Wole Soyinka & Okot p'Bitek

Wole Soyinka is a Nobel laureate and a major political force in his native Nigeria, though the civil war in that country and the dictatorships that have ruled it have made it necessary for Soyinka to live elsewhere. His poetry reflects not merely his experience but the experience of Nigeria. Okot p'Bitek is another poet who has addressed many of the same issues, treating to many of the same tensions caused by the Nigerian civil war from his native Uganda. Both writers are creating a new literature that draws on the colonial past of their countries to find a literary accommodation between European and African traditions. Monye refers to the way Africans have been portrayed in the works of European writers such as conrad and states,

I believe that it is in reaction to this kind of portraiture of their people that modern African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Ayi Kwei Armah, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Okot P'Bitek, etc. have taken up the challenge to tell the story of their people and not to allow outsiders to do it for them (Monye corso.ccsu.ctstateu.edu/ctrev/af_lit.htm).

These writers are also reacting to the way their people have been subjected to political and social control, first from the colonial powers, since then to military dictatorships. Each poet also reflects a belief in the power of the movement toward democracy and freedom.

Nigeria was a British crown colony and protectorate before independence on October 1, 1

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terms of the different modes of thinking. There is a cast of Western thought which is a habit of compartmentalizing. There is an African sense of ritual and space that is very different. What we call the audience is for the African an integral part of the arena of conflict that is the drama and contributes spiritual strength to the protagonist through its choric reality, which must first be developed and established, defining and investing the arena through offerings and incantations. There would be no drama except as set against this symbolic representation of earth and cosmos (Soyinka 37-39). Theater is one of the first arenas in which we know that human beings attempted to come to terms with the spatial phenomenon of being. Ritual theater such as that in Africa establishes the spatial medium not merely as a physical area for simulated events but as a manageable contraction of the cosmic envelope in which human beings exist. This attempt makes every manifestation in ritual theater a paradigm for the cosmic human condition. The unvoiced fear in each case is whether the protagonist will survive confrontation with forces greater than himself, and the act of the protagonist is one taken on behalf of the community so that the

Category: Literature - W