Art & Creativity Quote by Wole Soyinka

Soyinka is pushing back against a lazy expectation that African (and especially postcolonial) art must arrive with a receipt: proof of struggle, a syllabus of oppression, a neat moral. The sly force of his phrasing is in the refusal. He talks about opera and painting that have "nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition", then immediately undercuts the buzzwords that critics love to staple onto artists from "elsewhere": "struggle or whatever". That "or whatever" is the knife twist, a dramatist's aside that exposes how quickly serious histories get reduced to curatorial shorthand.

The intent isn't escapism. It's sovereignty. Soyinka claims the right to be aesthetically moved by work that doesn't perform urgency, and he frames that right as an expansion of "horizon" - a humanistic metaphor with colonial baggage flipped on its head. The horizon was once the line European modernity pretended to bring to the world; here it's enlarged by art's irrelevance to the news cycle.

Subtextually, he's also defending complexity against a marketplace that rewards legibility. When art must constantly testify, it becomes documentary evidence; when it's allowed to be "nothing at all to do with" crisis, it becomes a space where the self can breathe, sharpen, and re-enter reality less capturable by cliché.

Context matters: Soyinka, a Nobel laureate and political target who has written directly into Nigeria's turbulence, isn't denying volatility - he's rejecting it as a totalizing identity. The enrichment he describes is a quiet insistence that the fullest political act may be insisting on interior life.