Wole Soyinka
impersonate Sergeant Burma’s voice, gestural mannerisms and personal
idiosyncrasies:
: We were made much of in those days. To have served in
Burma was to have passed your London Matric. Sergeant Burma looked
forward to retirement and his choice of business came as a matter of
course...and Professor offered him the business corner of the drivers’
haven...the Accident Corner.
: Wetin enh? Wetin? You tink say myself I no go die some day? When
person die, ‘e done die and dat one done finish. I beg, if you see moto
accident make you tell me. We sabbee good business...sell spare part and
second-hand clothes. Wetin? You tink say I get dat kind sentimentation?
Me wey I done see dead body so tey I no fit chop meat unless den cook
am to nonsense? Go siddon my friend. Business na business. If you see
accident make you tell me. I go run go there before those useless men steal
all the spare part finish.
: Sergeant Burma looked forward to retiring and doing the
spare part business full-time. But of course his brakes failed going down a
hill (The group begins to dirge, softly as if singing to themselves. A short
silence. Samson’s face begins to show horror and he gasps as he realizes
what he has been doing.)
: (tearing off the clothes.) God forgive me! Oh God, forgive me. Just
see, I have been fooling around pretending to be a dead man. Oh God I
was only playing I hope you realize. I was only playing.
(CP,–)
There is a superb, if obvious irony in Samson’s panic at the end of this
scene, an irony that acts as a metacommentary on the entire play, indeed
on Soyinka’s dramaturgy in general. For the frantic, desperate protes-
tations of Samson that he was “only playing” introduces a dimension
of reflexive theatricality to the scene which can only be clarified by jux-
taposing this scene to other scenes, other plays-within-the-play in the
dramatic action ofThe Road. To the question why playing a dead man
by donning his defining accoutments and inhabiting his total persona
should inspire such metaphysical dread in Samson, we can only point
to the other numerous instances in the entire play in which, consistent
with their quasi-animist world-view, we see great psychic investment of
the lumpen, working class characters of the play in the sacred values
of certain cultic expressive andperformativeidioms. The most important
of these is of course the mask idiom of the “agemo” cult which indeed
supplies the deeply enigmatic preface poem to the play. But there is
also the climatic flashback scene in Part Two of the play which reen-
acts the day of the drivers’ festival when Murano was knocked down
by “No Danger, No Delay,” Samson and Kotonu’s “mammy wagon.”