African Aesthetics: A Matter of Reason or Cosmology?

Abstract

This editorial deliberately departs from the norm. It attempts to use the Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture delivered in 2021 by David Attwell to tie up the articles compiled for this issue of EAR, 39(1). The temptation to begin thus was difficult to resist; the lecture’s title, “‘Just What Gods Do You Serve, If Any?’: Wole Soyinka’s Chronicle and the Destruction of Postcolonial Reason”, intimates a far-reaching reflection on a vast literary terrain. This is because its focus on a first-generation African writer, Wole Soyinka, and particularly on his Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021), (re-)orients the reader to the consequences of Western colonial modernity for African epistemologies since at least the twentieth century.