Endnotes
[i] See Literature as Celebration. (VHS). London: BBC Production, 1998.
[i] See Achebe’s “An Image of Africa”.
[iii] Skepticisms about African literature in Western literary circles did not begin only in the mid 1970s. Indeed, when Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart was first published in 1958, there were interestingly heated debates as to whether it was another “ethnographic text” 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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[vii] It is said that the German scholar of Yoruba/African culture, Ulli Beier, drew Soyinka’s 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.
[viii] As the account of the real event has appeared in many essays on DKH, including Soyinka’s own preface to the book, it is significant to declare that the details here are gleaned from Anthony Appiah’s own rendering of it- one that I think is more detailed even though the date he cites (1944) is different from Soyinka’s- 1946.
[ix] In this paper I use the Methuen edition with notes and commentaries by Jane Plastow. All quotations will be from that edition.
[x] In Soyinka’s 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—that 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.
[xi] This is Elesin’s own characterization of Mr. Pilking’s interference in the play.
[xii] These plays include Kongi’s Harvest, A Play of Giants, Opera Wonyonsi, the two sketches, Before the Blackout and After the Blackout, A dance of the Forest, and not the least, Death and the King’s Horseman.
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