Wole Soyinka's Ake and African Philosophy of Culture

Abstract

Ernest Emenyonu had said wisely that literature of a people is more or less an "imaginative recreation of a people's account of their social, cultural, political and economic perspectives of a given time and place".(Nnolim, 2015:30) The social and the cultural as an encompassing worldview including the political and the economic is here arrayed to crystallize the sublime philosophical perspectives and literary aesthetics out of a clash of civilizations, the rhythm and contradictions of traditional and natural environment in Ake and how they collectively and generally became a burden to one's curiosity in seeking to understand the other, the local, then the foreign or invading white man's modern views, nay acculturation and enculturation.