Speaking in an interview with saharareporters.com, ahead of the rites of passage for the late Achebe, Soyinka asked his interviewers rhetorically as he responded, “Chinua’s place in the canon of world literature? Wherever the art of the story-teller is celebrated, definitely, assured.
As you yourself have observed, Chinua himself repudiated such a tag (of being the father of African literature) he did study literature after all, bagged a degree in the subject. So, it is a tag of either literary ignorance or “momentary exuberance” ala [Nadine] Gordimer to which we are all sometimes prone.
“Those who seriously believe or promote this must be asked: have you the sheerest acquaintance with the literatures of other African nations, in both indigenous and adopted colonial languages?
What must the francophone, lusophone, Zulu, Xhosa, Ewe etc. etc. literary scholars and consumers think of those who persist in such a historic absurdity? It’s as ridiculous as calling WS (Wole Soyinka) father of contemporary African drama! Or Mazisi Kunene father of African epic poetry. Or Kofi Awoonor father of African poetry. Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.”
Soyinka further remarked that Achebe himself did not help matters when he at a time made a squint remark that fuelled controversies on possible rivalry between them.
“Chinua we have to be frank here also did not help matters. He did make one rather unfortunate statement that brought down the hornet’s nest on his head, something like: “The fact that Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize does not make him the Asiwaju (Leader) of African literature”. I forget now what provoked that statement. Certainly it could not be traced to any such pretensions on my part.
I only recollect that it was in the heat of some controversy on a national issue, I think.” Soyinka also descended hard on the Heinemann’s African Writers Series of which Achebe was editor, saying the publishing outfit was ideally a ‘ghetto’ classification that did not deserve the rating accorded it.
He pilloried those comparing his literary savvy with Achebe’s as largely un-informed, as he rationalised: “Unfortunately, some of Chinua’s cohorts decided that they had a mission to prosecute a matter regarding which they lacked any vestige of understanding or competence or indeed any real interest. It is however a life crutch for them and they cannot let go.
“What they are doing now and I urge them to end it shame-facedly – is to confine Chinua’s achievement space into a bunker over which hangs an unlit lamp labeled “Nobel”.
Is this what the literary enterprise is about? Was it the Nobel that spurred a young writer, stung by Eurocentric portrayal of African reality, to put pen to paper and produce Things Fall Apart?” On Achebe’s new book, There was a country, Soyinka said he missed a golden opportunity of taking him up before his death as circumstances did not permit. He said he would have attended Achebe’s last symposium but could not make it.
“I was to have been present at his last Chinua Achebe symposium just a few months earlier together with Governor Fashola of Lagos. Something intervened and I was marooned in New York.”
Nonetheless, Soyinka offered some words on Achebe’s controversial last book: “Unfortunately, that chance of a last encounter was missed, so I don’t really wish to comment on the work at this point. It is however a book I wish he had never written that is, not in the way it was.
There are statements in that work that I wish he had never made. “The saddest part for me was that this work was bound to give joy to sterile literary aspirants like Adewale Maja-Pearce, whose self-published book self-respecting publishers having rejected his trash sought to create a “tragedy” out of the relationships among the earlier named “pioneer quartet” and, with meanness aforethought, rubbish them all WS (Wole Soyinka) especially.
Chinua got off the lightest. A compendium of outright impudent lies, fish market gossip, unanchored attributions, trendy drivel and name dropping, this is a ghetto tract that tries to pass itself up as a product of research, and has actually succeeded in fooling at least one respectable scholar,”
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