Modernity and Its Mirages: Wole Soyinka and the African State

Abstract

We know that a broad and relentless interrogation of the African state constitutes the moral constant of Wale Soyinka's dramatic universe, whether he is employing the most arcane and ritualistic, or the most realistic and accessible, performance form. By the "African state" I mean both the established ruling institution and the existing social condition as a whole. This persistent critical interrogation has made Soyinka the foremost scourge of the seemingly perpetual state of anomie on the continent and those who manage and profit from it. Although this is less clearly articulated in the dramas than in Soyinka's other writings, I see the catalyst of the dramatist's huge exertions as one grand irony. a historical irony of epic proportion that serves as vast diorama: Africa as living a modernity it practically financed with its blood and toil, its human and material resources, but whose direction it is powerless to chart and whose effect it is unable to control. If the acknowledged gains of that modernity in the West — stable, orderly government, accountability between the rulers and the ruled, entrenched striving for egalitarian relations, rationalized bureaucracy and economic system, optimum management of the population — continue to elude Africa, it is not because Africa is not part of that modernity but because it is part of it unequally