The “drama of existence”: sources and scope IMF and the World Bank retrench the monetary and diplomatic props
of his grandiose, delusionary aggrandizement. The play ends in an ex-
plosively anti-Genetian apocalypse: Kamini holds all the other “giants”
and representatives of the two erstwhile superpowers, the United States
and the Soviet Union, hostage and, taking personal control over a bat-
tery of rocket and grenade launchers in the Bugaran embassy, he begins
to rain deadly outbursts of these weapons of destruction on the United
Nations headquarters. The element of dramatic parable in this phantas-
magoric denouement is inescapable, if rather intricate. Soyinka seems
to be suggesting that order, civility and legality are often the convenient
facades of a fundamental, rampant and self-serving capitulation to the
seductions of power; mindless terror and violence follow very quickly
when the masks and facades are stripped away, and this can happen not
only “out there” in Africa and the developing world, but also right in the
heart of the metropole itself.
The thematic approach to the study of Soyinka’s dramas is of course
not exhausted by the cluster of themes around the subject of power.
One book-length study of Soyinka’s works, including his plays, is de-
voted exclusively to the cluster of themes and motifs around healing and
regeneration, and rebirth and renewal after death or decay.And there
is a highly visible group of feminist critics who have taken Soyinka to
task on the theme of gender and its representation in his plays.
And indeed, the world of Soyinka’s drama is intensively, normatively
male-centered. The typical protagonist of his plays is a driven, visionary
malewho, like Prometheus, is unbound in a cruel, endlessly violent and
destructive world, the world of the politics of dictatorship and repressive-
ness in the African postcolony. There are tough, steel-nerved and also
sensitive women in some of Soyinka’s plays, the best two examples of this
being Iya Agba inMadmen and Specialistsand Iyaloja inDeath and the King’s
Horseman. Amope, the shrewish termagant ofThe Trials of Brother Jerois
also sharply delineated, but no single female character in the Nigerian
dramatist’s plays is molded in the image, or comes in the putative line of
the “primal energy” of Ogun that Soyinka in “The Fourth Stage” iden-
tifies as the “first actor.” Indeed, the two central structural elements of
characterization in Soyinka’s drama – a strong, self-divided promethean
protagonist and the choral group of socially disadvantaged characters
ringed around the protagonist – are both typically constructed around
an assumed normativity of maleness. Thus, even where there are two
or three strong female presences in a Soyinka play, they are usually in
the margins of the drama proper which unfurls as anagonbetween male