Taking the theme of the conference – ‘Try Freedom’ – in the senses of to make an attempt at freedom, and also to put it on trial, this paper explores, first, Nayantara Sahgal’s novel Lesser Breeds (2003, published in India and not generally available in Europe); and, second, Wole Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006). Sahgal’s narrative takes the reader back to the moment of India’s struggle for independence, when non-violence was a weapon, and freedom was being tried out amid tremendous pressures. It then returns one to the contemporary situation when the ‘re-emergence’ of ‘the West, in its new incarnation, as it were, of world ruler, makes every other history and civilisation marginal’ (Sahgal, Wasafiri, 2006). In the third of his chronicles of his own and Nigeria’s political life, Soyinka pin-points ‘a new force’ that has come into being with the military regimes and their corporate allies, ‘a force that admitted of no constraints or scruples, was contemptuous of world opinion, and would remain deaf to the counsel of the most revered’. Whether the subject is a nation in crisis or global imperialism, the meaning of ‘freedom’, according to Sahgal and Soyinka, has to be continually investigated and put to the test. How this is undertaken and enacted in the two works mentioned above is the concern of this paper.