“Frantz Fanon goes further to describe the psychological and spiritual destruction of black people. In Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon says, “Every colonized people---in other words every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality---finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.” No doubt Wole Soyinka witnessed the results of this cultural dismantling, the broken pieces of broken human beings, ripped and torn and set against each other, subjugated by a British culture that placed them in a status of illegitimacy and dependency they had not here-to-fore experienced.” “Born in Abeokuta, Western Nigeria in 1934, Soyinka grew up in a time of political and cultural ferment. Indeed the seeds of liberation movements had been planted and African people everywhere were beginning to press their demands for freedom. No doubt Soyinka’s body of work comes out of this witnessing as well as his growing understanding of the condition of African people beyond Nigeria, and beyond the African continent itself. Seeing cultural disorientation, alienation, poverty, discrimination, mis-education, disease, economic and political disenfranchisement and, especially, the lack of self-efficacy in the global African community, Soyinka no doubt sought an avenue through which he could express this catastrophe and an avenue through which he could change society. The African power of self-efficacy, he believed, would develop through self-knowledge or what he refers to as self-apprehension. This self-apprehension would in turn come through a connection or remembering of indigenous cultural roots. Drama and poetry became his primary mechanisms for “remembering” both for himself and for his community at large. Ato Quayson puts it this way: “Wole Soyinka’s work represents an important phase in the strategic formation we are tracing because of his attempt at a new mythography that draws from the indigenous resource-base [of African culture].” This indigenous resource-base, autochthonous in nature, represents Soyinka’s attempt to counteract and supplant cultural anomie and alienation. Mining the wells of Yoruba culture as indigenous world culture from [the] African continent (the origin of human civilization), Soyinka began to understand that if the world is to heal, it needs to reconnect with those elements of culture that provided it with a sustaining foundation of ecological and spiritual balance for thousands of years long before the advent of Europe.” “Wole Soyinka and the Re-imagination of African Theater: Artist and Art as Defender and Constructor of the African Worldview” by Robert Coles and Bartley McSwine
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 18:38:28 +0000
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