Durban–Cape Town–Abeokuta–Austin
Abstract
The first academic project of any scale I attempted was an essay that arose from
a BA (Honors) dissertation written for the University of Natal in Durban (as it was
then) on Wole Soyinka. I was interested in the representation – in the terms of
Soyinka’s self-consciously modernist prose – of shamanistic experience, and of the
ways in which such experience came to define the meaning of interpretation,
a concept that stood at the center of Soyinka’s enigmatic first novel, The
Interpreters (1965).
The novel had been castigated by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and others for its “flights
into metaphysics,” for the “liberal humanism” with which Soyinka validated the
heroism of the “lone individual,” for ignoring “the creative struggle of the masses”
(“Satire” 68–69).