Re/Views & Critique
A Skeletal Review of Wole Soyinka's poem, "Ogun Abibiman"
written by
Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim
A review of (or essay about)
Abstract
Wole Soyinka is both the most celebrated and the most criticized African literary writer. He has been an enigma, especially for his multiple, often confusing and contradicting viewpoints, and for his use of intriguingly complex diction. “Ogun Abibiman” is one of such. He, though a giant Euro-modernist figure, attempts to spurn theWestern induced idea of “Africa”, even the name. He further condemns, in its totality, the inhuman policy of Apartheid experienced by Black South Africans; and call on the entire Black World to come back home and take on their gods in what is called a “return-to-roots” campaign. This paper sheds some light on the first portion of the aforementioned poem.
Introduction
Yoruba people are said to have about four hundred gods. Ogun, as one of them, is the godof iron and steel who, according to their mythology, created the first road on earth. Ogunrepresents a powerful combination of creation and destruction. The power and dominionof Ogun, though to Soyinka alone and probably a few others, as Ogunba (2005) says, gobeyond that. Ogun, he asserts, belongs not to only Yoruba but the world at large. In hisessay, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of YorubaTragedy” Soyinka himself stresses that “Ogun…is a totality of the [Greek] Dionysian,Apollonian and Promethean virtues”. Ogun is further given a number of titles such as“protector of orphans”, “roof over the homeless,” “terrible guardian of the sacred oath”…Far above all this, “Ogun stands for a transcendental, human but rigidly restorative justice” (Soyinka, 1976).And, on the other hand, Abibiman, a word of Akan, a language widely spoken in Ghana,stands for the lands of the black people. With this, we get a blended title of the poem:“Ogun Abibiman”, meaning Ogun [god] of the black people (Osakwe, 1998). OgunAbibiman is one of Soyinka’s earliest poems. The short volume published in 1976 is bothpanegyric of the gods and celebration of the Black World – Africa – with a particularfocus on South Africa and, to a lesser extent, its neighbouring country, Rhodesia, nowZimbabwe. His thematic preoccupation is particularly a condemnation of the worstinhuman policy ever witnessed in this world, which is Apartheid.The volume is divided into three portions, viz.
1)
Induction: Steel Usurps the Forests;Silence Dethrones Dialogue,
2)
Retrospect for Marchers: Shaka, and
3)
Sigidi. The writerof this essay made an attempt to expatiate on only the first portion.
About the Author
Muhsin Ibrahim is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of Cologne, Germany. He writes on Kannywood and other socio-political and religious issues with northern Nigeria in focus.
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