By Iferenta Ifemesia
There is nothing faintly opaque about the literary effulgence of Wole Soyinka universally. Not a moot point. Neither should there be an uncouth scrimmage here over his canonization as a literary artist. He is simply sui generis!
No one is also immolating him on the altars of religious prudery and quaint parochialism.
Sola Ojewusi, in his acrid, pedagogic and perspicuous comment here for instance, said nothing about Yoruba gods and pantheons I consider to be new-fangled to me. It is both fatuous and puerile to imply or assume that “Olodumare” or the “Yoruba pantheon of lesser gods” is news to me. My insular conceptions and conclusions here are tinged and hinged on the peculiarities of my own responses to religious belief paradigms, not on stock acculturation or being sucked away in a monsoon of deleterious innuendoes, Afrocentric or otherwise!
As for Soyinka’s legendary, Galahadist activism, why has he suddenly retreated into an ominous igloo of sagging silence when his jagabanising brother and consort has trundled the country to the very precipice of the most excruciating economic cataclysm that we have ever witnessed as a nation, where even “pure water” satchet is now veering in the direction of a luxury?
And the Sir Galahad professor suddenly slinks into a garret and becomes an insouciant observer, silent like the catacombs?
Humph! A sudden season of conspiratorial silence when millions of people with withering hopes and furrowed faces are flailing their hands in the crypts of devastating hunger and despondency?
Fleeting heroes only flit through the interstices of our minds like gossamers!
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