The Homestead at the Exit of the Paterfamilias: African Cultural Thought after Wole Soyinka

The Homestead at the Exit of the Paterfamilias: African Cultural Thought after Wole Soyinka TITl ADEPITAN The core of Wale Soyinka's writing career is best described as a sustained attempt to locate African society in the twentieth-century context of the philosophy of culture. His was the immediale generalion afler lhe slalements of cultural assertion that began with Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and the Harlem Renaissance and continued in the pronouncements of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aim" C"saire, Leon G. Damas, and Frantz Fanon. The urge to speak was also influenced by the colonial situation on the African continent,' and there was the gravamen of the crisis of apartheid in South Africa, which Soyinka has claimed time and again as one the deep motivations behind his urge to write (Jeyifo, Conversations 117). The most essential factor was Soyinka himself, or, more accurately, a cast of mind that had the singular gift of encapsulating cultural statements in elaborate "shrouds" and "veils" of metaphors. As considerable as his involvement with contemporary Nigerian and African politics is, the deeper motivations for even Soyinka's latter-day works, consumed so much by an overt topicality, derive from his long-standing commitment to show his theory of culture and society and the place and role of the writer/artist within it. It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to propose Soyinka as a paterfamilias in the terrain of African cultural thought. His location in an identifiable, distinguished , and readily documentable continuum has always been unique. In a cultural and intellectual climate notorious for sundry distractions and the short shrift often given to promising careers, it may be quite startling to discover lhat Soyinka has not only been saying and doing the same things for over forly years, he has also been taken very seriously. With regard to his drama, however ,little attention now seems to be paid to the old ways of problematizing the antinomies of culture through the agency of the involved metaphor and mythmaking in some of his major works. What does this say about the career of the writer in its autumn season? That his concern and fascination with Modern Drama, 45:3 (Fall 2002) 358 African Cultural Thought after Soyinka 359 mythmaking is over? This article is concerned not with the pertinence of such queries, but with highlighting Soyinka's position in the intellectual history of African cultural thought, which is gradually acquiring a post-Soyinka character , especially with the welter of theories and discourses of culture and cultural studies that have sprung up in the last decade and a half. The article attempts to fe-inscribe Soyinka's positions in the mainstream of current discourses of African culture. Soyinka is one of those writers, and the list is long in literary history, able to accompany the creative dimensions of their concerns in art and society with rigorous critical and theoretical avennents on the relationships and antinomies of art and life. Writers who have provided possibly the best critical insight into their own works date back to Aristophanes (Atkins 11-32); in the English literary tradition, the growth of criticism outside of the traditions of Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus was shaped by such writer-critics. In the Elizabethan period, perhaps only Shakespeare avoided making major pronouncements on art and life outside the framework of his drama and poetry. From the Augustan period on, artistic protocol seemed to demand that every "poet" adumbrate the strengths of an artistic or philosophical point of view with a well-wrought essay. T.S. Eliot was the most distinguished voice in the English tradition of the writer-critic in the twentieth century, but his was the self-interested intuitiveness of the original talent eager to secure a niche in an unending, fluid, and indeteIminate continuum ("Tradition" 2013-16). But Eliot appreciated more than most the illustriousness of his own pedigree. He described "the condition of entrance" ("To Criticize" 13) into the ranks of the writer-critic. whom he distinguished from the "Professional Critic" (II), alias "Super-Reviewer" (12), "the Critic with Gusto" (12), and the "Academic and the Theoretical" critic (13), as simply that "the candidate should be known...