ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critique of how Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, in a direct and meditative manner, confront the objective historical structures of colonial and postcolonial power that shape the character of Nigerian national identities. As two of the most acclaimed writers from the continent of Africa, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka have both felt the burden to offer alternative visions for the future of Africa, most especially, for their country of birth, Nigeria. Arguably, it is in part by virtue of the prodigious works of these two writers that Nigeria has earned the reputation for being crucial to the discourse of African literary criticism and the overall development of African literature. An examination of the political writings of Achebe and Soyinka will necessarily be a study of the writer’s burden of political intervention in the postcolonial condition characterized primarily by an irreducible heterogeneity. While they have fewer body of works that constitute political writings in the strict sense and in comparison to their overall creative and critical productions, texts such as Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria and Wole Soyinka’s The Open Sore of A Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis are particularly significant for crystalizing the quintessential concerns of these two writers for reinventing the nation. These two texts are distinct from their autobiographical works but bear an interesting relation to the creative and critical works.
