Casualties of Freedom

Abstract

Addressing the 1968 Uppsala conference on ‘The Writer in Modern Africa’, Wole Soyinka declared that ‘the stage at which we find ourselves is the stage of disillusionment’, a time for the writer to cease looking backwards ‘to prospect in archaic fields for forgotten gems which would distract the present’.¹ With this, Soyinka summed up the new themes and mood that had quickly emerged in African decolonization literature so soon after the euphoria of independence in the preceding decade. Disillusionment was not peculiar to African writers and peoples, however. In the Caribbean, writers who had taken stock of their societies’ performance following the end of direct rule by European colonizers were drawing similar conclusions. Among Polynesian writers, Albert Wendt began serious writing on a note of disillusionment,² like Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, but for the Maori novelists disillusionment did set in only after an initial period of hopes in the promise of biculturalism collided with the reality of Pakeha conceptions of biculturalism as assimilation of Maoris into Pakeha culture. Maori novels like Patricia Grace’s Mutuwhenua and Witi Ihimaera’s Tangi, which express some cautious optimism over biculturalism, have accordingly been followed by novels expressing disillusionment with Pakeha bad faith, such as Grace’s Potiki (1986) and Cousins (1992) and Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986).