Europe developed what is in many respects a hard separation between the temporal and the spiritual, or the rational and the spiritual, thanks in large part to what boils down to centuries of incessant religious feuding and civil war. This led to a compartmentalization of rationality and spirituality in European thought, just as government and religion were uneasily regulated to the public and private spheres. Given this is is natural that Europeans and Euro-Americans would assume the same held true in other cultures, or that if such a division did not exist then that culture must be in some sort of undifferentiated primitive state in which rationality as an intellectual discipline was undeveloped or absent. Case in point, see the example of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. “There is no intrinsic need in Yoruba ideology to fixate on the either/or mode of thought” that would classify a scientific or religious explanation by making “it exclusively one or the other” (Levey, 2000, p.44). Thus, in Soyinka’s cultural background there is a precedent for how the modern and the traditional can coexist in a non-antagonistic manner. This is coupled with the natural desire of a colonized people to reject the ideologies and intellectual frameworks of their oppressors. Soyinka, like many Africans, was not a stupid person. He knew that when Europeans presented the choice between their worldview and indigenous African worldviews as an either/or choice between rationality and superstition the ‘right’ choice would inevitably be the one that favored the European side of things.
Different modes of understanding can coexist cooperatively or in opposition, but as long as they deal with reality the objects of their understanding overlap. Soyinka grew up in a nation colonized by English-speaking Europeans and his experiences and development were colored by that fact. For example, he was brought up in a combination of Christian religion and native Yoruba religion. The implicit conflation of Christian religion with European religion here is an example both of the aforementioned “either/or mode of thought” (Levey, 2000, p.44) and the limits thereof. Christianity hardly began in Europe, after all. Nor has it ever been limited to Europe’s borders; Africa has had Christians for at least as long as what is now England. Christianity cannot be said to be either native nor wholly foreign, and there is “no simple, one-way hegemony at work here” (Levey, 2000, p.49). Christianity in Nigeria has in most everywhere else in the world was syncretic and represented a merger of local beliefs and international trends rather than a Platonic ideal of Christianity imposed upon or imported to another part of the world. Though it is true that many Christians have seen their religion as precisely that. When Christianity collides with local non-Christian religious beliefs and practices “meaning comes to exist, then, in a constant dialogue between two systems of interpretation and evaluation” (Levey, 2000, p.49). This could in fact be called a form of colonial resistance, not in the sense that native Yoruba religion was a rallying point against Christianity but in that by practicing personal syncretism, i.e., “the retention of traditional practices by the individual Christian and Muslim in his own particular religious experience, often despite the official disapproval of the religious group to which he formally appears” (Levey, 2000, p.49), Africans such as Soyinka could challenge “Christian syncretic monotheism with its monoculturalism” with “a polytheistic and polycultural network” (Levey, 2000, p.50). Suborning an imperialist missionary’s religion by adopting it the wrong way can be a better form of resistance than rejecting it entirely.
“The stories we tell about ourselves are inevitably a combination of memory, imagination and the power of narrative to impose its own logic, form and style” (Levey, 2000, p.40). Since there is no unchanging, irreducible essence of the individual that defines who a given person is it follows that the individual as a person is inevitably shaped by a combination of memory, imagination and the power of narrative. Our ability to tell who we are, what we’ve done and where we came from is delineated by cultural, sociological and political tropes and factors. Our ability to know these things ourselves is influenced by the same and by the physical and psychological limits of memory; neuroscientists have even proven that there is no physical difference in the brain between a genuine memory and a fabricated memory we believe to be true, to the point where even “functional brain scans cannot tell true from false memories” (Stark, 2014). And if our identity as a person is shaped by these factors which are largely beyond our control it stands to reason that our ability to form our own individual identity of our own volition is heavily dependent on which cultural and community currents we choose to tack our metaphorical sails to and against. Soyinka was an African from Nigeria. Being an African from Nigeria did not mean the same thing to him that it would have meant for a Nigerian who did not live abroad in Europe and America for years, or who did not speak English fluently or otherwise benefit from the literary and intellectual crosscurrents he was exposed to. His identity, and that of many other writers like him, was founded on hybridity.
References
Levey, C. (2000). African Encounters. Pretoria: University of South Africa.
Stark, C. (2014). Truth, Lies and False Memories: Neuroscience in the Courtroom. Retrieved from http://www.dana.org/Publications/ReportOnProgress/Truth,_Lies,_and_False_Memories__Neuroscience_in_the_Courtroom/
