WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

 Wole Soyinka

amateur and semiprofessional companies in Africa, some of which the
Nigerian dramatist himself founded and developed. As James Gibbs has
observed in his very well researched and informative book on Soyinka’s
drama and theatre, many of Soyinka’s published plays were shaped by
the production and reception histories of these companies’ performances
of his plays.Moreover, there is the factor of Soyinka being himself an
actor and director, not forgetting the fact that he has also been an ed-
ucator in the arts of the theatre.Finally, whether as an actor, director
or educator, Soyinka’s experience as a practical man of the theatre has
been overwhelmingly in the subsidized, noncommercial theatre. This
last point is indeed one of the main differences in background and ex-
perience between Soyinka and Athol Fugard, perhaps the only rival to
Soyinka’s claim to being Africa’s foremost playwright. This point of the
impact that Soyinka’s theatre experience within university theatres and
semiprofessional troupes has had on his dramaturgy is one that we will
return to later in this chapter. Before then, it is useful to get a sense
of the totality of our author’s dramatic corpus. And in exploring this
topic, perhaps the most important point to bear in mind is that, in his
dramaturgy, Soyinka has fashioned idioms and languages of communi-
cation so eclectic, so exuberantly flexible that he has been able to pursue
diverse, even conflicting objectives, sometimes simultaneously. One of
these, and a central one at that, is his use of the medium of drama for
passionate opposition to political tyranny and social inequities and the
human suffering that they cause, both in short dramatic sketches and
revues and in “weightier” and more ambitious plays.
We get a sense of the richness and diversity of Soyinka’s dramatic
corpus if the plays are grouped chronologically, both in terms of their
staging and publication history and their location in the phases of the
playwright’s career as a dramatist and political activist, especially as this
parallels and responds to the changing realities of postcolonial Africa.
Using this composite, many-layered approach, several significant and
interesting patterns become perceptible. For instance, Soyinka was at
the most prolific phase of his career as a dramatist in the period between
the lates to the end of thes. Of the seven or eight plays written
or staged in this period, three or four,A Dance of the Forests,The Road,Kongi’s
HarvestandThe Lion and the Jewel, are among our author’s most important
and lasting contributions to the art of drama; two other plays from this
period,The Swamp DwellersandThe Strong Breed, are two of the most
popularly appreciated and produced among his more “conventional”
plays. By contrast, thes constitute Soyinka’s “leanest” decade as a