Wole Soyinka
protagonists and antagonists. The following unvarnished assertion of
male superiority by Elesin Oba in the final scene ofDeath and the King’s
Horsemanis extraordinary in its explicitness and though it is theonlysuch
baldly male-chauvinist expression in all of Soyinka’s drama, it is nonethe-
less a metonymic pointer to the place of women in general in Soyinka’s
plays:
(hesitates, then goes to Elesin): Please, try and understand. Everything my
husband did was for the best.
(he gives her a long stare, as if trying to understand who she is): You are the wife
of the District Officer?
: Yes, my name is Jane.
: That is my wife over there. You notice how still and silent she sits? My
business is with your husband.
(DKH,)
It must of course be appreciated that a protagonist does not reflect an
author’s beliefs and world-view; moreover, the normative maleness in
Soyinka’s drama is far more complexly articulated than this instance
of crude expression of male chauvinism in one play. Additionally, in
light of the larger canvas of the historic conflict between colonizer and
colonized in the play, what we have here is the patriarchy of the colonized
confronting that of the colonizers, the project of both colonization and
the nationalist resistance that it engendered being both essentially male-
centered.
More subliminally, normative maleness in Soyinka’s drama is inscribed
by the powerful currents of homosociality by which the most formative
experiences of infancy through young adulthood of individual members
of each sex take place away from intimate contact with members of the
other sex. In Soyinka’s dramas, this takes the form of the relative absence
and marginalization of women in the main action of most plays in his
dramatic corpus. Indeed much of the energy and ́elan of many of the
playwright’s most memorable plays derive from this factor. Such male
homosocial bonding is at the heart of the energy and appeal of plays
such asThe RoadandFrom Zia with Love, neither of which has a single
female character.
The essential point in the foregoing observations on male-centeredness
in Soyinka’s plays is the point that what he knows best, what he writes
most powerfully about is the world of men – in play and in turmoil.
When one or two female presences crash that world, like Segi inKongi’s
Harvestand Iya Agba and Iya Mate inMadmen and Specialists, it is mostly as