Abstract

This essay examines how The African Child and Ake: The Years of Childhood, the autobiographies of two prominent African writers—the Guinean Camara Laye and the Nigerian Wole Soyinka—respectively widen our consciousness of man’s, of human being’s, that is, practical handling of cosmic, existential situations as revealed in his relationship with other beings—other things or beasts—in creation. How does man’s intuitive creativity and sensibility elucidate the myth and otherwise of human destiny in the African world as he goes about perceiving, feeling, thinking in his attempt to understand his experiences in the cosmological order? The essay seeks to answer this question mainly through an exploration of the writers’ engagement with the subject of the relationship between the living and the living-dead as well as spirit-beings which the autobiographies excellently focus on.