Myth and Social consciousness in Wole Soyinka's Alapata Apata

Abstract

The study of myths, its relevance and importance, has always generated interests among scholars over the ages. After the initial engagements before the twentieth century when most interventions, from scholars like Xenophanes, Plato and Euhemereus pronounced myths as intangible, many writers today have continued to use myth as anchor of their works. In Africa, writers, like Wole Soyinka, have deployed myths in the interrogation of crises in the postcolonial space. After his seminal essay, Myth, Literature and the African World (1992), which laid out the essences of primordial forms in his Yoruba tradition, Soyinka has continued to deploy the capacities of those primordial ‘literary” forms, particularly Ogun, in his interrogation and interventions on diverse conditions on the African landscape.