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Soyinka and his Radical Critics: A Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Brian Crow
Brian Crow
Affiliation:
Brian Crow isSenior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Western Australia, Perth.
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Extract

The volume of critical writing on the theatre of Wole Soyinka both in Nigeria and abroad indicates his unrivalled pre-eminence among African play wrights. His work is still not as well known in the West as it should be, though his plays do occasionally get performed, especially in the USA, and it is encouraging that six of them have recently been published in one volume in the Methuen ‘Master Playwrights’ series. If cultural chauvinism is at least partly to blame for ignorance of the Third World's leading dramatist, there is also a genuine problem of access to a writer whose work is ‘difficult’ even for the educated élite among his own people. Indeed, some younger Nigerian critics have persistently accused Soyinka of obscurantism and of being too much immersed in private myth-making, an arcane metaphysics, at the expense of communicating with a popular audience about issues which directly concern it. A heated and sometimes acrimonious debate has arisen in the last few years around Soyinka's theater, in which the dramatist himself has participated both as critic and artist. Since the controversy, like the drama, is not well-known, and some of its key texts are not easily available, my purpose here is to summarize its main features, the implications of which go well beyond the work of a particular writer, however important. In conclusion, I shall briefly review Soyinka's more recent work and its bearing on the critical debate.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 61 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1987

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References

Notes

1. The phrase is from his paper ‘The Writer in a Modern African State’ in Wästberg, Per (ed.) The Writer in Modern Africa (Uppsala, 1968).Google Scholar

2. Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge, 1976), p. 52.Google Scholar

3. Author's Note, Soyinka; Six Plays, The Master Playwrights (London, 1984), p. 145.Google Scholar

4. The Bacchae of Euripides (London, 1973), pp. 84–6.Google Scholar

5. Soyinka: Six Plays, p. 207.Google Scholar

6. Jeyifo, Biodun, ‘Some Corrective Myths for the Misguided Native and the Arrogant Alien’, rev. of Myth, Literature and the African World in Positive Review, no. 1 (Ile-Ife, 1978), p. 15.Google Scholar In addition to this and the article noted below, other significant contributions to the debate about Soyinka's work from a distinctively radical perspective include: Jeyifo, Biodun, ‘The Hidden Class War in The Road’, in The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London and Port of Spain, 1985)Google Scholar; Jeyifo, 's ‘Drama and the New Social Order’, Positive Review (Ile-Ife, 1978)Google Scholar and ‘Patterns and Trends in Committed African Drama’ in Positive Review, no. 2 (Ile-Ife); Ogunbiyi, Yemi, ‘Opera Wonyosi: A Study of Wole Soyinka's Opera Wonyosi’, in Nigeria Magazine, nos. 128/9 (Lagos, 1979), pp. 3–13Google Scholar; Etherton, Michael, The Development of African Drama (London, 1982)Google Scholar; and Hunt, Geoffrey, ‘Two African Aesthetics: Wole Soyinka vs Amilcar Cabral’, in Gugelberger, Georg M., Marxism & African Literature (London, 1985), pp. 64–93.Google Scholar Apart from the works by Soyinka cited, see also his ‘Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal’ in Morell, Karen L. (ed.) In Person: Achebe, Awoonor and Soyinka (Seattle, 1975), pp. 61–88Google Scholar; ‘Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition’ in Transition, no. 48 (Accra, 1975), pp. 38–44Google Scholar; and ‘Who's Afraid of Elesin Oba?’, paper presented at the Conference on ‘Radical Perspectives on African Literature and Society’, University of Ibadan, December 1977.

7. Jeyifo, Biodun, ‘Ideology and Tragic Epistemology: The Emergent Paradigms in Contemporary African Drama’, in The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London and Port of Spain, 1985).Google Scholar Page references are to this source.

8. Hussein, Ebrahim, Kinjeketile (Dar es Salaam, 1970), p. 53Google Scholar; cited by Jeyifo, , p. 40.Google Scholar

9. The Critic and Society: Barthès, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies, Inaugural Lecture Series 49 (Ile-Ife, 1982). Page references are to this text.

10. Barker, Howard, ‘49 Asides for a Tragic Theatre’, in The Guardian (London, 02 10, 1986), p. 11.Google Scholar It is worth comparing Barker's ‘theses’ on tragedy with the debate reviewed above.

11. For fuller accounts of Priority Projects see Gibbs, James, Wole Soyinka (London, 1986), pp. 145–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fiebach, Joachim, ‘Wole Soyinka as Director’ in Schumacher, Claude (ed.) Forty Years of Mise en Scene, Conference Papers of the Xth World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research (Dundee, 1986).Google Scholar