AKÉ BY SOYINKA

Aké: The Years of Childhood

Aké: The Years of Childhood

In Aké, Soyinka recounts his childhood in the teeming Yoruba world of the most densely populated black African country. From early in his career, Soyinka has insisted that the artist is inevitably engaged in society, and that everything he creates has political overtones. His awareness of the socio-political milieu of his own childhood is clear throughout Aké. In his home, history is localized in the wall photographs of bishops, including that of the first black bishop, Ajayi Crowther. Second World War, the medium for the Nigerian faction to independence from British rule, is portrayed in memories of blackened windows, the explosion of an ammunition ship in Lagos Harbor, trips by Daodu and Beere to Great Britain through mined waters, and remembered family comments. (Miller 2008, 89)

Soyinka supplies a plethora of details of life in a household in which both African tradition and Christianity are honored. The young Wole enjoys the sights and smells of the busy markets to which women walked many miles carrying their goods and is attracted to the dancing, music, egungun (ancestral masquerade), and ogboni meetings. The whole household carefully monitors him to end his compulsive habit of swiping akara in the pantry. Asked to perform for visitors, the precocious Wole is ambivalent. While Soyinka does convey momentary disgust or despair, nearly all of his memories are happy ones; an exception is his account of Folasade's illness and death.

Soyinka's style in Ake is rich and lyrical. He makes use of innumerable Yoruba words and proverbs and many synonyms and spelling variants. His reader cannot fail to be dazzled by the vivid details of the Episcopal Bishops Court compound and St. Peter's Church. He conveys a sense of the child's constant movement about the home and ...