Two 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, ‘call attention to the blindspots that underlie the cultural or metaphysical conflict that is enacted in the play’ (74-5). The girls in the market, and by extension the local populace, perceive the likes of Amusa and Joseph as ‘eunuchs’ 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 ‘natives’, very often frustrating and disconcerting to deal with. So ‘both Amusa and Joseph belong to both camps and to none’: 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 ‘native informant’ to the Pilkings can no longer read the native drums—they now seem indistinguishable to him. Olakunle George concludes that both characters serve the dramatist a structural purpose ‘for pointing up certain natives’ subservience to the colonial machine.’ That is, their ‘docility and intellectual confusion’ reflect the consequences of a sheepish submission to external forces—cultural, 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’s fabrication, it is rather a fabrication wrought by the colonial institutionalized framework, which Frantz Fanon (1975) argues, ‘depersonalizes’ the individual. Rather, it is Soyinka who tries to rescue the institutionalized character of Amusa. 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: ‘(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’ (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.
As a way of concluding this segment, let me quickly add that though Death and the King’s Horseman was written as a metaphysical drama, the play also addressed realistic social concerns. Elesin’s lack of will to die for his people was a potent allegory for Soyinka’s 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’s power plays—what Onookome Okome has described as Soyinka’s plays about discourses of power ‘especially political power and their dispensation in post-colonial African dictatorships’ (1).xii 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 ‘points 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’ (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’s cultural confrontation with the West. Soyinka’s 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.
But DHK was not a metaphorical critique of Postcolonial leadership alone; it was also of the followership too. In Ogundele’s view ‘Elesin’s 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.’ In other words, to quest into the havoc that Elesin brings unto himself, his family and the community at large, Ogundele argues, ‘is 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’ (53). As Elesin tells Iyaloja’ ‘I 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’ (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.
The play’s 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—that 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.
IV. Conclusion.
In my conclusion I will like to keep faith with my initial concern with strategies and achievements of Soyinka in Death and the King’s Horseman. Here, I will again inflect the epigraph at the beginning of this essay quoted from Anthony Appiah’s essay. Authenticity, for Appiah, is a conscious ‘escape from what society, the school, the state, what history, had tried to make of us’ (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’s literary outputs therefore became his own search for his authentic self, and by extension, the collective search for his African people for their roots and dignity.
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 ‘Great Tradition,’ 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—Greek, stands in for the universal—Europe. Or say, Shakespearean tragedy becomes Elizabethan tragedy. According to Olakunle George, ‘if we understand this maneuver—whereby European particularity is endowed with the status of the universal—as a case of ‘western’ literary culturalism, then Soyinka is in effect engaging western letters within the parameters of its own langue, 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” (85). Second, is the fact that Soyinka knows that Africans, in spite of their multifarious ethnicities, share some basic semblances—one 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’s 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, ‘to be universal the writer does not have to take a vertical flight from his home ground’ (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 ‘what is meant by the ‘functional’ and the ‘collective’ in African aesthetics, two otherwise abused and misrepresented notions’ (Gates 75).
Ultimately therefore, by writing Death and the king’s Horseman and its commensurate theory in Myth, Literature and the African World, especially the espousal of Yoruba metaphysics in “The Fourth Stage,” 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 ‘kept his nose to the ground,’ 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 ‘Time Machine’ in H. G. Wells novel and ‘ransacked the literary treasuries’ of Europe, made a voyage detour to Africa, ‘ransacked’ 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’s nationalism in literature. Soyinka was playing Ogun (his patron god); he was playing god!
