive valorisation of
'the people'" as characterising this alternative to cosmopolitanism (54).
There are, in fact, few Third World writers who combine a
commitment to the masses with an emphasis on national culture. Such a
combination may well be a contradiction in terms. The passionate
commitment to nationalist symbols and cultural origins will tend to work,
as unifying myths of the nation do, against the specific needs and interests
of the poorest inhabitants of that nation. The same quite painful
absence/presence of these inhabitants populates the writing of Wole
Soyinka or Ayi Kwei Armah, while Ngugi wa Thiong'o is increasingly
hard-pressed in juggling his socialism with the growth of his quite narrow
nationalistic ideology. It is for this reason that I have made a distinction,
within the decolonisers, between the more radical, revolutionary variant
and the writers who opt for more 'liberal' and more elite solutions.
The importance of teasing apart the "valorisation of 'the people'" from
the "insistence on 'national culture'" is underlined moreover by Brennan's
two examples of revolutionaries who combine these tendencies -
Amilcar Cabrai and Frantz Fanon. These two men are far from typical of
the politics and commitments of Third World writers in general. Their
magical names become a symbolic shorthand, often providing
revolutionary rhetoric that conceals the real absence of ordinary people
from the political and aesthetic considerations of most African fiction.
Brennan ends his book on a note of real disillusionment with the
politics of the cosmopolitans, as represented by Rushdie, perhaps the
flip-side of his tendency to romanticise the possibility of genuine
revolutionary Third World writing. He suggests that "'discipline,'
'organisation,' 'people'. . . are words that the cosmopolitan sensibility
refuses to take seriously" (166). What Cabrai and Fanon (and Brennan
implies, writers of combative protest, dccolonising fiction) know and
insisted upon "was the necessity of national struggle. That is a point of
view Rushdie shares in theory, but which he cannot bring himself to
fictionalise" (166). Soyinka, Aidoo, Armah, Ngugi, Ousmanc, all of them,
know only too well the importance of national struggle, to which they
have, to a greater or lesser extent depending on who they are, sa

other more socialist visions.
Decolonisers are not necessarily more politically active and com
than the cosmopolitans. Trends in both resist imperialism, raci
corruption. Trends in both are privileged and elite. The point is
difference lies in the way they present, describe and concep
themselves. The decolonisers simply attempt in various different wa
for different reasons, and with greater and lesser success, to su
acknowledging their global and hybrid experiences as part o
self-identity or their ideological and political agendas. The cosmop
by contrast, overtly take pride in presenting themselves as non-nati
as new composite human beings living liminally in creative
interstices.
In other words, the cosmopolitans are far more muted and am

in their criticism of the West, far more open to the cultural and po
advantages of Western culture than their decolonising counter
However, while the latter, with their emphasis on a national culture
be far more oppositional to foreign influences, sectors of both tende
will resist Western cultural imperialism:
By stressing the global nature of everyday life . . . they [the

cosmopolitans] consciously allude to the centre/periphery conflicts
raised by decolonisation, and modify them by enhancing the role o
the 'West' as, alternately, foil and lure. And this is, after all, the rea
distinction between the new cosmopolitanism and what Barbara
Harlow has called 'resistance literature/ the literature of the
independence movements: namely, the role of the West.
(Brennan 52)
Again the lack of distinctions trips Brennan up. Certainly the attitude to
the West, as I have shown, is a crucial divide between decolonisers and
cosmopolitans. However, nationalistic decolonisers, hostile to the West,
by no means necessarily write revolutionary resistance literature, linked to
national liberation movements, as defined by Barbara Harlow (1987). Her
study helped me to clarify my third tendency of decolonisers. However,
she too collapses distinctions and thereby systematically destroys her own
argument by confusing writers who arise out of organised movements of
national liberation with elitist cultural nationalists, my second category of
decolonisers.
Cosmopolitans are not ultimately the apologists that Brennan

sometimes makes them out to be. That category is very specifically
54 BRENDA COOPER
reserved for the writers who align themselves politically and

with the West; who are grateful for being, as they would see it, 'c
They are a small minority within the cosmopolitans. Foil as well as
the West is a central cosmopolitan tension, and one which ensures
question of a national culture has been not so much abandone
posed in broader, international, new ways. The growth of vocal and
ethnic minorities within the mtropoles means that western count
being forced to account for the new composition of their col
make-up" (Brennan 50). Brennan's following comment is a
observation of the complex cosmopolitan politics:
The writers I had grouped together in various ways all supplied
skeptical readings of national liberation struggles from the comfort
the observation tower, making that skepticism authoritative. And ye
while mastering the language of the metropolitan tribe, they did n
assimilate in any one-way process. Being invited to speak
'Third-World' intellectuals, they took the opportunity to chastise to
and with the aid of their global awareness stated in clear accents th
the world is one (not three) and that it is unequal, (ix-x)
In summary, notwithstanding the different schools of writing to

Soyinka and a Rushdie belong, they occupy very similar social
as global intellectuals from the postcolonial world. Although th
selected, and been selected by, quite different cultural strategies, h
and traditions, their differences constitute an intraclass subculture
than a distinctive political or social rift.
Wole Soyinka - The Road to Decolonising

Wole Soyinka has been internationally well known over many
(He was Script Reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London as
1958.) Renowned for his resistance to negritude-type thinking in h
writing and his fierce assertion of the necessity of appropriating i
modern science and technology into African cultural productions, S
has tended to be categorised as a cosmopolitan, as defined abo
something of an exception to my suggestion that African writ
tended to be decolonisers?
Wole Soyinka provides an excellent example of decolonisation as a

powerful African cultural position. This is so not least of all because he
has journeyed from a position bordering on cosmopolitanism to a
decolonising nationalist position. At the same time his work retains strains
of cosmopolitanism and also threads of more extreme anti-for

Manicheanism.
I am going to sketch this journey by beginning my analysis with an
early play, The Road, at which I see Soyinka standing at a crossroads. I
will then move on to the highly publicised debate between Soyinka and
the troika, Chinweizu and Co., which established Soyinka 's reputation as
a cosmopolitan. It is in his essays contained in Myth, Literature and the
African World that I will locate the beginnings of Soyinka 's ideological
change. I will develop my sense of these changes as they are expressed in
some of his later essays. Finally, I will look at his fictional memoir, Isara.
The Road was first published in 1965. Its protagonist, Professor, is of
the 'piano and drums' era. He is the archetypal bizarre product of a society
reeling from the effects of massive, uneven and incomplete cultural
transformation. He is " tall figure in Victorian outfit - tails, top-hat
etc., all thread-bare and shiny at the lapels from much ironing" (Soyinka,
The Road 8). The Professor is a 'culture clash' figure, "lost," as Okara
would have it, "in the morning mist of an age." How, if at all, does he
resolve the contradictoriness of his parts? I have to answer this question
in relation to my prior one, which is how and when did Soyinka move
away from acknowledging hybridity to the search for modernity as
grounded in a constructed African cultural purity? To address these
questions, we have to understand the role of Ogun and the Quest in
Soyinka 's writing.
Soyinka explains that in Yoruba cosmology, in addition to the worlds
of the living, the dead and the unborn, there are the dark areas separating
them. Far from suggesting the romantic idea of cyclical unity among the
three, Soyinka portrays a frightening emptiness, a chaotic sphere which
must be bridged or gulfed in order for wholeness, unity and resolution to
be achieved. It is this "fourth area" that constitutes the spotlight of
Soyinka 's dramas, and it is here that the leading role is played by Ogun.
As Soyinka explains in his Myth, Literature and the African World:
In Yoruba metaphysics, no other deity in the pantheon correlates so

absolutely, through his own history and nature, with the numinous
temper of the fourth area of existence which we have labelled the
abyss of transition. (26)
What was Ogun's heroic history, acted out in the abyss? The gods had
become isolated from the world of men, from whom they were separated
by "an impassable barrier which they tried, but failed to demolish" (Myth,
Literature 28). Ogun alone refused to accept this failure and through great
56 BRENDA COOPER
courage, determination and skill, he succeeded in breaching the c

achieving his quest, in overcoming the distance that separat
cleared the primordial jungle, plunged through the abyss and called
others to follow" (29).
A unified world, however, does not annihilate dualities, amb
and paradoxes. Ogun embodies contradictory elements. Human
implored him to become its king which he reluctantly does. Bef
fateful battle he becomes drunk, and after destroying the ene
butchers his own men. However, Soyinka believes that Og
incorporating within himself so many seemingly contradictory attr
represents the closest conception to the original oneness of Or
(31). If there is any appropriate sphere for syncreticity to be
between the different orders, not only of life and death and birth,
and others, the sacred and the profane, the new postcolonial soc
and the old rituals and customs, surely it is here in the "fourth are
Ogun is the god who builds the bridges, who constructs the roads
facilitates the connections between differences - between the realms of
mortals and gods, living, dead and unborn, Christian messiah and ancient
gods, technology and faith, humans and their own divided natures.
However, it is not to be. No spanning of the gulf for Professor. He is a
failed Ogun whose sought-after word degenerates into gobbledegook.
"For once," writes Oyin Ogunba, Soyinka "drops his messianic mask and
looks at Professor at a distance" (164). The society is too corrupt, the
contradictions too severe for the distance between the worlds that
Professor travels to be charted. He will die ignominiously at the hands of
an Americanised gangster whose sense of the sacred is greater than his
own. The Professor's contradictory blend of warped spirituality and
criminality cannot forge the "creative-destructive principle" in a society
where all higher values of courage, honour and spirituality have been
spent. Professor is an Ogun with no firm base upon which to begin the
ultimate quest for unity between the metaphysical realms of life and death,
suspended as he is within the morass of social chaos. Such questing is
portrayed as a contradiction in terms in the modern Nigeria of bribery,
political thuggery, the anonymity of the city and the morality of the spider.
Soyinka depicts here the inability of myth to cure social ills, to resolve
irresolvable social tensions. In its openness and its irresolution, The Road
is an exciting and wise play grappling with complex dilemmas and
uncertainties. It, and Soyinka's first novel, The Interpreters (1970), are
works at Soyinka's crossroads. If myth in this early writing of the sixties
refused to mix to the texture of social cement and if Soyinka refused

to find a new kind of merging within a syncretist framework, or to bec
cynical and disillusioned and abandon the inspirational image of Og
which is as much a personal sign as a religion or a textual strategy,
what choices remained for him? I think that Soyinka chose the na
road of return to a constructed 'traditional' culture. I think that he turned
away from confronting his own diverse and complicated global heritage
with all its rough edges.
Cosmopolitans choose to accept and even to embrace the contradictions
of the hybrid conditions of their existence. This is not the road that
Soyinka decides upon. His lifcwork has been to fashion and re-fashion the
myth. His dominant, later tendency has been to create a "strong breed" of
"interpreters" whose messianic calling is to assume the guise of Ogun and
bridge the contradictions, if not ultimately to succeed in forging social
harmony then at least to offer the hope of individual regeneration through
the enactment of ancient ritual. (This is particularly the case in his second
novel, Season of Anomy, published in 1973.) Ultimately, even social
regeneration is achieved, as we will see, in Soyinka 's Isara, published in
1989.
The seventies saw the publication of Myth, Literature and the African
World (1976) that so articulately set out his mythology as a blueprint for
interpreting all his subsequent work, and, among other things, two papers
which aggressively respond to the now famous attack on him on the part
of what became known as the troika of Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike.
We must first look at this attack because I think that it played a major
contributing role in Soyinka's change in direction.
The troika argue under such bold headings as "The Inculcation of
Euromodernism in Nigerian Poetry: The Scandalous Leeds-Ibadan
Connection." They describe what they call "an alienating syncretism
whereby African elements are inducted into the service of a euromodernist
sensibility in Africa instead of euromodernist elements being absorbed
into the African tradition to serve it" and wonder "about the ways and
means whereby this wrongheaded and blighting tendency was imported
and entrenched." Their answer is "the Leeds-Ibadan connection,
personified in the roles of Martin Banham and Wole Soyinka" (Chinweizu
et al. 196). They accuse Soyinka of being an Imperialist agent with the
portfolio of cultural infiltration, whose brief was to destroy the African
cultural heritage:
58 BRENDA COOPER
Then Wole Soyinka, with his brand-new reputation, is parachuted in

(1960) from Leeds and the Royal Court Theatre, and lands amidst
much fanfare blown by such colonialist propaganda organs as
Encounter magazine, and goes into action to flush out and swat the
remnants of the native resistance to Anglo-Saxon pseudo-
universal ism. (203-4)
It seems that, according to the troika, thanks to the single-handed act

of British Chief Agent Soyinka, the spread of ngritude is contain
"British cultural imperialism can reign secure a little longer ove
minds in its African 'commonwealth' possessions" (204). Note tha
call to action on the part of the troika, and which forms the title of t
book, is "toward the decolonization of African literature." I am suggest
that this keyword, 'decolonization,' begins to dominate the ideolo
African writers and intellectuals enabling the excesses of the troik
fall very squarely into the Manichean dcoloniser category that I have
up, to carry currency.
The cutting defensiveness of Soyinka's response is a tell-tale indic
of his vulnerabilities. However, his "Neo-Tarzanism" paper, in whi
initially replied, still strongly echoes the tone of his earlier writin
asserts his right of access to his world heritage which is neither a
expense of his own culture, nor unduly complicates or mystifies
writing. In this paper he expresses his hatred of
the traditional Hollywood image of the pop-eyed African in the

jungle - "Bwana, bwana me see big iron bird." My African world is
a little more intricate and embraces precision machinery, oilrigs,
hydro-electricity, my typewriter, railway trains (not iron snakes!),
machine guns, bronze sculpture etc., plus an ontologica! relationship
with the universe. . . (38)
He again insists on the indissoluble coexistence of Western and Af

religious belief systems, but now with the somewhat new and, I t
problematic, jibe at the inferiority of Western culture and philosophy
other words, there are little hints in this paper of the later cor
cultural nationalism, which will dogmatically characterise Western cult
as monolithic and depraved:
Yoruba society is full of individuals who worship the Anglican God

on Sundays, sacrifice to Sango every feastday, consult Ifa before any
new project and dance with the Cherubims and Seraphims every
evening. Chinweizu and Co. may be surprised to learn that they find
it natural; no spiritual conflict is created within them and no guilt is
experienced. Being unwesternised in religious attitudes, thai is, not

slavishly tied to the western concept of a single form of worship for
the attainment of spiritual exaltation or divine protection, they live
without any internal contradictions. (42, my emphasis)
Notwithstanding the generalisation about inferior Western religio

concepts, this is, however, still very reminiscent of the syncretism of t
cosmopolitans. He asserts defiantly that "selective eclecticism" is "
right of every productive being, scientist or artist" (44).
Soyinka increasingly speaks the language of race retrieval of rac
essences, and the superiority of a monolithic African world view. In Myt
Literature and the African World, he insists that:
The quest for racial self-retrieval is not only a logical dimension of

the process of decolonization but a realistic reaction to the actuality
of internal betrayal experienced everywhere by the new African
polity. It is by no means a coincidence that this quest has become the
preoccupation of scholars, writers and social formula tors everywhere.
(1)
Soyinka is aware that this new emphasis on "eliciting the African
self-apprehended world" may appear to contradict old passions, but
defends the consistency of his ideological development in that he has
"long been preoccupied with the process of apprehending my own world
in its full complexity" (ix). The emphasis has, however, crucially shifted
to the language of "my own world," to the search for African realities in
their essence, notwithstanding that their essence is plastic and
accommodating of the accoutrements of modern urban life. Somewhat
ingeniously, Soyinka attempts to resolve the potential contradiction
between his old and his new outlook. What he is proposing is a brand of
Ngritude which retains what is now described as its fine goals while
purging itself of what is depicted as the narrow ethnic language of the
foreign, alien influence:
The vision of Ngritude should never be underestimated or belittled
.... This vision in itself was that of restitution and re-engineering of
a racial psyche, the establishment of a distinct human entity and the
glorification of its long-suppressed attributes. (On an even longer-
term basis, as universal alliance with the world's dispossessed.) In
attempting to achieve this laudable gpal however, Ngritude
proceeded along the route of over-simplification. Its re-entrenchment
of black values was not preceded by any profound effort to enter into
this African system of values.
{Myth, Literature 126-7).
60 BRENDA COOPER
Paradoxically, Soyinka has become more pure than the purists

ethnic than the neo-tarzanists. The problem with Ngritud
characterised as its being too European. The "effort to enter i
African system of values" becomes paramount for Soyinka. The
bracket and vague "on an even longer-term basis" for the possibi
more global "alliance with the world's dispossessed," combined w
denigration of European thought as a whole, brings Soyin
Chinweizu into a very similar camp, the acrimony of their ex
notwithstanding. This is not to say that in the seventies he be
traditionalist of the ilk of the troika. He retains his insistence on the
fundamental reality and benefits of modern life, of technology, of science,
of urban culture, but in quite a mystical and hazy way attempts to claim
these as transformed, by the Yoruba world view of old, into African,
rather than hybrid phenomena.
Soyinka 's increasing resistance to hybrid ity in general finds its specific
symbolic object in Brazil, in his rejection of the syncretism of the Yoruba
gods with the Roman Catholic saints. In Myth, Literature and the African
World, he denigrates the depiction of the Yoruba deities by the Brazilian
playwrights Zora Zeljan and Ijimere. From a superior African stance,
Soyinka bemoans the fact that "the Yoruba gods in the Brazilian version
do not sweat or copulate" (24). Whereas the Yoruba accept the
shortcomings of their gods - that they become drunk, violent and
destructive, along with their creativity - the insipid, philosophically less
wise "Christian syncretism in Bahia rationalises the existence of the
malformed in human society within the overall framework of
farsightedness and supra-human understanding of the creator god" (18).
Soyinka criticises the "transcendentalist essence" which has been
brought about by "the encounter of the gods with Christian saints." His
repeated reference is to the superiority of the imagery, the philosophy and
the spirituality to be found "in plays from the original source." The
Brazilian plays are peopled by creatures who have been "rarefied by the
incorporeality of those saints with whom the Yoruba gods have become
syncretised." How Chinweizu and Co. would have approved of Soyinka's
list of acceptable homegrown images whose absence in the Brazilian
versions he bemoans - "peat, chalk, oil, kernels, blood, heartwood and
tuber" (25)!
I think that cosmopolitanism in general, and Brazilian syncretism
specifically, poses an enormous threat to cultural nationalism, greater, in
fact, than that of European cultural influence. The Brazilian case presents
the possibility of a transformation of the most sacred African god

rituals. The appropriating power of hybridity, of the writers and artis
the Third World who have become cosmopolitan, intellectuals and ar
who are black, who have experienced colonialism and who revel in
mongrelism, hit all the wrong buttons for the African nationalists who
strategy of 'decolonisation' aims to excavate the authentic, pure spir
African culture.
The emphasis on the "authentic traditions" of African people continu
in Soyinka 's essays of the eighties. He admires Ayi Kwei Armah, w
the high priest of the positive espousal of the existence of superior Afr
traditions and authentic, pre-colonial spirituality. Armah is valued for
careful construction of mythical past as a potential model for the

future. At the heart of Armah *s desperate invectives against the
European and Arab slaver, and Islamic and Christian mind-enslaver,
we read the concepts of challenge to the new African -
self-retrieval, self-identity, cultural recollection, cultural security etc.,
as prerequisites for social revolution.
(Soyinka, *, Dialogue and Outrage 182)
It is clear here and elsewhere that Soyinka approves of Armah's strategies
of African self-retrieval (elsewhere referred to as "race-retrieval"). The
emphasis that is missing, that is essential to Soyinka with his stains of
cosmopolitanism, is modem, urban, highly technological life, which he
desperately attempts to conceptualise within an African framework, rather
than accepting the inevitability of something quite new emerging in the
modern world. It becomes clear that his own "principal concern" is "to
rediscover, express, re-interpret and otherwise creatively transform those
elements which render a society unique in its own being, with a potential
for its progressive transformation" (183). Soyinka repeatedly asserts that
"transatlantic adaptations" only serve to emphasise "the replete
self-sufficiency of the original." The original is always what is "authentic"
(252).
The decade ends with the publication of Isara in 1989. In discussing
Soyinka 's fictional memoir, I will take up the threads, which become
importantly interwoven, of both Ogun's quest as positive goal and of
Brazil as negative symbol. The book is set in Nigeria, where members of
the Brazilian family, the Santeros, are portrayed as either dishonest or a
decadent, dying breed. Madame Santero "was the last surviving sister of
the last male descendant of the Senhor." She "gave the appearance of a
diminutive queen holding court among subjects who had briefly excused
62 BRENDA COOPER
themselves but left behind their shadows" (Soyinka, Isara 203)

member of the Nigerian elite reminiscent of Soyinka's earlier Inter
is negotiating with Madame Santero because her son, Jos, stole fro
(what and how remains pointedly unspecified, assuming sy
magnitude). As the family is near destitute, Sipe bargain
spectacular, thoroughbred white horse, significantly named Bah
ritual passing over of a culture, heritage and birthright:
"Bahia ." Her lips trembled slightly as she turned round to look at
the photograph of the ancestor directly behind her. "That's the last i
the breeding line of the first Bahia, which came with him from Brazi
He named him Bahia. He wanted his descendents to have a live
reminder of their other home in Bahia" ...
"And are you going to sell it to offset your loss, Mr. Efuape?"
"Oh no. A king is going to ride it - into Ashtabula." (205)
The ritual, then, becomes all the more significant when it emerges that
instead of remaining a living symbol of Bahia, of home, the purpose of the
horse will radically alter to that of carrying Akinsanya, the new Ogun
protagonist, on his victory procession, the spectacle of which contributes
to his successfully ousting his more traditionalist rival to ancient power.
As always with Soyinka, the consolidation of African spiritual growth
and development, the achievement of the Ogun quest, relies on and
incorporates the world outside. However, the contribution ofthat world, as
signified by Brazil, is conditional upon its total capitulation to African
terms and demands. The dregs, after demoralisation and decay, are seized
and grafted onto African designs. There is little dignity or respect afforded
the pathetic Brazilian contingent in Africa where the mother, surrounded
by the shadows of her immanently extinct family, drinks to the clever Sipe
whom she admires as "a man who can teach Jos such an impressive
lesson" (206). It is abundantly clear that Jos can teach Africa nothing.
It is interesting to compare and contrast this Brazilian incorporation
with the role played by the white man, Wade Cudeback. It is clear that
Cudeback could only arrive in Africa once the Ogun, Akinsanya, has
breached the gulf. This answers the question: "Why should a white man
come looking for you today of all days?" (252). Only on that day will
Africa have the spiritual might to face Europe, enabling Soditan, fellow
teacher and penpal, to welcome the white man in the name of Cudeback's
own home - "'Welcome to Ashtabula'" (262). Cudeback, too, becomes
part of the ritual following along Ogun/Akinsanya's path. The crowd was:
nearly impossible to control as they sought to catch a glimpse of the

intruder from over and beyond the seas who had come to seek out an
Isara son - and on such a singular day! Did it augur well? The
feeling was - it had better! (262)
Soyinka recreates for us in Isara his famous white man of M

Literature, and the African World. There Descartes in his ridicul
helmet, with his absurd Western philosophical preoccupatio
fashioned in Soyinka 's 1970s unresolved struggle on two fronts -
the African neo-tarzanists and also in opposition to white racism
Here, in Isara he returns: "The motor-cycle half was ridden by
their own people, but the low-slung pod which shuddered on e
springs contained a white man in safari suit, complete with pith
(251). The "one of their own people" is firmly in the driving seat
white continues to look ridiculous in his pith helmet and safar
bouncing along in the side pod. His skin colour, in true Ng
tradition, is foregrounded derogatorily: "a man so pale, even to
including the hair on his skin, that he seemed to have been moulded
cotton fluff (252). However, the portrayal of the white m
significantly different from that of the Brazilians and relates, I thi
my earlier point regarding the particular threat that syncreticity p
decolonisers. Soyinka can cope with the white encounter after the se
that comes from the indigenous ritual safely enacted. In this c
Soditan, the teacher, can revel in reading about strange and inte
faraway places. His relationship with his European penfri
compelling and significant in his firmly grounded African cultural s
This exclusive, nationalist focus on African cultural unities, an
construction of prime categories of black and white, Brazil and
render the social complexities internal to Soyinka 's own si
invisible. This brand of cultural nationalism, by definition, cuts
distinctions of class and gender. Why then characterise Akinsan
Trade Unionist? There is nothing enacted in the book that gives
insight as to what this job entails, what workers' struggles are about
has to conclude that this is merely a gesture to resistance writing, t
category of decolonisation that does not in any meaningful way genu
permeate Soyinka's writing. The men, without women, who ma
break kingships are the old benevolent elite, the healers, strong
interpreters and messiahs who continue to rule supreme i
imaginations of African writer-patriarchs. Akinyode "faced th
squarely - Isara was still backward." Under the leadership of Aki
64 BRENDA COOPER
Akinyode and his cronies "between them . . . would provide the

(251). Soyinka paints a daunting picture of Akinsanya's (nic
Saaki) tasks and heavy burdens ahead as he cuts through the p
forests. It all falls on his individual shoulders with no reference to the
hope of some contribution on the part of ordinary Nigerians, with whom,
as a trade unionist, he surely must have worked:
Ah, yes, Saaki 's shoulders might look straight enough; Akinyode saw
them already bowed under the load of expectations. "Ani I that heavy
in your hands?" he had exclaimed with touching gratitude. It is Isara,
Saaki, which, alas, will weigh heavy in your hands. Must. And you
dare expect no gratitude, only more demands, more expectations, and
miracles, yes, nothing short of miracles. But no gratitude. That
emotion, Akinyode felt often, did not exist in Isara dialect. (259)
The exclusion of ordinary people has remained a constant through all the
comings and goings of Ogun - now a hope, now a disillusionment, now
achieved. Ultimately the keynote is one of the cultural nationalism so
distinctive of dcolonisera, Akinsanya as a black sun, an African cultural
god, whose 'Afro* dress emerges to carry the line of ngritude imagery in
which dress, food, names and skin colour signify everything:
Saaki 's face, a black sun against the sky, was topped by an abetiaja
of stiffened white damask, its triangular flaps bristling above his ears
in severely symmetrical folds, their tips at right angles to the ears. No
one had, until then, seen an agbada made entirely from eye etu. The
huge embroidered robe shimmered in soft contours with the motion
of the horse. (258)
Soyinka 's mission is now to contribute towards a "culture-secured

society" {Art, Dialogue and Outrage 184). What can such a society look
like? It is the vision of Saaki, a modern man returning to the source to take
up kingship and forge a path for his people; it is the polar opposite of
Brennan's image of the cosmopolitans for whom
the cosmopolis is no longer just life in the capitals of Europe and

North America, nor that place of refuge for the native intellectual
seeking a break from the barbarousness of underdevelopment a
home. It is rather (and simply) the world - polyglot and interracial.
(Brennan 39)
Conclusion
I would like in this conclusion to go back to the "Piano and Drums" era
and to tell a Brazilian short story in order to construct a symboli
shorthand for the historical difference between the decolonisers and the
cosmopolitans. The Brazilian writer, Georg Amado, published his story,
"Interlude of the Christening of Felicio, Son of Massu and Benedite, Or
Ogun's Compadre" (originally in Portuguese), in 1964, just one year
before Soyinka's The Road. This story can act as a foil to Soyinka's play,
in particular in terms of its portrayal of Ogun.
In "The Christening," Massu had a brief and wild love affair with
Benedita who disappears from his life, appearing only to present him with
a 'son/ a boy so blond and blue-eyed as to stretch the imagination that he
could have been fathered by the black Negro Massu. Massu and his
mother, however, accept and adore the child. The thorny issue is simply
that of the christening of Massu' s boy. I must hasten to explain that the
problem is not with the act of christening itself. This poor black
community is entirely happy with its adherence to both African and
Catholic religious rituals. The problem is that Massu has so many close
male friends and how can he choose the child's godfather without causing
offence? That his fears are fully founded is evidenced by the fierce
competition for this honour that erupts among the circle. Then Massu has
a vision that the Yoruba God, Ogun, appears and tells him "to relax
because he, Ogun, his father, would settle that problem of the child's
godfather" (Amado 170). With the assistance of the priestess, Doninha,
Ogun appears by means of "mounting" or possessing one of his "votaries"
through whom he announces that he has made the decision that "'The
godfather will be I, Ogun'" (181). The search is then on for a male votary,
one of Ogun's sons, to be his "horse," his mouthpiece at the ceremony, as
the woman through whom he originally spoke would not be able to appear
at the church as the godfather. Women predominate as votaries and only
by great luck is Artur da Guima found who was "a votary of Ogun." The
priest, Father Gomes, on enquiring as to the name of the godfather, is told
"Antonio de Ogun." The friends later explain that Ogun's full name is
Ogun Santo Antonio, given that he was syncretised with St. Anthony and
that it was appropriate that Artur da Guima go by Ogun's name on this
occasion. (One can only imagine Soyinka's response to such a name!)
The biggest threat to the smooth sailing of the christening lies with
Exu, Yoruba messenger of the other deities, described as "malicious and
66 BRENDA COOPER
easily irritable," a trickster who is "often syncretized with t

(362). Sure enough, Exu nearly destroys the ritual by himself
Antonio de Ogun, given that "gun had been delayed that morning
christening; he had to be present at long-drawn-out rites in Nigeri
Ogun is in a terrible fix on arriving at the church to discover
taken and "not a single male horse of his whom he could moun
By a stroke of happy coincidence, it turns out that Father Gomes h
is descended from a family that would have enabled him to bec
of Ogun, had he been trained and fulfilled his obligations instead o
brought up entirely Christian. With enormous relief, Ogun mo
other than the priest, Father Gomes himself, beats up the er
(leaving red marks on the poor old Artur da Guima's face), bani
and takes up his rightful place within "his old, familiar horse." Th
happy ending:
When the godfather's turn came, Ogun took three steps backwar
and three forward and came in a dancing movement to embrac
Father Gomes three times. Father Gomes, who was also Antonio
Ogun. It did not matter that the priest did not know it, but he was
son of Ogun, of Ogun of the mines, of iron and steel, of shootin
irons. Ogun the warrior. The deity clasped him to his breast an
rested his cheek against that of the priest, his beloved son in whom
was well pleased. (219)
The boy is christened in the Church of the Rosary of the Negroe

Yoruba god, Ogun as his godfather and Antonio de Ogun as h
The celebrations were tremendous and in "Pelourinho Square a
more than fifty Oguns [were] doing a victory dance. Not to me
other deities. They all descended, without exception to celebr
christening" (221). Negro Massu gained great prestige and stan
compadre of Ogun.
Nothing could be more different from the Ogun of The Road
defeated by the pluralistic society and who will emerge nearl
decades later in triumphal recapture of ancient African rituals, a ret
heralds, as much as anything else, the end of the Brazilian line in N
The Ogun of "The Christening" revels in his Catholic reincarnat
an ancestral image to Rushdie's India where "Bombay serva
Portuguese names . . . worship a Jesus who is blue like Krishna
in Brennan 40). Both Soyinka's and Amado's Oguns look at
transformed by colonialism, and attempt to address it. I h
suggesting that the critical difference in their strategies can
symbolic of what has grown into two tendencies of postcolonial wr

cosmopolitanism and decolonisation. I have further suggested
internationally well-known African writing tends to be position
decolonising spaces on the postcolonial map.
I have been implying that syncretism is a more realistic and com
characterisation of the modern global condition of intellectuals fro
postcolonial world. At the same time it is true that the attem
resolution of social contradiction cuts across the tendencies - one works
through syncretism, the other by way of nationalism. If nationalist
ideology conceals differences of privilege or gender in the name of a
unifying State, then syncretism too potentially dissolves social
complexity. The blond and blue-eyed baby, unquestionably accepted as
the son of the black Negro Massu, makes Amado's point that race is of
secondary importance in Brazilian society ("'There is more class
consciousness than racial consciousness in Brazil"').4 This is to some
extent more wishful thinking than reality on Amado's part. It is true that
Amado is acutely aware in his writing of the powerful determining force
of differences in wealth and privilege but he foregrounds this awareness
with an assertive aesthetic of cultural and racial merging, intermarriage
and syncretism which works contradictorily to erase this awareness and to
construct the old, problematic, liberal ideology of happy integration. The
syncretist imagery of "The Christening" has its own agenda as the poor
Negro Massu is depicted as rich in friends and in cross-cultural
encounters. The cosmopolitan world, for all its polyglot interracialism,
does not represent the migrant poor who inhabit the great cities of the
world.
Brennan defined his cosmopolitans in part in terms of being "those
writers Western reviewers seemed to be choosing as the interpreters and
authentic public voices of the Third World" (viii). Soyinka's framework
becomes an objective correlative for a class of Oguns who span the gulf
and face many directions and contradictions. In this sense all of this
stratum, whether they speak the language of authenticity and the purity of
ancient tradition, or that of mongrelism, are hybrids. The strategic
rejection of syncretism does not make a Soyinka or an Aidoo any less of a
complex mixture of welded parts than a Rushdie or a Marques. They all
struggle against the poison of cultural imperialism, but deploy different
strategies and weapons. In this sense they all struggle with issues of
postcolonialism, if from different standpoints, from different parts of the
globe, often facing in opposite directions.
68 BRENDA COOPER
NOTES
1. See Brenda Cooper, 1992.

2. See Rob Nixon, 1992.
3. Bahia is the Brazilian cily which is a centre of Afro-Brazilian religion.
4. I transcribed this comment from a BBC film of the series Films Around
the World, directed by Mary Sprent and in which Amado speaks.
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Todorov, T. 1984. The Conquest of America
York: Harper and Row.

Ogun and Soyinka

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Ogun and Soyinka

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Rhodes University

"the beginning of all understanding is classification"

English in Africa 22 No.2 (October 1995)

My attempts at classification, then, will be supported by tw

'post-colonialism' ... is unevenly developed globally. Argentina,

The significant historical and cultural differences between countries that

I will attempt to classify the many different postcolonialisms into

politics. In other words, I will suggest that these differen

Cosmopolitanism and Decolonisation

values. The poem stereotyped and distorted images of Africa and

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the

is the case, "the nature of post-colonial experience" in ge

began this book by looking at a group of literary celebrities from the

Wilson Harris of Guyana and Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, for example,

Antonio Granisci, who defined such an intellectual as "the

These immigrations - in the United States of Mukherjee and th

What Brennan does not emphasise, and what has not ch

problems, usually through the medium of myth. This we will see in

attempts to deal with the human effects of decolonisation have

and an insistence on 'national culture' - in the sense that culture

itself is meaningless if not considered 'in its national aspect/ (54)

This is in contrast to "writers like Rushdie, Vargas Llosa, Mukherjee and

have, to a greater or lesser extent depending on who they are, sa

In other words, the cosmopolitans are far more muted and am

By stressing the global nature of everyday life . . . they [the

Cosmopolitans are not ultimately the apologists that Brennan

reserved for the writers who align themselves politically and

In summary, notwithstanding the different schools of writing to

Wole Soyinka - The Road to Decolonising

Wole Soyinka provides an excellent example of decolonisation as a

of cosmopolitanism and also threads of more extreme anti-for

In Yoruba metaphysics, no other deity in the pantheon correlates so

courage, determination and skill, he succeeded in breaching the c

refused to mix to the texture of social cement and if Soyinka refused

Then Wole Soyinka, with his brand-new reputation, is parachuted in

It seems that, according to the troika, thanks to the single-handed act

the traditional Hollywood image of the pop-eyed African in the

He again insists on the indissoluble coexistence of Western and Af

Yoruba society is full of individuals who worship the Anglican God

experienced. Being unwesternised in religious attitudes, thai is, not

Notwithstanding the generalisation about inferior Western religio

The quest for racial self-retrieval is not only a logical dimension of

Paradoxically, Soyinka has become more pure than the purists

the possibility of a transformation of the most sacred African god

careful construction of mythical past as a potential model for the

themselves but left behind their shadows" (Soyinka, Isara 203)

nearly impossible to control as they sought to catch a glimpse of the

Soyinka recreates for us in Isara his famous white man of M

Akinyode and his cronies "between them . . . would provide the

Soyinka 's mission is now to contribute towards a "culture-secured

the cosmopolis is no longer just life in the capitals of Europe and

easily irritable," a trickster who is "often syncretized with t

The boy is christened in the Church of the Rosary of the Negroe

symbolic of what has grown into two tendencies of postcolonial wr

1. See Brenda Cooper, 1992.

Chinweizu, O. Jemie and I. Madubuike. 1983.

Social Text 15: 65-88.

Ondaatje,M. 1993. Tfie English Patient. London: Picador.

Said, E. 1993. Culture and Imperialism

African, Caribbean, and Black American Liter

Spivak, G.C. 1987. In Other Worlds. London

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