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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
"The Last Proof of the Human in You": Wole Soyinka and the Oedipus Myth
| Panel |
4. "African Oedipus"
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| Paper ID | 633 |
| Author(s) |
Buchanan, Bradley William
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | My paper deals with Wole Soykinka’s use of the Oedipus myth in his early radio play Camwood on the Leaves, as well as in his later plays Death and the King’s Horseman, Madmen and Specialists and The Strong Breed. Although Soyinka highlights the incestuous and parricidal elements of the myth, I argue that Soyinka’s interest in Oedipus is not primarily psychoanalytic but political, philosophical and anthropological. Like Pentheus (the hero of Euripedes’ The Bacchae, adapted by Soyinka) and Sango (an African hero-king discussed in Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World) Oedipus is interesting insofar as he shows human intelligence encroaching on divine territory and risking degradation and dissolution. Soyinka suggests that symbolically incestuous or parricidal actions (which seem to disobey universal human laws and thus merit the punishment Oedipus inflicted on himself by gouging out his eyes) may in fact be the most significant gestures humans can make.
Soyinka’s self-consciously Nietzschean celebration of Dionysian excess, madness and self-destruction challenges many of the pieties of political correctness, but he also uses these motifs to critique specific aspects of Nigerian politics. For instance, Bero’s boasts about cannibalism in Madmen and Specialists are commentaries on the Nigerian civil war and its atrocities. This violation of "civilized" human values, while not explicitly Oedipal, is part of Bero’s revolt against his father, a revolt that culminates in an act of parricide that (since his father was about to murders an innocent beggar when Bero kills him), paradoxically affirms the humane values Bero professes to have abandoned.
My paper will place Soyinka’s complex responses to the Oedipus story in the context of Yoruba myth, and compare him briefly to the Nigerian writer Ola Rotimi, the less well-known author of the play The Gods Are Not to Blame (an adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus in light of African tribal conflicts). I will argue that both Rotimi and Soyinka rely on provocatively ambiguous ideas about the coexistence of fate and free will in human affairs (Rotimi’s description of the pre-natal process of akunleyan, or "kneeling down to choose" will be a case in point).
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