Excerpt from Essay

Beyond doubts, Soyinka makes a successful attempt in presenting the African world, in a critical and richer perception. Debunking the European notion that literature, in the African context, does not exist. His argument and expositions, draw similitudes with the relativist school of thought which displayed a counter-revolt against the evolutionists’ argument that the African world is void of literature, and indeed drama. Soyinka punctures these themes with works of literature (African); history; ritual and Myth, with tentacles on ritual and drama.

He kickstarts with a Précis, explaining his motivation towards his writing. Acknowledging his experience at Churchill College Cambridge, far back as the 1970s with a student-scholar whose desire was a research on ‘Myths and black literature’. The research proposal was rejected, due to many claims that the project work is not researchable. Perhaps the Europeans must have guffawed saying ‘Africans don’t have literature, and it will be futile researching what does not exist’. By implication, the graduate student received no supervisor, until Soyinka, a member of staff in the department of English comes into the scene. Of course, to Soyinka, the project rejection was a mere display of cultural aspersion, and he takes up its supervision to demystify the Western views on African literature. Soyinka expresses a degree of disgust at the betrayal of scholars of African descent. Those who deny their affiliation with the black idea, because the bleached seemed better. Thus, constituting a part of the negritude problem. He describes them as ‘Alienated Africans’ and the Europeans as the ‘Genuine aliens’. Ogunbiyi categorizes them more similarly with an example of the ‘Echeruo-Enekwecontroversy’, Africans who employ Western parameters in judging the existence of the elements of drama, in the African ritual festivals; against a sect of true indigenes who believed drama had always existed. Theirs was a question of ‘medium’ and ‘context’ versus those of ‘content’ (7)….

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