In Search of Authentic Personhood: An Existentialist Reading of Femi Osofisan’s Tẹgọnni: An African Antigone

Abstract The symbiotic relationship between philosophy and literature has a long history stretching back to the ancient Greek period. This perhaps is largely because these branches of knowledge share a common disciplinary boundary within the area of humanism. With the return to humanism by some contemporary movements in philosophy, this relationship has taken a methodological bent in which philosophical positions are driven home through literary forms. This essay demonstrates such a relationship by exploring the existentialist theme of authentic personhood in Femi Osofisan’s Tẹgọnni: An African Antigone (1994). The article situates Osofisan’s work within the broader theoretical perspective of the personhood debate in African philosophy. Using the eponymous heroine of the play as an instantiation of the existentialist theme of authenticity, the article argues—contrary to the dominant view in the discourse of African traditional thought, namely that personhood is constituted through alignment with the rules of the community—that the real marker of authentic personhood is the right deployment of an individual’s freedom in the achievement of self-conceived life goals. The article adopts the Sartrean existentialist theoretical framework as an evaluative apparatus to apply to the creative work. It concludes that, given the rich existential dispositions of Osofisan’s Tẹgọnni, the work qualifies as a philosophical memoir on human existence.