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Particular Myths, Universal Ethics: Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers in the New Nigeria PATRICK COLM HOGAN In Myth, Literature and the African World, Wole Soyinka set out to formulate a theory of African literature in relation to myth. He criticized African writers who based their work on European cosmologies. urging instead greater attention to African systems of belief. In his preface, Soyinka went so far as to say that "There is nothing to choose ultimately between the colonial mentality of ... West Africa's first black bishop, who grovelled before his white missionary superiors ... and the new black ideologues who are embarrassed" by African traditions. "Like his religious counterpart. the new ideologue has never stopped to consider whether or not the universal verities of his new doctrine are already contained in, or can be elicited from the world-view and social structures of his own people"; Soyinka condudes, simply, "they can.'" In some ways, the statement is almost commonplace - an assertion ofcultural identity ofthe sort we have come to expect from post-colonization writers, Irish, Indian, African, and so on. And this is, for the most part, how it has been treated. Readers of Soyinka understand him as stressing "the necessity of de-Anglicizing African literature"

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