{"id":405,"date":"2012-09-28T17:08:38","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T17:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/?page_id=405"},"modified":"2019-03-14T14:29:42","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T14:29:42","slug":"paul-ugor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/writings\/scholarship\/paul-ugor\/","title":{"rendered":"Writings \/ Scholarship: Paul Ugor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Playing God: The Triadic Course of Soyinka\u2019s Nationalism in Literature<\/h2>\n

Authenticity is an escape from what society, the school, the state, what history, has tried to make of us (Anthony Appiah 1994: 100).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I. Introduction: The Project of Cultural Representation<\/strong><\/p>\n

The very expansive body of critical literature on Wole Soyinka and his works is quite unanimous about his cultural project as a creative artist; his use of literature for what he himself described as the recording of \u2018the mores and experiences of his society and the voice of vision in his own time\u2019 (\u2018The Writer in a Modern African State\u2019 21). For Soyinka, like many of his contemporaries, the writer in him could not afford the luxury of literature for just its own sake, a literature that does not serve his Nigerian, African, and indeed, the human race, any utilitarian socio-cultural value. Therefore, his works (and indeed himself) have been very unequivocal in the commitment to great social enterprises in the face of an unjust and sometimes daunting human history. This much has been established in the large body of critical writings on Soyinka and his creative and critical works. What needs to be done, then, I want to argue, is a shift from the object of his literature, to what Tejumola Olaniyan describes as \u2018the modalities\u2019 of Soyinka\u2019s literary activism (349). Olaniyan in other words solicits a new critical approach that emphasizes the literary \u2018moves\u2019 initiated by Soyinka as a writer, scholar, and philosopher in reinventing Africa at a critical juncture in the world\u2019s cultural history when Africa counted as nothing within the global cultural imagination. In this paper, therefore, I am concerned to demonstrate the cultural framework deployed by Soyinka as a literary activist and what achievements have attended those cultural \u2018moves\u2019.<\/p>\n

My concern with Soyinka\u2019s strategies as a writer is made the more imperative when considering a play that stands at the threshold of African literary history such as Death and the King\u2019s Horseman (<\/em>hereafter referred to as DKH). For DKH crystallized into a canonical text not so much because of the enormous aesthetic suavity that it enfolds and exudes, but by the very fact that it was conceived and deployed as a thesis-play to enunciate Soyinka\u2019s own conception of Yoruba (African) tragedy at a tense moment of almost incurable doubts about the existence and validity of African literature in western literary circles. The play thus offers a unique opportunity not only to reflect upon the capacious potentials of literature to narrate nationhood\u2014people (their social, cultural and political tensions and struggles), mentalities, sensibilities, visions and collective social pursuits, but also to deconstruct and gauge Soyinka\u2019s literary moves as writer and inventor of Africa\u2019s existence in literature. And to undertake the pursuit I set for myself in this essay, I fear only the play-text under study will not suffice. For as Mpalive-Hanson argues: \u2018one will have to take into account the totality of his [Soyinka\u2019s] immediate ideological context in order to preserve the distinctiveness of his cultural project\u2019 (78). In this paper, then, I shall engage in a bit of historisization, comparative analysis, and textual interpretation, as I tease out my central concern, which is what Soyinka\u2019s Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em> narrates, symbolizes, and what it achieved as an African cultural text. I will begin by revisiting the exact context of the field of global cultural production in which the play was written.<\/p>\n

II. Contextualizing Soyinka\u2019s Dearth and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n

In his introduction to Pierre Boudieu\u2019s The Field of Cultural Production<\/em>, Randal Johnson observes that Boudieu was primarily concerned with the unraveling of \u2018the role of culture in the reproduction of social structures, or the way in which unequal power relations, unrecognized as such and thus accepted as legitimate, are embedded in systems of classification used to describe and discuss everyday life\u2014as well as cultural practices\u2019 (2).\u00a0 For Boudieu, the field of cultural production is integrated and deeply enmeshed in other larger social processes. Chinua Achebe, Africa\u2019s foremost novelist, hints at this power of culture in the context of Africa when he made copious references to the works of western writers about Africa like Joseph Conrad and his contemporaries as not being innocent.i<\/sup> So art, especially literature, within the field of cultural production, embodies and is embodied by human tensions and hence cannot be divorced from other social realities. There is thus an inextricable link between the field of culture and the field of power, and precisely so because as Boudieu notes, \u2018cultural producers, who occupy the economically dominated and symbolically dominant position within the field of cultural production, tend to feel solidarity with occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations\u2019 (44).<\/p>\n

The anecdotal instances of skepticism about the existence of African literature in Europe and North America, especially in the so-called Ivy-League institutions in the early 1970s are important here. In 1973, while a visiting professor at the department of English at Sheffield University, a series of lectures on \u2018Literature and Society\u2019 were being held, but when it came to the theme of \u2018literature and society in Africa\u2019, the seminar was moved to the department of social Anthropology, instead of English. On casual probing, Soyinka discerned that the \u2018Department of English (or perhaps some key individuals) did not believe in any such mythical beast as African literature\u2019 (Myth, Literature and the African World,<\/em> vii). Similarly, Chinua Achebe has narrated such encounters of cynicism about the existence of African literature while at Amherst, Massachusetts in the early 1970s.ii<\/sup> The experiences from these kinds of encounters, Soyinka notes, \u2018provided an unintended (and mildly comic) pertinence to the themes of his lectures\u2019 collected in his book of essays, Myth, Literature and the African World<\/em>, and I must also add, his famous play, Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What did the doubts recounted by these two very important writers of African literature about the existence of African literature in Europe and North America mean or engender within and outside western academes? In his essay, \u201cAn Image of Africa,\u201d Chinua Achebe provides an amazing answer. According to Achebe, \u2018The west seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparing it with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity, it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Grey\u2014a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate\u2019 (Achebe 17). To refuse Africa the existence of its literature then was to \u2018have gone far as to deny the existence of African world\u2019 (Myth<\/em> viii)\u2014its history, civilization, culture, its people; its humanity. If, as Boudieu avers, the \u2018literary or artistic field is a field of forces\u2019 (30), then the entry of DKH into that contested field of global cultural production became a symbolic struggle for the recuperation of a suffocating or vanishing cultural entity (Africa) struggling to emerge from the dominating and asphyxiating cultural forces of the West. So when Soyinka, in his preface to DHK prescribes a downward play of the \u2018colonial factor in the text, he puts his entire literary project in harm\u2019s way. According to Radhamani, \u2018the colonial factor raises its head, demanding attention. In all its poignancy, the metaphysical question is projected against the background of historical reality\u2019 (44). It is the \u2018colonial factor\u2019 that gives birth to the play in the first place, and is also central in the play\u2019s overall dramatization of its \u2018threnodic essence\u2019. So although Soyinka tells us that the \u2018colonial factor\u2019 in the play is merely \u2018catalytic,\u2019 we cannot ignore its continued protruding influences. I will now return to my previous concern with \u2018strategies\u2019 by showing how the western tragic paradigm became central to Soyinka\u2019s cultural project in Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em>.<\/p>\n

III. The Tragic Paradigm: Nietzsche and Soyinka<\/strong><\/p>\n

The tragic genre is very central to the Western literary tradition; it embodies the very nitty-gritty and perhaps dignity of Western civilization and history. Western myths, lore and folkways are constantly transmitted, amongst many other cultural routes, through the tragic genre. This means that to share in the Western tragic vision is to share in a \u2018dignified civilization\u2019\u2014it is to have a respected history, a legitimate human existence\u2014one that had been consistently denied African literature in the field of global cultural production up until the 1970s.iii<\/sup> And though Aristotle had rigorously theorized the character of good tragedy, it was Fredrick Nietzsche, the German philosopher of the mid- Nineteenth century who tracked the very roots of European tragedy in that seminal essay, \u201cThe Birth of Tragedy.\u201d It was the Nietzschean logic, very central to the \u2018existence\u2019 of western literary culture, which Soyinka mobilized in articulating the tragic vision in Yoruba [African] tragedy. I will sketch very briefly Nietzsche\u2019s thesis and proceed to show how Soyinka sipped from that vision in enunciating the logic of Yoruba tragedy.<\/p>\n

According to Nietzsche, the very fountain of European tragedy is to be traced to the \u201cAppolonian-Dyonysiac duality\u201d (820). It is by apprehending the influences of the two gods as art-sponsoring deities that we are brought face-to-face with the origins of Greek (European) tragedy. The two represent, according to Nietzsche, the separate realms of \u2018dream and intoxication\u2019 (821). Apollo is the god of creativity- \u2018the god of all plastic powers and soothsaying.\u2019 In other words, he is the inner light of man\u2019s \u2018world of fantasy.\u2019 As a god of beauty, his aesthetic requirement demanded \u2018self-control\u2019 from all. His dictum was \u2018man know thyself\u2019 and \u2018nothing too much\u2019 (Nietzsche 822). The excess of anything was [un]Appolonian. So, for example, the excess wisdom of Oedipus, the inordinate determinism of Antigone, the inordinate selflessness of Agamemnon, are all qualities of the Dionysian spirit. They all lead to human disaster in the clear literary formation that we call tragedy.
\n
\nFrom Nietzsche\u2019s account, though the Greeks respected the Apollonian demand for a sober self-controlling mien, they also adored the Dionysiac bravado. As Nietzsche puts it \u2018the effects of the Dionysiac spirit struck the Greeks as titanic and barbaric; yet they could not disguise from themselves the fact that they were essentially akin to those deposed Titans and heroes.\u2019 Beyond this empathy with the tragic heroes, they also felt that \u2018their whole existence, with its temperate beauty [an influence of Apollo], rested upon a base of suffering<\/em> and knowledge <\/em>which had been hidden from them until the reinstatement of Dionysos uncovered it once more\u2019 (822). iv<\/sup> This love for the fiery spirit of Dionysos made it clear that Apollo could not exist without Dionysos, so there must be a measured and serene merger. As Nietzsche notes, \u2018thus we have come to interpret the Greek tragedy as a Dionysiac chorus which again and again discharges itself in Apollonian images\u2019 (823).<\/p>\n

The typical Greek tragic vision then was that of an \u2018Apollonian dream-illusion\u2019 but one objectifying \u2018a Dionysiac condition.\u2019 Deployed on stage, only the chorus was a \u2018reality,\u2019 creating a vision of itself and its god\u2014Dionysus. The chorus \u2018sees how the god suffers and it transforms himself, and it has, and for that reason, no need to act\u2019 (Nietzsche 824). In the earlier Greek tragic tradition, Dionysos was not present on stage but only imagined\u2014thus on the Greek classical stage was the creative influences of Apollo and the fierce spirit of Dionysos. But as Nietzsche observes, later attempts were made to physicalize the Dionysiac figure vividly on stage. This was the root of drama and its tragic variant. So, when the actor was introduced, it \u2018became the task of the Dithyrambic chorus so to excite the mood of the listeners that when the tragic hero appeared they would behold not the awkwardly masked man but a figure born of their own rapt vision\u2019 (824). That is, the spectators will instinctively \u2018project the shape of the god that was magically present to his mind onto that masked figure of a man, dissolving the latter\u2019s reality into a ghostly reality\u2019 (Ibid). The abstract god whom the Greek audience conjured in their heads now came alive as an actor on stage and \u2018the god now speaks to him from the proscenium with clarity and firmness\u2019 (Nietzsche 825). So with the influence of the dream interpreter Apollo, the Dionysiac condition is projected on the chorus through a human figure, but as Nietzsche argues, \u2018in truth that figure is the suffering Dionysos of the mysteries\u2019. This was the mythopoeic spirit of early Greek tragedy\u2014one rooted in ritual involving the sacred deities of Apollo and Dionysus, not the mundane exploits of man.<\/p>\n

It was precisely to this Nietzschean tragic paradigm then that Soyinka turned his attention in attempting to rationalize and legitimize the Yoruba tragic vision in his play Death and the King\u2019s Horseman.<\/em> Just like the Greek, Soyinka tells us that Yoruba tragedy has its deep roots in ritual. In the place of the Apollonian–<\/strong> Dionysiac duality in Greek myth, we have the Obatala-Ogun duality in Yoruba (African) tragedy. Obatala is the Yoruba god of creation and thus \u2018the essence of the serene arts.\u2019 According to Soyinka, \u2018The art of Obatala [like Apollo] is thus essentially plastic and formal\u2019 (Myth<\/em> 140). On the other hand, Ogun is the \u2018God of creativity, guardian of the road, god of metallic lore and artistry. Explorer, hunter, god of war, custodian of the sacred oath\u2019 (Myth <\/em>140).\u00a0 Like Dionysus, Ogun is ferocious in temper against the sober character of Obatala. Again, just as Dionysos fought the battle for reinstatement in the Olympian mountain, bringing knowledge<\/em> through great suffering<\/em> to mankind, so did Ogun through a difficult and fiery voyage re-link man with the world of the gods.v<\/sup> According to Soyinka \u2018It is this experience that the modern tragic dramatist recreates through the medium of physical contemporary action, reflecting the actions of the first active battle of the will through the abyss of dissolution\u2019 (Myth.<\/em> 159). Also, as Greek tragedy was the celebration of Dionysos projected to the audience through the Apollonian dream influence and plastic art, so is Yoruba tragedy a celebration of the primordial feats of Ogun made possible by the creative artifacts of Obatala. As Greek tragedy was the dramatization of the excesses of the Dionysiac spirit, so does Yoruba tragedy dramatize the excesses of such gods as Songo, Obatala and not the least, Ogun.<\/p>\n

These similarities however do not make Yoruba and Greek tragedy the same. It is the differences that Soyinka theorizes in the essay, \u201cThe Fourth Stage,\u201d with panache and sophistication. The dissimilarities, for Soyinka, do not lie in the \u2018opposition between creative individualism [European] and communal creativity [African]\u2019 but \u2018rather, they will be found more accurately in what is a recognizable western cast of mind, a compartmentalizing habit of thought which periodically selects aspects of human emotion, phenomenal observations, metaphysical intuitions and even scientific deductions and turns them into separatist myths (or truths) sustained by a proliferating superstructure of presentation idioms, analogies and analytical modes\u2019 (37). For the European mind then, the world is structured in a uni-linear framework with each phase almost independent and thus unconnected with the other. The implication of this difference between the African and the European worldview is that the former is \u2018one culture whose very artifacts are evidence of a cohesive understanding of irreducible truths and another [the later], whose creative impulses are directed by period dialectics\u2019 (Soyinka 38).<\/p>\n

The import of the different worldviews is enormous for cultural representations from both worlds. For the European cast of mind, Soyinka argues, it\u00a0 \u2018sees the cause of human anguish as viable only within temporal capsules\u2019 but this is different for the African \u2018whose tragic understanding transcends the causes of individual disjunctions and recognizes them as a far greater disharmony in the communal psyche\u2019 (Myth<\/em> 46). For this worldview, the foundations of particular social fractures have deep roots in remote collectivities. The Yoruba African worldview is cyclical, made up of the world of the living, the dead and the unborn. The three worlds are linked together, and a disjuncture in one will actuate disharmony in the other. There is a great need to maintain cosmic harmony between all three worlds through annual propitiatory and sacrificial rites. It is worthy of note also that the connection between the different worlds is not a smooth asphalted metaphysical highway. It is rather a huge, bottomless gulf, what Soyinka himself describes as the \u2018chthonic realm\u2019 (Myth <\/em>142). It is this deep, \u2018seething cauldron of the dark world,\u2019 that the redemptive Yoruba tragic hero must traverse in the course of salvaging his people\u2019s collective existence. The first actor in that fearful but selfless feat is the god Ogun himself. As it is the case with the Greek tragic character, the Yoruba tragic actor \u2018emerges still as the mediant voice of the god [i.e. Ogun], but stands now as it were besides himself, observant, understanding, creating.\u2019 At this stage, Soyinka avers, \u201cis known to him the sublime aesthetic joy, not within Nietzsche\u2019s heart of original oneness but in the distanced celebration of the cosmic struggle\u2019 (143). It is this Yoruba tragic rite that Soyinka has dexterously displayed in Death and the King\u2019s Horseman.<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps it is important to clearly state my thesis in this segment of the essay. I do not mean to suggest that by drawing a parallel between European and African tragedy Soyinka was implying a faithful semblance between them. Rather, I argue that by such parallelism, Soyinka was teasing out the basic tragic index intrinsic to all cultural narratives, and by doing that, Soyinka was negotiating and solving an equation of inequality between a dominated African culture and a dominating colonial\/European force. This is what Olakunle George implies when he declares that by \u201creturning to his native Yoruba cosmology and the rituals that derive from it, Soyinka elicits from ritual a drama of archetypes, developing in the process a vision of history, society, and tragic drama\u201d (67). In other words, Soyinka\u2019s refashioning of his Yoruba worldview in both theoretical terms and in the form of drama, was a \u2018theory of historical being and the often brutal adventure of the social and, on the other, of art as witness to both\u2019 (George 67). This is a crucial aspect of human nature that the West had denied Soyinka\u2019s continent since its first feel of the imperial arms. What did he achieve by this deft literary maneuver? It marked the beginning of the redemption of a vanishing African culture (and by implication history) from the stifling influences of Euro-American colonial institutions. By paralleling the tragic genres of both West and South, Soyinka was forging an equilibrium between both cultures, and by extension, effacing the superior\/inferior dynamic predominant in the Western academe about African literature. Strategically, therefore, what we witness in Soyinka\u2019s \u2018move\u2019 is, as Anthony Appiah argues, a literary artist who \u2018has ransacked the treasuries of English literary and vernacular diction with an eclecticism that dazzles without disconcerting, and has found a language that is indisputably his own\u2019 (99). The immediate and poignant question, then, will be: why does Soyinka imagine this Yoruba vision as the tragic paradigm of all African plays? I shall return to this in my conclusion, but I shall now turn to the play itself in pushing further some of the arguments that I have been making so far.<\/p>\n

Soyinka\u2019s Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Soyinka\u2019s Dearth and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em> was written in the early 1970s but first published in 1975vi<\/sup><\/strong><\/em><\/strong>. It derives its immediate narrative template from an actual life event that happened at the old Oyo kingdom in 1946.vii<\/sup><\/strong><\/em><\/strong> In December of that year, the reigning Alafin of the old kingdom of Oyo, Oba Siyenbola Oladigbolu died and was buried that night. As was the custom, the king\u2019s horseman, Olokun Esin Jinadu, was to willfully commit ritual suicide one month after. This, according to traditional Yoruba belief, was to lead the Alafin\u2019s \u2018 favorite horse and dog through the transitional passage to the world of the ancestors\u2019 (Appiah 68). But in January of 1947, when the ritual was due to take place, the then British colonial district officer, Captain J.A. Mackenzie, thought the culture of burying the king with another human being savage and intercepted the ritual by arresting the Horseman. Afraid that this imperial intervention will precipitate a disastrous disjuncture in the communal health of the Oyo kingdom, the king\u2019s last son, Murana \u2018stood as surrogate for his father, and sacrificed his own life\u2019 (Appiah 68).viii<\/sup><\/strong><\/em><\/strong> This became a fitting social reality of Soyinka\u2019s Yoruba tragic essence which he describes as \u2018an act undertaken on behalf of the community,\u2019 and that the \u2018welfare of that protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community\u2019 (Myth<\/em> 42).<\/p>\n

Death and the King\u2019s Horseman takes place in \u2018a passage through a market in its closing stages. The stalls are being emptied, mats folded. A few women pass through on their way home loaded with basket\u2019 (7).ix<\/sup> The market in Africa is a strong social nexus. The indigent and the rich, indigenes and foreigners, men and women, the sane and insane, buyers and sellers, all conglomerate here. But the market is not only a human space\u2014even the deities\/spirits of the land converge there. In my own small municipality of Obudu in Cross River state, Nigeria, it is believed that the spirits of dead also come to the big periodic town market, katube. It is in the African market therefore that the entire collectivity of the African world can be glimpsed. According to Adebayo Williams then, \u2018apart from its obvious economic importance, the market occupies a signal cultural, political, and spiritual position in the Yoruba cosmos.\u2019 He argues that it doubles as that \u2018numinous zone in which the distinction between the world of the dead and that of the living is abolished\u2019 (72). The import of this is that there is both a material (economic) and spiritual (metaphysical) exchange going on in an African market. As Elesin makes his entry into this collective communal space in its closing stages, his entrance \u2018immediately revivifies it\u2019 (Mcluckie 147). All those who have a stake in what Elesin is about to do\u2014living, dead, and unborn, all reside in that public space. But the market assumes an effective structural symbol\u2014one that is ironic\u2014in the whole narrative. If the market is the center for exchange, physically and spiritually, \u2018then there is profound irony, for what is going on between the indigenous culture and the alien culture runs counter to the natural logic of the market\u2019 (Williams 73)\u2014that is, a place for buying and selling. What we rather experience is \u2018the bizarre phenomenon of a culture that insists upon forcing its hardware on another \u2026without making a commensurate purchase in return\u2019 (Ibid). Further more, it is about an individual, Elesin, who has taken so much from the market (expensive clothes, wife, public attention) without wanting to give anything in return. This is what Iyaloja, the imperial matriarch, hints at when she says \u2018who are you to open a new life when you dare not open the door to a new existence\u2019 (Death and the King\u2019s Horseman, 74). To take so much from the market without replenishing by way of exchange is to run the whole economic\/spiritual structure aground. Such imbalance in the equation of commerce is likely to lead to a riotous destabilization of the cultural stock exchange market. This is precisely what we see in Death and the King\u2019s Horseman.
\n
\nAs the play opens there is a veneer of fierce determinism in the demeanor of Elesin:<\/p>\n

\u201cPraise singer: Elesin o! Elesin Oba! Howu! What tryst is this the cockerel goes to keep with such haste that he must leave his tail behind?<\/p>\n

Elesin: (Slows down a bit, laughing) A tryst where the cockerel needs no adornment\u201d (7, emphasis mine).<\/p>\n

From these statements, it will seem that Elesin means to keep his head straight on the communal task ahead of him, but beneath this fa\u00e7ade of determination one can read a tactful ploy at playing evasion. Elesin is aware of the solemn nature of his task that evening. He knows that to carry the collective guilt of the community by way of forfeiting his own life is not a time for adorning luxurious clothing, frolicking with women, and deflowering a nubile belle, and such other social pastimes. It is a difficult duty requiring committed and austere living\u2014meditation, solitude, spiritual cleansing, and a phenomenal will, fired by the praise singer\u2019s music and praise incantations, and doubly aided by the ethereal or celestial presence of the Yoruba pantheons. Elesin is in a hurry therefore to meet the last badge of people leaving the market because their absence will create a perfect setting for his ritual, which he does not mean to carry out. If he really does mean to execute his very onerous communal duties, he would naturally choose a tranquil moment devoid of the distractions of human presence. As Wole Ogundele has noted, \u2018Elesin overdramatizes his eagerness to go in order to hide his reluctance\u2014even from himself\u2019 (54). Even the praise singer who is quite central to this task, x<\/sup> Elesin will abandon because in the true sense of the word, he will ultimately not need him. The world Elesin \u2018knows is good\u2019 (DKH 17); it is an epicurean lifestyle with luxurious wines, clothes, women, and the best of the world. It is not a world he wants to leave. At the market, he realizes the women think him \u2018a man of honour\u2019 and thus expect him to fulfill his duties. The outcome of this communal expectation draws Elesin\u2019s ire: \u2018stop enough of that\u2019 (DKH 17). From now on, he must devise and deploy manipulative tactics to evade his ultimate task\u2014first new clothes, then a new bride, and then finally the \u2018colonial factor\u2019\u2014 Mr. Pilkings.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Elesin confesses his own unwillingness to his new bride\u2014\u2018I confess to you, my daughter, my weakness came not merely from the abomination from the white man who came violently into my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held feet\u2019 (DKH 71, Emphasis mine).\u00a0 Therefore, Elesin lacks the will to carry his people\u2019s future through that \u2018numinous zone\u2019 that is the abyss of transition. It is significant to note, especially in the context of Soyinka\u2019s theorization of the Yoruba worldview as reflected in tragic drama that, \u2018Elesin\u2019s intended sacrifice is not meant to suggest the obliteration of an individual soul, but rather is an implicit confirmation of an order in which the self exist with all of its integrity but only as one small part of a larger whole\u2019 (Gates Jr. 70). Elesin is only an infinitesimal part of a large whole made up of the physical Oyo kingdom, the world of the ancestors of Yoruba people, and that of their unborn children. Elesin\u2019s grave sin to his community, then, is the way in which he compromises its future for personal gratifications\u2014drinks, clothes, women, and fanfare. The strength Elesin needs to break through the fiery metaphysical thoroughfare is what he dissipates in breaking a hymen (Ogundele 52). All of these, plus his lack of ultimate will, constitute his flaw as a tragic protagonist of Yoruba classical drama.<\/p>\n

In Elesin\u2019s hands, the Oyo kingdom is a submerged cultural entity, hanging on the precipice, at the brinks of collapse. It is a community whose cyclical structure has been distorted by an unwilling patriarch. It is Olunde, the returnee son of Elesin, who then kick-starts a redemptive social process. To be sure, Olunde\u2019s self-sacrifice is fruitless or of no consequence in a certain sense. Elesin himself confesses that the ritual was to be done in a particular moment\u2014\u2018You don\u2019t quite understand it all but you know that tonight is when what ought to be must be brought about\u2026It is not an entire night but a moment of the night, and that moment is past. The moon was my messenger and guide\u2019 (DKH 68). Elesin \u2018knows when the narrow gates are open\u2019 and it is precisely at that time that he must lead the king through. Anything short is to expose the spirit of the king to \u2018wonder in the void of evil with beings who are enemies of life\u2019 (78). So Olunde\u2019s death is ineffectual because the time is past, the king is already astray but most importantly, his spirit is still too tender to bear the king across the abyss. This is what Olakunle George implies when he argues that \u2018in a profound sense, then, the social process that Elesin\u2019s failure signals is one that Olunde self-important suicide cannot arrest by a mere gesture of the will\u2019 (86). Olunde redeems only his personal and family honor, not the village or community. It is only a symbolic gesture to the colonial institution represented by Pilkings that only so much can we change a people, for culture is more powerful than the colonial [political] power. While Olunde\u2019s death might be ineffectual in the context of the play, as a cultural action, it constitutes a significant thematic concern that the play dramatizes.\u00a0 His death signals a collective will of the people, and the tenacity of any repressed culture in the face of an imperial onslaught of a global proportion.<\/p>\n

Olunde\u2019s self-immolation comes from his new knowledge of other worlds. If he fled from home believing that his culture was barbaric, his experience outside has proved to him that all cultures, all civilizations\u2014European, American, Asian or African, are actually kept alive by the culture of self-sacrifice\u2014of the individual for the whole. He tells Mrs. Pilkings \u2018\u2026I found your people quite admirable in many ways, their conduct and courage in this war for instance\u2019 (55). So the contexts may differ, but the essence is the same. As a medical intern in Britain during World War II, he attended to British soldiers wounded from the battle to save the empire; he witnessed altruistic acts on behalf of nations by leaders (an immediate example being the risk born by the Prince only to erect a British Flag in the colony), and here again Mrs. Pilkings arms him with the story of a captain who blows himself up for the sake of the people living by the shore. In other words, Olunde, as George reads him is \u2018presented as having seen the west on its own grounds, complete in its wartime vulnerabilities\u2019 (81).\u00a0 He has thus come to the conclusion that human sacrifice, in whichever guise, is a necessary lubrication to the wheels of social\/communal\/national life. When he appears in the play, we meet him as a determined young man with a clear cultural vision and project. And his entry is commensurate with his intentions\u2014it is austere, sober. Soyinka himself describes him as \u2018a young black man in a sober western suit.\u2019 A medical student from Europe, he deserves a more grandiose entry, but he keeps it low, aware of the enormity of what his community is going through. Olunde then becomes that voice of confrontation with the oppressive colonial institution that has \u2018no respect for what it does not understand\u2019 (DKH 55).\u00a0 And because he now knows the secrets of both worlds, he is now fearless. The scene immediately preceding his entry is that in which Amusa returns to the Pilkings at the dance ball in the residency. His drama of silence (he will not talk to the Pilkings in Egungun costume) is because he believes the Egungun masquerade is the spirit of death. While Amusa remains voiceless, dazed by his tradition and a suppressive colonial institution, Olunde is given voice and a confrontational one for that matter. Unlike Amusa, when he meets Jane with the Egungun costume, he is unshaken because, as George argues, for \u2018Olunde, intentionality mediates his reaction to Jane dressed as Egungun, and since a white colonial functionary cannot wear the mask for the same reason that the native wears it, he is able to see Jane as Jane. He thus disregards her status at that moment as \u2018mask in motion\u2019- which is the spirit of the dead in material incarnation\u2019 (83). The secularization of Olunde\u2019s traditional African consciousness by western contact assumes a positive value here because it ironically becomes an enablement in the confrontational dialectics between him and Jane as a spokesman for autochthonous values. This is what we also encounter with the young schoolgirls who ridicule Amusa in the market place when he goes to arrest Elesin. This, I think, is Soyinka\u2019s own subtle suggestion to the hope for cultural revivalism in Africa\u2014not the worn-out Elesins, the dazed Amusas, but the educated Olundes and the young schoolgirls. It is they that have acquired the new knowledge of the century to redeem Africa from \u2018being squelched in the spittle of an alien race.\u2019xi<\/sup><\/p>\n

The Pilkings constitute an interesting pair in the play; a seemingly sympathetic Jane and an obstinate Pilkings, of course both blinded by British colonial sentiments. While Jane clearly has some influence on her husband Simon, her feminist sentiments are secondary to the colonial project. But taken together, we encounter in the Pilkings a prototypical colonial institution and mindset in its entirety. According to Radhamani, \u2018colonial administration carried with it repeated instances of political and personal interventions, conversions to Christianity, desecration of ancestral mask, indifference to significance of customs and traditions and above all, a sense of unquestioned superiority of white man over the African\u2019 (43).\u00a0 This is all exemplified in the district officer: first they aid Olunde leave for England against the will of his father; then they desecrate the communal insignia of sacredness (Egungun); and finally they meddle in a communal rite that does not impinge nor undermine British colonial authority in anyway. As representatives of colonial authority, they meddle in and hence toy with both private and public lives. This, of course, comes from the perception that both the personal and the public life of indigenous people are in dire need of help\u2014rescue from an allegedly barbaric and backward culture to a supposedly refined western mode of being. But curiously the Pilkings do not belong here nor there. Mr. Pilking has a knack for spiting sheepish Christian fundamentalism (note his use of \u2018holy water nonsense\u2019 which he uses on Joseph) and of course, does not see any value in African culture. Only the colonial project, which subjugates the people, their capital, their culture, matters. Mr. Pilking is therefore an outcome of an industrial and scientific age where \u2018ritual has acquired a pejorative connotation of meaningless exercise, a mundane tradition\u2019 (William 67). The Pilkings then represent that typical western mindset contoured by \u2018period dialectics\u2019, as Soyinka himself puts it. \u00a0In the immediate fictional world of the play then, they may be inconsequential, especially in the play\u2019s concern with \u2018threnodic essence,\u2019 but in the larger cultural project of the narrative, it is for the likes of the Pilkings that the play was written.
\n
\nTwo characters that I think are also important in this play, in spite of their subservient roles, are Amusa and Joseph. Both characters, as George argues, \u2018call attention to the blindspots that underlie the cultural or metaphysical conflict that is enacted in the play\u2019 (74-5). The girls in the market, and by extension the local populace, perceive the likes of Amusa and Joseph as \u2018eunuchs\u2019 of colonial authority. In other words, they are ineffectual colonial agents. But even the Pilkings do not recognize them as complete English men. That is, they are not properly integrated into the larger colonial framework. They are still \u2018natives\u2019, very often frustrating and disconcerting to deal with. So \u2018both Amusa and Joseph belong to both camps and to none\u2019: they are there and not there, present but not visible, around but not immanent. There are grave cultural implications here for their liminal personalities. Not properly integrated into either culture, they come across as people without roots. Joseph for instance who doubles as house servant and \u2018native informant\u2019 to the Pilkings can no longer read the native drums\u2014they now seem indistinguishable to him. Olakunle George concludes that both characters serve the dramatist a structural purpose \u2018for pointing up certain natives\u2019 subservience to the colonial machine.\u2019 That is, their \u2018docility and intellectual confusion\u2019 reflect the consequences of a sheepish submission to external forces\u2014cultural, political, religious, and economic (George 74). Another favorite critique of the fabrication of the character of Amusa is that he is de-individualized and rather institutionalized into a stereotype (Gotrick 1990). Even if this is true, it is not Soyinka\u2019s fabrication, it is rather a fabrication wrought by the colonial institutionalized framework, which Frantz Fanon (1975) argues, \u2018depersonalizes\u2019 the individual. Rather, it is Soyinka who tries to rescue the institutionalized character of Amusa.\u00a0 For instance, when Amusa is mortified on account of seeing the Pilkings on the Egungun costume, he is reminded that he helped arrest the Egungun leaders and thus the costume has no spiritual power which should make him panic. But Amusa responds: \u2018(Without looking down) Madam I arrest the ringleaders who make trouble but me I no touch Egungun. That Egungun itself I no touch. And I no abuse am. I arrest ringleaders but I treat Egungun with respect\u2019 (DKH 26). Here, the colonial institution attempts to depersonalize him by blurring his cultural consciousness in the course of his imperial duties. It is the playwright who restores his individuality by making him draw a line between his role as a colonial police officer and his moral obligation to his immediate community.<\/p>\n

As a way of concluding this segment, let me quickly add that though Death and the King\u2019s Horseman was written as a metaphysical drama, the play also addressed realistic social concerns. Elesin\u2019s lack of will to die for his people was a potent allegory for Soyinka\u2019s usual concern with political will amongst African leaders. This concern has been recurrent since A Dance of the Forest, through The Strong Breed to The Swam Dwellers and all through to the post 1970\u2019s power plays\u2014what Onookome Okome has described as Soyinka\u2019s plays about discourses of power \u2018especially political power and their dispensation in post-colonial African dictatorships\u2019 (1).xii<\/sup> But as Martin Banham has argued, nowhere has that literary concern been schematized and thematized clearly and perfectly than in DKH. According to Martin, the play, like others \u2018points to the failure of the post-independence generation of political leaders in Nigeria (and, of course, the reference is wider) to transcend the pleasures and corruptions of power\u2019 (128). Apart from its threnodic essence, the play therefore doubled as a tense critique of contemporary political culture in Africa. The concern amongst African political elite with the gains of political power rather than genuine self-sacrifice for emerging African democracies already pillaged by years of imperialism was also concurrent with Soyinka\u2019s cultural confrontation with the West. Soyinka\u2019s Nigeria, for example, had become a political laboratory since its independence in the 1960s with a succession of thieving governments less concerned with the welfare of the people than with the expediency of global democratic culture and the leeway it accorded them to the billions of dollars gushing out of the oil wells in Niger Delta of South-eastern Nigeria. Elesin represents that older leadership, which lacked the will to move the nation forward and hence, had precipitated a thrombosis in the entire national physiology.<\/p>\n

But DHK was not a metaphorical critique of Postcolonial leadership alone; it was also of the followership too.\u00a0 In Ogundele\u2019s view \u2018Elesin\u2019s action is not the private sin of betrayal that Iyaloja later makes it out to be, but a collective error resulting from the interplay of character, the pressure of the occasion, and the ethical values of the culture.\u2019 In other words, to quest into the havoc that Elesin brings unto himself, his family and the community at large, Ogundele argues,\u00a0 \u2018is to implicate that community as well as its ethos which sanctions certain forms of morally ambiguous actions in its leaders. If Elesin is guilty of self indulgence, the community [also] indulged him\u2019 (53). As Elesin tells Iyaloja\u2019 \u2018I need neither pity nor the pity of the world. Even I need to understand. You were present at my defeat. You were part of the beginnings. You brought about the renewal of my tie to earth, you helped in the binding of the chord\u2019 (75, Emphasis mine). If Elesin had any dint of will left to undertake his communal ritual, a regaling crowd tickled his fancy back to the mundane world. This was a huge lesson in the way African publics goaded its leaders on in the midst of unending iniquities.<\/p>\n

The play\u2019s ending, which calls for an attention to the unborn rather than the dead or the living, was therefore a tacit projection of the future of Africa not in the present leadership and its abetting publics but to the future (unborn) generation, who hopefully, will hear of the equivocation of Elesin, and learn from the determinism and self-sacrifice of Olunde. This political logic of the play of course inheres some huge problematic\u2014that of locating communal\/national redemption in such a narrow instance of self-sacrifice. Yet, the deep ideological contours of power, nation, nationhood, and the human factor that the play maps out cannot be denied.<\/p>\n

IV. Conclusion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my conclusion I will like to keep faith with my initial concern with strategies and achievements of Soyinka in Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em>. Here, I will again inflect the epigraph at the beginning of this essay quoted from Anthony Appiah\u2019s essay. Authenticity, for Appiah, is a conscious \u2018escape from what society, the school, the state, what history, had tried to make of us\u2019 (100). Wole Soyinka was born in 1934 to averagely educated parents (for his father was a teacher and a Christian), attended primary and secondary schools modeled after British high schools in Abeokuta and Ibadan, attended the archetypal western academes (the premiere University at Ibadan and later proceeded to Leeds) where he studied studied English, Greek and history. All of these social processes had tried to make him what he was not. Soyinka\u2019s literary outputs therefore became his own search for his authentic <\/em>self, and by extension, the collective search for his African people for their roots and dignity.<\/p>\n

Why the essentialism with his Yoruba culture in this continental quest? A number of answers can be proffered. First, the usual or familiar logic of the unflinching scholars of what is often called the \u2018Great Tradition,\u2019 i.e. in regards to timelessness and universality, is hinged on what for want of a proper phrase I call the particularism- universalism equation. That is, a specific literary tradition rooted in cultural specificity\u2014Greek, stands in for the universal\u2014Europe. Or say, Shakespearean tragedy becomes Elizabethan tragedy. According to Olakunle George, \u2018if we understand this maneuver\u2014whereby European particularity is endowed with the status of the universal\u2014as a case of \u2018western\u2019 literary culturalism, then Soyinka is in effect engaging western letters within the parameters of its own langue<\/em>, rather like the way Olunde engages the Pilkings on terms that he has come to share with them. Looked at it this way, Soyinka is writing back to Europe by seizing a discursive form and filling it with a different content [Yoruba]. And by doing that he acts out a basic self-refutation that culturalists of the canon act out all the time\u201d (85). Second, is the fact that Soyinka knows that Africans, in spite of their multifarious ethnicities, share some basic semblances\u2014one being their conception of the unbreakable chain between the individual, the community, the gods\/deities and eternal continuities generally. This much unites Africa and is central in its worldview. Any one culture that shares this worldview can therefore be used to dramatize its civilization. In other words, as Shakespeare (English) implanted his tragedies in Denmark or Scotland, Brecht (German) superimposes his settings in Chicago without losing the nitty-gritty of its tragic dimension (See Gates 74), so does Soyinka situate his African worldview in Yoruba culture. It could have been in Akan, Fanti, Nupe, Kanuri, Bette or Urhobo cultural settings and yet be as effective as it was in a Yoruba locale. Third, and by no means the final and least answer, the existing prejudices against African literature in the west in the 1970\u2019s was not a Eurocentric sentiment specific to any one African culture. It was a broad perjorative disposition towards Africa as a continent. If his arguments were effective with the Yoruba paradigm, it only but pointed to the reality that it was possible and inherent in all African ethnic civilizations. After all as Yakubu Nassidi argues, \u2018to be universal the writer does not have to take a vertical flight from his home ground\u2019 (Umukoro 12). Soyinka was writing within the purview of the culture he knew best but this did not detract his ultimate literary project, which was to debunk western literary prejudices against Africa. Taken together, by his adumbration of the Yoruba tragic vision, Soyinka created an understanding in both western, Asian and all [non] African histories and civilization about \u2018what is meant by the \u2018functional\u2019 and the \u2018collective\u2019 in African aesthetics, two otherwise abused and misrepresented notions\u2019 (Gates 75).<\/p>\n

Ultimately therefore, by writing Death and the king\u2019s Horseman<\/em> and its commensurate theory in Myth, Literature and the African World<\/em>, especially the espousal of Yoruba metaphysics in \u201cThe Fourth Stage,\u201d Soyinka had begun the social vision he himself was recommending for the emerging generation of African writers. Like Olunde, he knew his Yoruba (African) culture well; he had gone abroad and \u2018kept his nose to the ground,\u2019 synthesized the relevant parts of both cultures, and was beginning a renaissance for the future of his African people. But most importantly, Soyinka was enacting an Ogunian feat; apart from straddling both worlds (African and European) in the mortal realm, Soyinka had preternaturally bent backwards from time, almost like using the famed \u2018Time Machine\u2019 in H. G. Wells novel and \u2018ransacked the literary treasuries\u2019 of Europe, made a voyage detour to Africa, \u2018ransacked\u2019 the secret mysteries of his Ogun ancestors, made a long and tortuous journey back to humanity, and selflessly regurgitated his amassed sacred knowledge with the world. And by doing so, he was not only inserting his African culture in the global scheme of things, he was also laying a solid foundation for the African Future. This is what I see as the triadic course of Wole Soyinka\u2019s nationalism in literature. Soyinka was playing Ogun (his patron god); he was playing god!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Endnotes<\/p>\n

<\/a>[i] See Literature as Celebration<\/em>. (VHS). London: BBC Production, 1998.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[i] See Achebe\u2019s \u201cAn Image of Africa\u201d.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[iii] Skepticisms about African literature in Western literary circles did not begin only in the mid 1970s. Indeed, when Achebe\u2019s novel Things Fall Apart <\/em>was first published in 1958, there were interestingly heated debates as to whether it was another \u201cethnographic text\u201d serving some anthropological function, or a literary text in the true sense of the word. Today, that novel remains the most widely read of African literary texts all over Europe and North America.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[iv] According to Greek mythology it was through the suffering of Dionysos that the secret mysteries of life were revealed to man through a tortuous journey reconnecting man and the world of the gods.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[v] Yoruba myth has it that the world was once one. But the consistent pounding of the belly of the celestial body by women cooking pounded yam drove the gods in anger far off from man. It was Ogun who forged that link again by a tortuous journey through the abyss re-establishing man and gods again.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[vi] He wrote the play while a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. But its world premiere was at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), directed by Soyinka himself.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[vii] It is said that the German scholar of Yoruba\/African culture, Ulli Beier, drew Soyinka\u2019s attention to this history in the early 1960s. This has been somewhat contentious. But the true story remains in the British colonial archives till date.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[viii] As the account of the real event has appeared in many essays on DKH, including Soyinka\u2019s own preface to the book, it is significant to declare that the details here are gleaned from Anthony Appiah\u2019s own rendering of it- one that I think is more detailed even though the date he cites (1944) is different from Soyinka\u2019s- 1946.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[ix] In this paper I use the Methuen edition with notes and commentaries by Jane Plastow. All quotations will be from that edition.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[x] In Soyinka\u2019s tragic paradigm, music is very central to that spiritual transition of the protagonist. Unlike western tragedy, the music in Yoruba African tragedy is not a mere aesthetic element. It has a functional spiritual essence\u2014that of easing the steps of the protagonist from life to death. The person who provides this music is the praise singer who does the Oriki.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[xi] This is Elesin\u2019s own characterization of Mr. Pilking\u2019s interference in the play.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[xii] These plays include Kongi\u2019s Harvest, A Play of Giants, Opera Wonyonsi<\/em>, the two sketches, Before the Blackout<\/em> and After the Blackout<\/em>, A dance of the Forest<\/em>, and not the least, Death and the King\u2019s Horseman. <\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Works Cited.<\/p>\n

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. \u201cMyth, Literature and the African World.\u201d Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal.<\/em> Ed. Adebowale Maja-Paerce. Oxford: Heinemann Educational \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Publishers, 1994.<\/p>\n

Achebe, Chinua. \u201cAn Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness.\u201d Hopes \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 and Impediments.<\/em> New York and London: Doubleday Inc., 1988.<\/p>\n

Boudieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature.<\/em> USA: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Columbia University Press, 1993.<\/p>\n

Banham, Martin. \u201cOn Being Squelched in the Spittle of An Alien Race.\u201d Wole Soyinka: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An Appraisal<\/em>. Ed. Adebowale Maja-Pearce. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994.<\/p>\n

Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Mask<\/em>. (DVD). Dir. Isaac Julian. San Francesco: \u00a0\u00a0 California Newsreel, 1996.<\/p>\n

Gates, Henry Louis. \u201cBeing, the Will, and the Semantics of Death.\u201d Perspectives on Wole \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity<\/em>. Ed. Biodun Jeyifo. USA: University Press of \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mississippi, 2001.<\/p>\n

George, Olakunle. \u201cCultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka\u2019s Death and the King\u2019s \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Horseman<\/em>.\u201d Representations<\/em>. The Regents of the University of California. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Summer, 1999. 67-91.<\/p>\n

Gotrick, Kacke. \u201cSoyinka and Death and the King\u2019s Horseman or, How Does Our \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Knowledge- or Lack of Knowledge of Yoruba Culture Affect Our Interpretation of?\u201d Signs and Symbols: Popular Culture in Africa.<\/em> Ed. Rauol Granqvist. Umea \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Studies in the Humanities-99. Umea: Almqvist and Wiskell International, 1990.<\/p>\n

Gopalakrishnan, Radhamani. \u201cEzeulu and Elesin: Faith and Change in Achebe\u2019s Arrow \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 of God <\/em>and Soyinka\u2019s Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em>.\u201d South Asian Responses \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 to Chinua Achebe. South Asian Responses to Chinua Achebe<\/em>. Eds. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/cite>Lindfors, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bernth and Kothandaraman, Bala.\u00a0 New Delhi: Prestige, 1993. 200. 34-49.<\/em><\/p>\n

Johnson, Randal. \u201cIntroduction.\u201d The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Literature.<\/em> USA: Columbia University Press, 1993.<\/p>\n

McLuckie, Craig. \u201cThe Structural Coherence of Wole Soyinka\u2019s Death and the King\u2019s \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Horseman.\u201d College Literature<\/em>. 3:2- Spring, 200. 143-163.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche, Fredrick. \u201cThe Birth of Tragedy.\u201d Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greek to \u00a0\u00a0 Grotowsky.<\/em> Ed. Bernard Dukore. USA: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974.<\/p>\n

Olaniyan, Tejumola. \u201cModernity and Its Mirages: Wole Soyinka and the African State.\u201d \u00a0 Modern Drama: Soyinka and Postcolonialism<\/em>. Toronto: University of Toronto \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Press. 5:3. Fall, 2002.<\/p>\n

Ogundele, Wole. \u201cDeath and the King\u2019s Horseman: A Poet\u2019s Quarrel With His Culture.\u201d \u00a0 Research in African Literature<\/em>. 25:1. Spring, 1994. 47-60.<\/p>\n

Okome, Onookome. \u201cThat Nebulous Geography of Power:\u201d Reading Dictatorship and \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Power in Wole Soyinka\u2019s Power Plays.\u201d CALEL: Currents in the African \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Literature and Language.<\/em> 1: (1997). 10-25.<\/p>\n

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 University Press, 1976.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>.\u00a0 \u201cThe Writer in a Modern African State.\u201d The Writer in Modern Africa.<\/em> Ed. Par \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Wastberg. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968.<\/p>\n

—. Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em> (Methuen Students Edition with Commentaries and Notes by Jane Plastow). Great Britain: Methuen, 1998.<\/p>\n

Umukoro, Simon. Drama and Politics in Nigeria<\/em>. Ibadan: Kraft Books LTD., 1994.<\/p>\n

Williams, Adebayo. \u201cRitual and the Politically Unconscious: The Case of Death and the \u00a0 King\u2019s Horseman<\/em>.\u201d Research in African Literature<\/em>. Fall, 1998. 67-79.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Playing God: The Triadic Course of Soyinka\u2019s Nationalism in Literature Authenticity is an escape from what society, the school, the state, what history, has tried to make of us (Anthony Appiah 1994: 100). I. Introduction: The Project of Cultural Representation The very expansive body of critical literature on Wole Soyinka […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":747,"parent":403,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-405","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/405\/revisions\/669"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}