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Chinua Achebe. Morning yet on creation day: Essays.

Garden city, New York: Doubleday, 1975; and Wole
Soyinka. Myth, literature and the African world.
Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 1976
a
David Dorsey
a
Atlanta University , U.S.A.
Published online: 18 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: David Dorsey (1978) Chinua Achebe. Morning yet on creation day: Essays. Garden city, New York: Doubleday,
1975; and Wole Soyinka. Myth, literature and the African world. Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 1976, World Literature
Written in English, 17:2, 453-460, DOI: 10.1080/17449857808588548

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449857808588548

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 *****

CHINUA ACHEBE. MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY: ESSAYS.

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY, 1975.

WOLE SOYINKA. MYTH, LITERATURE AND THE AFRICAN WORLD.

CAMBRIDGE: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1976.
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Especially for the non-African Africanist, contemporary Af-

rican literature often seems deceptively perspicuous. In part this is
because Westerners perceive the forms of the literature (when written
in European languages) as European genres adopted by Africans. Hence
there is a tendency to regardas faults any lapses from Western literary
expectations. This mistake is reinforced by many African authors' ob-
vious thorough schooling in the character and classics of one or more
European literatures. Further, the critic sometimes is overconfident
in his familiarity with the African culture represented in a work.

Beyond the myriad petty consequences of these problems

stands a more fundamental problem. European method and terminology
haveby accident of history become the international basis for the study
of culture and cultural objects throughout the world. It thus becomes
extremely difficult to formulate statements of metaphysical belief and
ethical or aesthetic value whose accuracy is free of European pre-
conceptions and prejudgements.

In a complementary way these two books address these prob-

lems. Achebe's Morning Yet on Creation Day is a collection of talks
and essays delivered over a decade. Soyinka's Myth, Literature and
the African World is a series of four lectures delivered in 1973, with
an earlier essay appended. Achebe's urbane and, given the provocations,
gracious essays confront the mundane sources of error. Soyinka's in-
voluted prose grapples with the transcendent. As neatly as though by
design, with substantive praeteritio each makes forced marches past
terrain where the other lingers.

Over the years with sober calmAchebehas offered reflections

on the specifically African nature of African literature. Often the sub-
ject is topical, but always he invests it with importance beyond the par-
ticular occasion. In the fifteen essays reprinted in Morning Yet . . .
three themes prevail: 1) the indefensibility of artistic canons of "uni-
versality" and "ars gratia artis, " 2) the defense of the didactic in Afri-
 454

can literature, and 3) the racism, error and irrationality frequently

found in Euro-American criticism.

In the explication of the essential spirit which informs the art

of so diverse a continent, errors, especially recurrent or influential er-
rors, must first be corrected. Achebe demonstrates that some of these
errors are plainly due to hubris. The essay, "Colonialist Criticism"
offers very concrete examples of folly clearly due to still prevailing co-
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lonial habits of thought. Perhaps the most amusing type cited is that of
the critic who knows and loves Africa better than Africans, or at least
he admires the "best" ethnic group in Africa—the one he visited. *

More important is the frequent criterion of "universality" be-

cause, as Achebe points out, it demands that subject matter and treat-
mentaccordwith the sensibilities and experience of the European reader.
But it would seem beneficial to also reiterate the obvious: that allworks
of European literature which are praised for their universality are in
fact extremely parochial in time and culture and space, requiring of the
reader astoundingly extensive knowledge of the culture that produced
them for even simple comprehension, and even more precise information
if they are to be understood precisely. Universality then becomes an
attribute of the reader, who by learning and by empathy can embrace,
comprehend, the human community in its disparate, alien identities.
The demand that a writer, rather than the reader, be universal stems
from culpable ignorance of human nature, which does not exist except
in its many specific and different cultural configurations.

Another common Western complaint, which Achebe addresses

often, deplores the characteristic didactic force of African literature.
On one level he shows that frequently the complaint is due to the critic's
refusal to accept the lesson taught, as for example the general distaste
for novels of "black-white confrontation, " which fail to recognize Eu-
rope's civilizing legacy to benighted heathen, or the fondness for Afri-
can novels which find fault with Africa andaré praised for their univer-
sality. The obverse of this counterfeit coin is, of course, ars gratia
artis. Achebe1 s argument against it seems to be primarily that, given
the exigencies of modern Africa, of men any time, anywhere, " a r t i s ,
and was always, in the service of man."

The truth is less sanguine than that of course. Art is always

in the service of social forces. Stated thus the claim explains the ap-
parent counter-examples from soap opera to Mister Johnson. 2 A more
daring claim is true and required: narrative is impossible without at
 455

least unwitting, implicit lessons in causality and morality, without sug-

gesting or reinforcing an ethical cosmos. In a word, didacticism is in-
trinsic to narrative. Therefore beneath the silly disavowal of social
significance lie two more interesting questions. Is there a character-
istically African formal aesthetic, ^ however vague and varied, which
permeates evengenres ofworld-wide audience? If so, is a certain overt
didacticism (alien to the contemporary West's "high art") a part of Af-
rican aesthetics?
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Though Achebe concentrates upon the historical and social

contexts of African'writing which warrant committed literature, his im-
plicit answer to each of these questions is affirmative. For example,
the first of his "Thoughts on the African Novel" is

. . . that the African novel has to be about Africa.

A pretty severe restriction, I am told. But Africa
is not only a geographical expression, it is also a
metaphysical landscape—it is, in fact, a view of the
whole cosmos perceived from a particular position. 4

The criterion implies some shared African view of the world, a shared
cosmos and metaphysic. This, in turn, would require shared corollaries
of values. But Achebe explicitly eschews any delineation of thesebeyond
clarion and repeated allusions to the shared recent history of colonial-
ism and the requisites it imposes (imposed?) on artistic intent:

I would be quite satisfied if my novels . . . did no

more than teach my readers that their past—with
all its imperfections—was not the one long night of
savagery from which the first Europeans acting on
God's behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write
is appliedart as distinct frompure. Butwho cares?
Art is important, but so is education of the kind I
have in mind. And I don't see that the two need be
mutually antagonistic. ^

Even this famous remark presupposes some unity of culture available

for explication, explication more clear and convincing in literature than
in anthropology.

That the didacticism is principle and the colonialism mere

application is confirmed by the content of essays concerning Tanganyika,
Biafra, African intellectuals, African publishing, etc. "Named for Vic-
 456

toria, Queen of England" is an atypically autobiographical frame for

Achebe's most common themes.

In sum, I think of Morning Yet as clearing away weeds of

criticism which would stifle the growth of Africa's modern self expres-
sion, but scarcely touching, for fear of mangling its roots and fruit.

In contrast, Wole Soyinka's book is remarkable for its brief,

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trenchant asides which level thickets of error, so that he may proceed

to "embrace the apprehension of a culture whose reference points are
taken from within the culture itself, " as independent as possible from
Western preconceptions or comparisons.

Myth, literature and the African World makes generalizations

about African culture which are firmly grounded in specifics. Despite
comparative references including "new world" Africanisms, the first
two chapters concern Yoruba metaphysics as reflected in Yoruba drama.
Chapters 3 and 4 treat the religious and secular in African literature
more generally. On one level this is a book of literary criticism, ad-
mirable most in its respect for uniqueness, its probe of implications,
and its concern for social and historical import without sacrificing at-
tention to formal niceties.

In several essays Achebe has had to defend the use of "Euro-

pean languages" by African writers. For Soyinka's intent, the problem
of English is the problem of terms. To conduct continental dialogue,
African writers at present must employ the language and the "learning"
of others. But he declares that it is merely an expedient of self-
apprehension that it sometimes requires liberation from and comparison
to the concepts and values of other cultures.

Soyinka dismisses in passing the notion that no distinctly Af-

rican world-view exists, a prima facie impossibility, motivated, he
suggests, by retrenched colonialism. But even given the salient com-
monalities of distinct black cultures throughout the continent and the
world, it is difficult to mediate between inadequate specificity and in-
valid generalization. In Chapters 1 and 2 Soyinka usually makes gen-
eralizations implicit; he concentrates rather on detailed statement of the
stations of man in the Yoruba cosmos, and on the formal properties of
drama as reflections of the cosmic vision.

The interdependence of the aesthetic and the metaphysic may

be seen in this discussion. Defining "Ritual" as the dramatic or tragic
 457

rites of the gods (in contrast to "Epic" as celebration of man's conquest

of limitations), Soyinka demands a context of cosmic totality, including—
especially for Africans—chthonic space and cyclical time. He also r e -
quires that performances be genuine celebration of deities and myth.
Thus, if the re-creation of communal communication is genuine, the
scholastic dichotomy of ritual vs. drama evaporates. With carefully
argued definitions at each turn, the cosmic and moral properties of man
in Yoruba myth are delineated, and the consistent myth in several mod-
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ern dramas is demonstrated. A thorough but unaffected familiarity with

myth and staging in ancient Greek drama is used to clarify contrasts and
to dethrone some modern European absolutes. Ironically, despite his
dissents, Soyinka seems excessively influenced by Jungian theory, which
is a sure instance of Eurocentric vision falsely extended to encompass
a globe. But Soyinka's construct stands without this distraction.

The second chapter offers lucid mythopoetic analyses, espe-

cially of J. P. Clark's Song of a Goat and Duro Ladipo's Oba Koso, and
the quick suture of issues like "individual vs. communal creativity" and
"audience participation" in African and European drama. More funda-
mental are the premises for those analyses; they spell out much of Soy-
inka's conception of the place of drama in man's communal conscious-
ness. The communal presence is made the defining concept of staged
drama, and thus the actions of the protagonists encapsule the "archetypal
struggle of the mortal being against exterior forces. " From this per-
spective most modern Western drama suffers from a conception of moral
and metaphysical forces which is severely atrophied by the confined
cosmos of modern Western mythology, usually called "technology" or
"materialism" or "science. "

But of course there is no such archetypal struggle, since the

ends, means, and impediments of the struggle are always culturally de-
termined. Soyinka recognizes this.

Nothing in these essays suggests a detailed unique-

ness of the African world. Man exists, however,
in a comprehensive world of myth, history and
mores; in such a total context, the African world,
like any other "world" is unique. It possesses, how-
ever, in common with other cultures, the virtues of
complementarity. 7

No one would deny the complementarity, but as a premise it leads Soy-

inka to dysfunctional redefinitions of culture-bound terminology, par-
 458

ticularly European dramatic terms.

Soyinka's schemata, however, are precisely defined, cogent,

daring and basic. Discussions of theplays 1 plots and forms demonstrate
and confirm his principles. The reader must always sift for himself the
specifically Yoruba elements of Soyinka's examples from the generally
African. Nevertheless I find the exposition fundamentally convincing in
large part because the critical stance is so "African": it is focused not
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on the didactic, nor the innovative, nor even the cathartic in drama, but
on the cultural vision and dramatic experience of all who participate in
the presentation (including of course the audience). This emphasis on
drama as a communal institution is maintained without sacrificing pre-
cision regarding the functions of the Aristotelian "parts" of tragedy.

The appended essay also attempts to penetrate the essential

tragic vision of Yoruba ritual (including modern drama) relying espe-
cially on contrasts with ancient and modern Western concepts of tragedy.
There is much here to be learned about Yoruba myth, ethics, and r e -
ligion, and much that will help in any study of Soyinka's adaptation of
Euripides' Bacchae. But there could be no clearer example how futile
it is to accommodate European aesthetic concepts to all cultures of the
world. By the third century B.C. the term "tragedy" had a welter of
conflicting referents. By the nineteenth century A. D. one could not de-
fine it without defining Europe in all its histories and mores. Little is
gained save a net full of red herrings when one claims that, ". . . of all
the subjective unease that is aroused by man's creative insights, that
wrench within the human psyche which we vaguely define as 'tragedy' is
the most insistent voice that bids us return to our own sources. " Trag-
edy itself makes no such demand. Similarly, the reliance on Dionysus
and Apollo to define Ogun and Obatala will mislead those whose knowl-
edge of Greek or Yoruba religion is superficial. Others it will distract
from an integral view of Yoruba deity.

Chapters 3 and 4 treat works of literature over the continent,

mostly in French and English. Soyinka posits that the contemporary Af-
rican writer exhibits a social vision if not a literary ideology, which in
any case is rather the property of critics. As elsewhere he makes curt
corrections of several popular errors. For example, in answer to the
motley crowd of arguments that didacticism vitiates art, he cites Sem-
bene's God's Bits of Wood as proof that revolutionary fervor can be con-
sonant with any standards of humanism and of literary excellence.

In the discussion of particular works, Soyinka usually avoids

 459

the intentional fallacy by concentrating uponthe social vision which per-

meates the work and rises to the careful reader's eye regardless of the
author's consciousness. In this way works such as Lewis Nkosi's
"Rhythm of Violence" are shown to be ruined by a "Christian Salvation-
ist ethic—the love variety. " Occasionally one may cavil at the choice
of emphasis in these analyses. Treatment of Dennis Brutus' "Their Be-
haviour, " for example, would have profited from more attention to its
second half, but already corrects the many critics who utterly distort
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the poem.

By contrast the penetration to the ideology of Kane's L'Aven-

tureAmbigiie, and the surprising, unassailable demonstration of Achebe1 s
secularism in Arrow of God are paradigms of well-marshalled fact. The
stress on Oulouguem's iconoclasm as a service to Black Africa offers
a long needed redirection of critical attention, yet even Soyinka seems
deaf to the anguished cry of Devoir du Violence in behalf of black, bound
people, a cry as essential to the book as cultural denigration, and which
explains the incestuous and homosexual episodes better than does the
psycho-criticism into which Soyinka lapses.

Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, God's Bits of Wood, and

Laye's Radiance of the King are discussed for their "social vision" in
the context of the intellectual and social forces of Africa today, with a
strict literary approach constant. Soyinka relates these works to each
other as different points on the field of defense and attack required now
in behalf of Africa and Africanity. The chapter ends with a discussion
of Négritude, the most elaborated definition of Africanity. There is
little new in the discussion, but as a brief, dense, argued outline of its
values and limits as felt by Soyinka (and most black Anglophones), it
too is indispensable.

One of the indirect merits of Myth, Literature and the African

World is the complementary force of its two parts, one concerned with
Africanity essentially independent of the European intrusion, the other
with literature essentially an expression of contemporary Africa, in
both the ethicalperception and ordering of human experience canbe seen
as a salient formal property of the art as well as the criticism. If the
assertion that ethical implications are intrinsic to narrative is correct,
then it must be agreed that the ethical vision of modern Western narra-
tive is often atrophied, disordered, unconscious, intellectuallyuntenable
and artistically defective, even in some works lauded for artistic merit.
In the same way that African music is generally credited with greater
rhythmic sophistication than most European, perhaps it may be argued
 460

that didacticism is a more sophisticated, more developed element of

narrative in the African literary aesthetic.

It is a truism of comparative aesthetics that extremely elabo-

rated elements of one culture's art whichare atrophied in another's are
perceived by the latter as monotonous, crude, extrusive excess. It
would follow that not only for its specific content, but also for its very
elaboration in the archetectonics of the literature, African didacticism
would tend to repel the Western oriented critic. It would also follow that
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all critics bound to European terminology would have difficulty defining

and describing the canons of African didacticism.

That vague and tentative conclusion is suggested by the prem-

ises and arguments of both these books: the existence of an African
world-view and an African aesthetic derived from it, the necessity for
critical immersion in this Africanity, the avoidance of criticism based
on non-African sensibilities and experience, and of criticism which
serves to undermine the evolution of independent African values.

NOTES
1
We are inevitably reminded of the infamous instance when
the Igbo chi was explained to Achebe. See Austin J. Shelton, "The Of-
fended Chi in Achebe's Novels," Transition 3, No. 13 (1964), 36-37;
Donatus I. Nwoga, "The Chi Offended, " Transition 4, No. 15 (1964), 5,
and the final essay of Morning Yet, "Chi in Igbo Cosmology, " pp. 159-75.
2 For a most moving and profound critical extraction of the
unconscious didacticism which may inform a work, see Simone Weil,
Iliad or the Poem of Force (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendel Hill, 1956).
3 I have argued elsewhere that formal elements of a literary
aesthetic are paramount and often appear in critical commentary dis-
guised as matters of content: David Dorsey, "Prolegomena for Black
Aesthetics," in Black Aesthetics: Papers from a Colloquium held at the
University of Nairobi, June 1971, ed. Andrew Gurr and Pio Zirimu
(Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1973), pp. 7-19.
4
Achebe, Morning Yet, p. 83.
5
Achebe, p . 72.
6
Soyinka, Myth, Literature, p. viii.
7 Soyinka, p. xil.
8
Soyinka, p. 140.
David Dorsey
Atlanta University
U.S.A.