XXVI. The Bacchae of the Niger
He takes the Penthean rigidness of state
And dissolves it in a Dionysian flood,
To mock the hegemon's self-appointed fate
With the primordial rhythm of the blood.
Through the Theban gates, the Yoruba spirit strides,
Where Ogun and the Vine-God merge as one,
To strip away the arrogant and thin hides
Of those who think the human race is won.
A maximalist fusion of the ancient fire,
Where Strophe meets the Gungun’s heavy beat,
To pluck from the Eurocentric funeral pyre
A decolonized and holy, wild heat.
He proves that tragedy is not a Western throned,
But a universal ache, by the forest owned.
XXVII. The Black Scourge (January 2026)
He turns the surgical lamp upon the skin,
To find the pathogens that dwell within the heart,
Where the indigenous and the secret sin
Tears the pan-African dream apart.
It is the Black Scourge, the internal decay,
The reflexive worship of the whip and chain,
Where liberators of the yesterday
Become the vultures of the current reign.
He rejects the facile blame of foreign shores
As the sole architect of the continent’s woe,
Opening the hermetic and the heavy doors
To show the complicit shadow that we know.
His maximalist truth is a bitter, cleansing salt,
Calling the continental drift to a sudden halt.
XXVIII. The Antigone of the Savannah
The unburied dead demand a sacred rite,
Defying the Creon of the modern sprawl,
Across the savannah in the deepening night
Where the ancestral voices loudly call.
Soyinka’s syntax is a shovel and a shield,
A lexical defense of the basic, human law,
Refusing to let the sovereign spirit yield
To the state’s cold and indiscriminate claw.
He parses the theogony of the righteous act,
The maximalist weight of a singular "No,"
Turning the abstract and the legal pact
Into a visceral and a living glow.
From Thebes to Lagos, the story is the same:
The human pulse survives the tyrant’s flame.
XXIX. The Apotheosis of the Iron Road
In 2026, the road is more than stone,
It is the Ogunquit vein of the nation’s life,
Where the Laureate walks, vital and alone,
Through the cacophony of the global strife.
His lexis has become the infrastructure’s soul,
A maximalist grid of intellect and light,
Maintaining the tenuous and the dark control
Over the chaos of the coming night.
The Laderin-Wole Soyinka station stands
As a monument to the journey and the word,
Across the consecrated and the shifting sands
Where the prophet’s roar is still clearly heard.
Five hundred sonnets are but a flicker’s spark
In the infinite sun he casts against the dark.
Indeed Soyinka’s influence remains a cornerstone of African intellectualism, with his recent dialogues at the Ake Arts and Book Festival emphasizing the need for literary vigilance against the rise of digital autocracy.
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