Manufacturing Beginnings: Ritual, Image, and Chronopolitics in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of Journalism, Massmedia College, University of Thi-Qar, Nassiriya City. Iraq

10.22059/jor.2026.415233.2851

Abstract

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, ‘

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References

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Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 31, Issue 2
June 2026
Pages 327-341

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