The “drama of existence”: sources and scope its increasing separation from nature and its inculcation of a deadening
uniformity overwhelms its charmed auditor. We, the audience, are also
“seduced” by the poetry and rhetoric of this speech, and though we may
not be in agreement, point by point, image by image, with the view of
history, culture, and tradition that Baroka advances here, we feel that
weighty issues are involved, even though they are articulated with a self-
gratifying intent. Soyinka created a rich layering of dramatic action in
this early play, and we can see here the roots of his full powers as apoetic
dramatist in the far more adroit and self-assured manipulation of verse
dialogue inDeath and the King’s Horseman, as we will see in our discussion
of the scene of Elesin and the Praise-Singer’s trance-dance in the fourth
chapter of this study.
The event on which Soyinka basedFrom Zia with Love, his most fe-
rocious satire to date on military dictatorship in Nigeria, took place on
April,. On that day, three condemned drug traffickers, Bernard
Ogedengbe, Bartholomew Owoh and Lawal Ojulope, were executed by
a military firing squad in Lagos.These men, all in their twenties, had
been condemned to death under the so-called Miscellaneous Offenses
Decree of, otherwise known as Decreeand generally consid-
ered one of the most heinous decrees ever promulgated by any Nigerian
military regime. By the time the execution took place in April,the
regime of Generals Buhari and Idiagbon was already sixteen months in
power; and it had clearly established itself as an arrogantly repressive and
self-righteously authoritarian military dictatorship. And yet, the whole
country was profoundly shaken by the execution of these three young
men. Prior to this event, nobody had ever been condemned to death,
let alone executed for drug peddling in Nigeria. Armed robbery, murder
and unsuccessful coup making were the only crimes punishable by capi-
tal punishment. Also “Decree” outraged most Nigerians by its being
made retroactive to offenses committed before the promulgation of the
decree. Thus, most Nigerians expected that the death sentences on these
men would either be commuted to life imprisonment or reduced to a
long prison term. At any rate many religious, civic and political leaders
publicly appealed to the regime not to carry out the death sentence
on the three men, not to implement the retroactive punitiveness of
“Decree.” These pleas were simply ignored and the men were quickly
executed.
The scope of the expression of outrage which greeted this event was up
till then totally unprecedented in the history of military rule in Nigeria.
A former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the country described