In his work, ‘Achebe or Soyinka: A Study in Contrasts’ on which I am reflecting briefly in tribute to the recent passing of the author, Professor Kole Omotosho, he indicates respective ambiguities in both Achebe and Soyinka’s personal reactions and responses to the colonial encounter by their Igbo and Yoruba ethnic communities. He argues that “While Achebe understands the need for the Igbo to compromise with a stronger power in order to survive, he is not in support of a generation of Igbo having been the instrument of that compromise”.
According to the author, Achebe is uncomfortable with the fact that “his parents were members of that generation raised, trained and used by the white man to communicate with the Igbo people”. Consequently, he submits, rather than deal with this difficult challenge in his creative writings, Achebe prefers to write in his fiction about the period and generation before his parents, (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God) and the generation after them (No Longer At Ease, A Man of the People). Omotosho submits that “While Achebe’s work might not be considered complete until he has dealt with the historical experience of his parents in the same way that he had to write ‘Anthills on the Savannah’, there is no doubt that he has succeeded enormously in his chosen duty of vindicating the African past through looking at the Igbo past”.
As for Soyinka, Omotosho contends that “his own ambiguity resides…in the area of the rule of the individual and the role of the community especially at the point of creating new communities”. The author submits that against the background of the Yoruba’s acceptance of the white man as another, perhaps inevitable, episode in their history, Wole Soyinka in his works treats the colonial encounter as essentially a catalytic episode. In his words, “The catalytic effect of the colonial encounter within the Yoruba society becomes the area of his creative inquiry. This acceptance of the colonial episode as inevitable and perhaps not all evil led to Yoruba involvement in western education”.
Still with reference to the response of the duo to the colonial encounter by their respective Igbo and Yoruba ethnic communities, Omotosho is of the view that Achebe portrays the missionaries’ advent in Igbo land with a high degree of antagonism as if they found no welcome at all among the Igbo. Achebe, he submits, appears indifferent to the fact that the emergent, new missionaries’ era was “particularly beneficial to the weakest members of the society. In fact, Achebe takes the side of the ruling elite which had done precious little to help the weak among them. He does not see the survival needs of the weak and the poor in seeking salvation in the arms of the missionaries. Achebe is only interested in defending the Igbo traditional elite in both ‘Things Fall Apart’ and ‘Arrow of God’. Whatever happened to the poor and the weak and the low caste was their problem”.
In the case of Soyinka, Omotosho avers that the Nobel Laureate has been kinder and more sympathetic to the poor and weak characters in his plays, novels and autobiographies. Citing such of Soyinka’s works as ‘The Strong Breed’, ‘The Bacchae of Euripides’ or ‘Isara: A Voyage Around Essay’, Omotosho submits that “Generally then, while Achebe seems to have eyes only for the traditional elite, Soyinka represents the weak and the poor while refusing to defend the point of view of the traditional elite”. In his elaborate depiction of daily life in representative multi-religious communities of Igbo and Yoruba land, Omotosho calls to mind the validity of the late Professor Ali Mazrui’s formulation of Africa’s triple spiritual heritage – Islam, Christianity, and African traditional religion.
Professor Omotosho analyzes the works of Achebe and Soyinka within the theoretical framework of what he calls three agendas: the Pan-African agenda, the Nigerian nation-state agenda, and the ethnic communal agenda. Many critics, he avers, have taken the simplistic approach of interrogating the works of the two writers from the prism of one supposedly unanimous and undifferentiated African culture. Thus, once their works transcend the boundaries of Nigeria, they seemingly become part of a homogeneous species of excessively generalized African writers. He however argues that the criticisms of their works within and beyond Nigeria are inadequate and questionable to the extent that they ignore the substantial differences between both writers and simply lump them into the undiscriminating category of ‘African’ writers.
Since the most important critical challenge facing Nigeria since the amalgamation of 1914 has been that of making ‘out of many peoples one people’, what political scientists depict as the challenge of ‘nation-building’, as well as the primacy of politics in their personal lives and artistic pursuits, Omotosho also extensively examines in what ways their works and persona have contributed to the emergence of a common national consciousness or otherwise.
One of the most intriguing and fascinating chapters in the book is that titled ‘Pan-Africanism and the African Writer’. Here, beyond Soyinka and Achebe, Omotosho dissects the major works of other key African writers including Camara Laye, Sembene Ousmane, Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awonoor, Mongo Beti, T chicaya I Tam si, Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Es’Kia Mphalele. After an exhaustive reflection on diverse dimensions of the colonial encounter and the anti-colonial struggle, Omotosho submits audaciously that “If the Nigerian intellectual had been bold enough to insist that the encounter between the West and Africa in Nigeria had both positive and negative possibilities, we would not be where we are today, still attempting to make sense of the nation-state and modernization. If the Nigerian intellectual had been humble enough to accept that there were many ways in which the Western life was qualitatively superior to the African way of life, the encounter with the West could have been the beginning of a renaissance in African life and in African re-development”.
Continuing in this vein, he argues that “Africans must be mature enough now to accept that while theirs was not paradise on earth, Europe did not come to them bearing the fruits of the Garden of Eden. At the point of contact with the West, it is a fact that many African societies were near decay and stasis, whatever level of development they had achieved before this”. Nevertheless, he readily admits that “Arab and European slave trading activities in Africa worsened the conditions of Africans” and that “The pain is made even more unbearable because Africans collaborated in this grievous material and spiritual damage to Africa”.
Omotosho admits that diverse aspects of the colonial encounter including slavery, unequal exchange, colonization, and racial disdain were painful and humiliating for the Africans. Yet, he points out, perceptively, that “there are also aspects of this encounter which Africans can indeed be proud of: the great number of battles which African armies did win against superior western arms; the great number of African ritual objects stolen by westerners and the influence which these had on western artists and the continued existence of Africans on the African continent”.
As he rightly points out, “Africans are in fact the only natives to have survived in large enough numbers to challenge Europeans and other settlers for the ownership of their land. The North American native, the South American native, the Canadian native, the Australian native, and the New Zealand native have all been either completely displaced or else exist in ineffectual numbers compared with the European settlers in these places. Because it is the pain of African history that is more prominent, it is not surprising that the African has attempted to find compensation by valorizing everything on-European”.
In the chapter titled ‘Achebe, Soyinka and the Gods and Goddesses of their Ancestors’, Omotosho examines the orientation and attitudes of both writers especially to Christianity and Islam with reference to traditional African religious practices. Referring to Achebe’s obvious opposition to the seeming intolerant absolutism of Christianity, he quotes the celebrated novelist thus, “Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute. I am the truth, the way and the life would be called blasphemous or simply absurd for is it not well known that a man may worship Ogwugwu to perfection and yet be killed by Udo?”.
As for Soyinka, Omotosho avers that “When Wole Soyinka writes or speaks, then, he does so against the background of one African religion which has had the daring to take on both Islam and Christianity. He writes from a body of knowledge which is verifiable in the Ifa corpus, a system of divination which has given rise to many publications by both Western and African anthropologists”.
