The dialectic of myth and history in the post-colonial contemporary: Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

This chapter was initially presented at a conference on cultural identity in Africa at the University of Leeds, September 1997. The regime's determination to destroy all forms of opposition could not have been more gruesomely demonstrated than in its callous execution in 1995 of another distinguished Nigerian writer, Ken Saro Wiwa. Chidi Amuta has denounced Soyinka's use of myth as reproducing a cyclic concept of history in which the human subject is robbed of agency and presented as being wholly at the mercy of the inexorable logic of destiny. As Patrick Taylor has argued in his book The Narrative of Liberation, there is a point beyond which history and myth dissolve into each other, with myth functioning as history and history as myth and with the main determining difference being a political one: between liberating myths and hegemonic myths.