Note 2 to the author's "The Interpreters' Cultural Politics, Or Soyinka's Postcolonial Otherness"
Elleke Boehmer speaks of Nationalistic Tradition whose principles were determined before hand (184). Writers had to abide by them, at the risk of running the gauntlet if they did not. Many writers in English from the African and Caribbean colonies took up the call to include literature as a moving spirit in the nationalist struggle. Anti-colonial resistance became for them a rallying cause, an enabling context, and a focal subject.
There was widespread agreement that the role of culture was to help transform social life, and that, in turn, social transformation had the potential to regenerate marginalized culture. To George Lamming, "the education [or re-education] of feeling" in their creative literature constituted a basic, sustaining force in a liberation struggle ("A Visit to Carriacou", 1982). Especially during the 1970s and early 1980s, Ngugi insisted in essay after essay that, in its own sphere, the pen might do the work of the gun; a play might pack the power of a hand grenade (Barrel of a Pen 1983).
Boehmer, E. (1995) Migrating Metaphors
