Egbe's Sworn Enemy: Soyinka's Popular Sport

Upon returning to the University of lbadan in 1960 after more than five years of study and work in England, Wole Soyinka wrote a brief essay on 'The Future of West African Writing' for a young campus publication called The Horn. 1 In it he praised Chinua Achebe for displaying an 'unquestioning acceptance' of West African subject matter in his novel Things Fall Apart. Soyinka believed that this 'seemingly indifferent acceptance' of one's own cultural milieu marked 'the turning point in our literary development', for it departed radically from the attitudes of earlier writers who had distorted African reality.