From Nietzsche’s account, though the Greeks respected the Apollonian demand for a sober self-controlling mien, they also adored the Dionysiac bravado. As Nietzsche puts it ‘the 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.’ Beyond this empathy with the tragic heroes, they also felt that ‘their whole existence, with its temperate beauty [an influence of Apollo], rested upon a base of suffering and knowledge which had been hidden from them until the reinstatement of Dionysos uncovered it once more’ (822). iv 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, ‘thus we have come to interpret the Greek tragedy as a Dionysiac chorus which again and again discharges itself in Apollonian images’ (823).
The typical Greek tragic vision then was that of an ‘Apollonian dream-illusion’ but one objectifying ‘a Dionysiac condition.’ Deployed on stage, only the chorus was a ‘reality,’ creating a vision of itself and its god—Dionysus. The chorus ‘sees how the god suffers and it transforms himself, and it has, and for that reason, no need to act’ (Nietzsche 824). In the earlier Greek tragic tradition, Dionysos was not present on stage but only imagined—thus 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 ‘became 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’ (824). That is, the spectators will instinctively ‘project the shape of the god that was magically present to his mind onto that masked figure of a man, dissolving the latter’s reality into a ghostly reality’ (Ibid). The abstract god whom the Greek audience conjured in their heads now came alive as an actor on stage and ‘the god now speaks to him from the proscenium with clarity and firmness’ (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, ‘in truth that figure is the suffering Dionysos of the mysteries’. This was the mythopoeic spirit of early Greek tragedy—one rooted in ritual involving the sacred deities of Apollo and Dionysus, not the mundane exploits of man.
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’s Horseman. Just like the Greek, Soyinka tells us that Yoruba tragedy has its deep roots in ritual. In the place of the Apollonian– Dionysiac duality in Greek myth, we have the Obatala-Ogun duality in Yoruba (African) tragedy. Obatala is the Yoruba god of creation and thus ‘the essence of the serene arts.’ According to Soyinka, ‘The art of Obatala [like Apollo] is thus essentially plastic and formal’ (Myth 140). On the other hand, Ogun is the ‘God of creativity, guardian of the road, god of metallic lore and artistry. Explorer, hunter, god of war, custodian of the sacred oath’ (Myth 140). 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 through great suffering to mankind, so did Ogun through a difficult and fiery voyage re-link man with the world of the gods.v According to Soyinka ‘It 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’ (Myth. 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.
These similarities however do not make Yoruba and Greek tragedy the same. It is the differences that Soyinka theorizes in the essay, “The Fourth Stage,” with panache and sophistication. The dissimilarities, for Soyinka, do not lie in the ‘opposition between creative individualism [European] and communal creativity [African]’ but ‘rather, 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’ (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 ‘one 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’ (Soyinka 38).
The import of the different worldviews is enormous for cultural representations from both worlds. For the European cast of mind, Soyinka argues, it ‘sees the cause of human anguish as viable only within temporal capsules’ but this is different for the African ‘whose tragic understanding transcends the causes of individual disjunctions and recognizes them as a far greater disharmony in the communal psyche’ (Myth 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 ‘chthonic realm’ (Myth 142). It is this deep, ‘seething cauldron of the dark world,’ that the redemptive Yoruba tragic hero must traverse in the course of salvaging his people’s 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 ‘emerges still as the mediant voice of the god [i.e. Ogun], but stands now as it were besides himself, observant, understanding, creating.’ At this stage, Soyinka avers, “is known to him the sublime aesthetic joy, not within Nietzsche’s heart of original oneness but in the distanced celebration of the cosmic struggle’ (143). It is this Yoruba tragic rite that Soyinka has dexterously displayed in Death and the King’s Horseman.
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 “returning 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” (67). In other words, Soyinka’s refashioning of his Yoruba worldview in both theoretical terms and in the form of drama, was a ‘theory of historical being and the often brutal adventure of the social and, on the other, of art as witness to both’ (George 67). This is a crucial aspect of human nature that the West had denied Soyinka’s 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’s ‘move’ is, as Anthony Appiah argues, a literary artist who ‘has 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’ (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.
Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman
Soyinka’s Dearth and the King’s Horseman was written in the early 1970s but first published in 1975vi. It derives its immediate narrative template from an actual life event that happened at the old Oyo kingdom in 1946.vii 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’s horseman, Olokun Esin Jinadu, was to willfully commit ritual suicide one month after. This, according to traditional Yoruba belief, was to lead the Alafin’s ‘ favorite horse and dog through the transitional passage to the world of the ancestors’ (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’s last son, Murana ‘stood as surrogate for his father, and sacrificed his own life’ (Appiah 68).viii This became a fitting social reality of Soyinka’s Yoruba tragic essence which he describes as ‘an act undertaken on behalf of the community,’ and that the ‘welfare of that protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community’ (Myth 42).
Death and the King’s Horseman takes place in ‘a 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’ (7).ix 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—even 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, ‘apart from its obvious economic importance, the market occupies a signal cultural, political, and spiritual position in the Yoruba cosmos.’ He argues that it doubles as that ‘numinous zone in which the distinction between the world of the dead and that of the living is abolished’ (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 ‘immediately revivifies it’ (Mcluckie 147). All those who have a stake in what Elesin is about to do—living, dead, and unborn, all reside in that public space. But the market assumes an effective structural symbol—one that is ironic—in the whole narrative. If the market is the center for exchange, physically and spiritually, ‘then 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’ (Williams 73)—that is, a place for buying and selling. What we rather experience is ‘the bizarre phenomenon of a culture that insists upon forcing its hardware on another …without making a commensurate purchase in return’ (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 ‘who are you to open a new life when you dare not open the door to a new existence’ (Death and the King’s 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’s Horseman.
