My concern is the way certain literary dialogues may liberate their protagonists, their countries and the world from the strongholds of colonialism. Such dialogues, whose scope eludes the critical categories of mimicry and counter-discourse, open up aesthetic horizons made of moral values that have been there from the dawn of colonialism—trying to have a say in the political scene—to the present age, when the world is still on the arena interrogating itself on human rights while systematically disrespecting them in many parts of the world (so-called democracies included).

I will firstly linger on Shakespeare’s position towards the rise and the practices of colonialism as it comes to light in some of the plays and I will then follow the ways in which some threads of discourses have been picked up, questioned and partly followed in the poetic collection A Shuttle in the Crypt by W. Soyinka and in the epic poem Fredy Neptune by L. Murray. Such deliberate connections with the time and place where it all began have helped the African and Australian authors endure and overcome situations on both the individual and the political sphere, in which the long arm of colonialism would have taken over by segregating men and their ideas behind the real and psychological bars imposed by their newly-formed nations.

My literary approach to the discussion of human rights and freedom today will try to prove the pedagogic experience that literature with its huge archive may be, were we more willing to surrender to its inconvenient, hence unconvincing, revelations.