Laye, Camara. The Radiance of the King. Translated by James Kirkup, Collins, London, 1956. [S=Soyinka, Myth. 123]

"The Radiance of the King remains our earliest imaginative effort towards a modern literary aesthetic that is unquestionably African, and secular." [Soyinka, Myth, 126]

"The epic celebrates the victory of the human spirit over forces inimical to self-extension. It concretises in the form of action the arduous birth of the individual or communal entity, creates a new being through utilizing and stressing the language of self-glorification to which human nature is healthily prone. The dramatic or tragic rites of the gods are, however, engaged with the more profound, more elusive phenomenon of being and non-being. Man can shelve and even overwhelm metaphysical uncertanties by epic feats, and prolong such a state of social euphoria by their constant recital, but this exercise in itself proves a mere surrogate to the bewildering phenomenon of the cosmic location of his being." (2)

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"Negritude trapped itself in what was primarily a defensive role, even though its accents were strident, its syntax hyperbolic and its strategy aggressive. It accepted one of the most commonplace blasphemies of racism, that the black man has nothing between his ears, and proceeded to subvert the power of poetry to glorify this fabricated justification of European cultural domination." (129)