Beyond the Yoruba Cosmology: A Contestation of the Africanness of Wole Soyinka's Submission in Myth, Literature and the African World

A great part of the early works of African writers and critics dealt with the issue of re-defining the African culture which, to a certain extent, was seen not to have been properly presented or represented by foreign writers. Another level of this scholarship was the response of African scholars to the attempt to universalize western culture by the West. Nevertheless, some Africans in their response to the West made postulations and generalized submissions, using a microcosm of a single African culture to stand for the whole, and thus repeating the same universalising tendency which Western scholarship had been guilty of. This paper attempts to challenge the assumed Africanness' of Wole Soyinka's Yoruba cosmology in Myth, Literature and the African World, which he uses to propose a universal African literary and tragic aesthetic