5 - Conclusion

Summary

In conclusion, it can be argued that Soyinka primarily works within the modes of both satire and tragedy, employing the former principally as the language of critique, of revealing the corrupt underbelly of the post-colonial malformation as well as its colonial antecedent, and the latter as the discursive site where political and social change are enacted as possibility, a restaging of the primal Ogunian traversing of the abyss of alienation and the Atunda will to counter-identification. However, in Soyinka's framework, these are merely strategies rather than irrevocably separate modalities of engaging with the hegemonic, for, as we have seen in those texts where the two modes are deployed together, satire and tragedy can be profitably combined to offer the most piercing gaze at the tragic banality of post-colonial power. Indeed, it is Soyinka's ability to work with antinomies while also interrogating their axiomatic premises, that makes his work challenging and also amenable to contemporary post- Marxist and post-Structuralist readings.

However relevant contemporary cultural theories are to the study of Soyinka's work, and by extension to other African writers too, one needs to ensure that the use of such critical discourse does not rob the writer's work of its cultural specificity and historical rootedness. Soyinka has always written in response to particular pressing issues of his society, where he simultaneously addresses the problems of Nigeria and those of other African countries as well as of the African diaspora. One would have to take into account the totality of his immediate ideological context in order to preserve the distinctiveness of his cultural project while also opening it up to other avenues of interpretation, a performance of the dynamic critical hybridity presupposed by the writer's own critical practice.

In this regard, his essays and the numerous interviews he has given, as well as his journalism, offer a useful resource for specifying his cultural location. They highlight some of the political issues and intellectual debates which inspired particular aspects of his creative and critical work. That is certainly the case with his first collection of essays, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976).