African reality: Wole Soyinka,‘The writer in a modern African state’

It is difficult to grasp much of Soyinka’s work outside the context of his arguments with Africans about Africa and what African writing might be. Much of his early writing was part of a debate about Negritude. Although the Negritude movement is not what it once was, its ideas, fragmented and mutated, are still with us, and this is a debate to which Soyinka often returns in his later work.