Wole Soyinka, born in Western Nigeria on 13 July, 1934 and Nobel laureate as well as the winner of many awards is among contemporary Africa’s greatest writers. He is also one of the continent’s most imaginative advocates of native culture and of the humane social order it embodies. While Soyinka while praised for his work also suffered from critics largely due to being has been one of the most outspoken critics of the concept on négritude, which have been associated with Léopold Senghor, the writer and former President of Senegal. Soyinka sees that négritude encourages into self-absorption and affirms one of the central Eurocentric prejudices against Africans, namely the dichotomy between European rationalism and African emotionalism .”A tiger does not shout its tigritude,” Soyinka said, “it acts.” Even so, Soyinka’s critics failed to appreciate was the radical originality of his approach to liberating black Africa from its crippling legacy of European imperialism. He envisions a “New Africa” that would escape its colonial past by grafting the technical advances of the present onto the stock of its own ancient traditions. Native myth, reformulated to accommodate contemporary reality, was to be the foundation of the future, opening the way to “self-retrieval, cultural recollection, [and] cultural security.” In his banquet speech on receiving of his Nobel prize ,his speech which highlights his views as mentioned above and in his work with a perfect bit of humour and wit using his belief system as a centre point of this short speech. The god whom he refers to in his speech, is one of the many from the Yoruba tribe in Western Nigeria in Sub-Sahara Africa called Ogun. Ogun in a simple form is referred to as the god of Iron but Soyinka in his work and his speech introduces us to a more metaphysical nature of this god by highlighting his different part more like the Judo-Christi
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 06:08:13 +0000
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