Beyond the Yoruba Cosmology: A Contestatioon of the Africanness of Whole Soyinka's Submission in Myth, Literature of the African World.

A great part of the early works of African writers and critics dealt with the isse of re-difining the African culture which, to a certain extent, was seen not to have been properly presented or represented by foreign writers. Another level of this scholarship was the response of African scholars to the attempt to universalize western culture by the West. Nevertheless, some Africans in their response to the West made postulations and generalized submissions, using a microcosm of a single African culture to stand for the whole, and thus repeating the same universalising tendency which Western sqcholarship had been guilty of. This paper attempts to challenge the assumed 'Africanness' of Wole Soyinka's Yoruba cosmology in Myth, Literature and the Afircan World, which he uses to propose a universal African literary and tragic aesthetic.