Memoirs Towards a Cohesive Community

Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn and Achebe’s There Was A Country

Résumé

Social and literary critics of African literature have often debated the impact of the political arrangement of African states on African literary productions. This paper rethinks the impact of inter-ethnic hostility on literary production in Africa and the complicity of the state in Africa, with specific focus on two non-fiction works: Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country (2012) and Wole Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006). Engagements with this problem bifurcate into two strands: the first advocating the complete overhaul of the present sociopolitical arrangement in Africa, and the second proposing the need for reasonable tact and integrity in the conduct of government business. In this paper, we argue that both Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka demonstrate in their non-fictional writings that inter-ethnic tension characterizes the environment in which they write and that Tejumola Olaniyan’s (2017) stimulating theorization of the concept of stranger initiates new possibilities of reconsidering the configuration of the African state. Engaging Georg Simmel’s (1950) and Zygmunt Bauman’s (1990) conceptualization of the stranger, this paper stretches Olaniyan’s argument even further to demonstrate the need to extend the stranger’s liminality not just to the state but also to the citizenry.