Autobiography As Biography: A Commentary on Wole Soyinka’s Creation of Characters in Ake

Abstract

This brief essay examines Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood as an autobiography that is equally a biography, which examines the lives of other persons outside the autobiographer’s. The central argument is that Soyinka utilizes the novelistic mode, precisely mythologization as well as impressionistic and suggestive naming of closely observed characters, to underline the status of Ake as creative literature rather than a mere factual or historical narrative.