دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Manufacturing Beginnings: Ritual, Image, and Chronopolitics in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest Manufacturing Beginnings: Ritual, Image, and Chronopolitics in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest 327 344 107921 10.22059/jor.2026.415233.2851 FA Qutaiba Saleh Fenjan Department of Journalism, Massmedia College, University of Thi-Qar, Nassiriya City. Iraq 0009-0000-7064-3042 Journal Article 2026 05 26 This article claims that Kongi’s Harvest stages postcolonial dictatorship not as a site of the “modern” superseding the “traditional”, but as a regime of ritualized mediation; one in which sovereignty is constituted by calendars, broadcast technology, and performative images that try to turn the imposition of coercion into the march of national fate. The feast is reified by Soyinka into a state “opening,” as a result “the reign of Kongi is launched as ‘the official start of the Five Year Plan,’” with the jailed Oba Danlola’s public appearance and delivery of the new yam presented as the prop for its authentication (Soyinka 1967, Kongi’s Harvest). The satire is most keen in relation to the discourse of image-work and chronopolitics; the staged photography, the renamed institutions, even “the decision to date the years from Kongi’s Harvest,” all betray a state that functions by writing the conditions of visibility and rewriting time (Soyinka 1967, Kongi’s Harvest). Formally, the theatrical spectacle is contrasted by a choral interrogation of uni-directional political discourse. The hymn of Oba Danlola effectively distills the nation’s “word factory” into the macabre chant of “Ism to ism for ism is ism,” and refuses the mediation of “government rediffusion sets... [and] a government loudspeaker” in so far as it represents an impositional pronouncement that produces no dialogue (Soyinka 1967, Kongi’s Harvest). This is immediately juxtaposed with the pragmatic realism of the Reformed Aweri Fraternity’s planning meeting that bluntly name the imperative behind authoritarian aesthetics, ‘ <em>Kongi’s Harvest</em> proves postcolonial sovereignty to be not an immediate, but a carefully constructed artefact of aesthetic and historical manipulation. Through a reading which moves beyond the categories of ancient and modern, I show how the despot fortifies autocracy by capturing the architecture of rites, policing the national imagery, and terrorizing the new temporal infrastructure of the calendar and of the city. While the policy-maker seeks effective policy, the despot seizes autonomy and, through an inscription of terror, forces a shared communal harvest into a national epoch which aims to turn a public into a mass undifferentiated “now.” An analysis of the aesthetic architecture of performative government, however, reveals its vulnerability: broadcast sound saturation, image inoculation, and the dictation of slogans are ultimately unable to efface the affect- and body-based workings of the rituals which the tyrant co-opts. When the enormous collective body of the New Yam Festival is instrumentalized in order to produce a PR exercise which assumes that communal consensus can be turned into images of surrender, this construction of the despot’s sovereignty is explosively betrayed by the power of embodied history, which stands up in mass demonstration against the appropriation of the community’s traditions and lives for a personal PR coup. Drawing on media criticism, chronopolitics, and critical spectacle theory in order to identify the structural contradictions of the aesthetics of dictatorships vis-à-vis the subject forces which they try to neutralize, I will finally argue that, though the postcolonial state may indeed master its chronogram, the reordering of space, and the production of visual representations, it will always ultimately fail to triumph over the elemental force of the embodied, corporeal dynamics of the ritual body. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107921_51048bfa2332a3aba727434b85da1dd6.pdf