Wole Soyinka
: Who? What little fellow?
: Esu. Small but potent. (Unveils his Esu shrine) You know his oriki don’t
you? He throws a stone today and it kills a man last week. That retroactive
twist is just the kind of idea he inspires in men of action.
: Look, Sebe, you stick to your superstitions. I will take
care of the practical measures...
: I am a practical man, Commander. I keep a toe in every shrine and a
finger in every business pie. Your man is Esu, but you are going modern.
Esu only throws stones, but you, you fire bullets. But Esu is broadminded,
don’t worry. He won’t be resentful of your prowess – that is, as long as we
give him his due. This exercise enh, you’ll see, when you fire a bullet today,
it will have hit its target long before you ever took over government. Now,
that is real power for you.
:(rapt in the prospect): You know, the power to act backwards
in time...
: And it was your own idea! You people are trained to think big.
(,)
Because he is so captivated by the vision to act, not only without the
constraints of institutional and moral accountability to the ruled, but
also outside the natural bounds of temporality, the Wing Commander
easily falls prey to Sebe’s diabolical plot and becomes a sacrificial victim
whose corpse is discovered the next day at one of the city’s crossroads.
What is grimly ironic about this grisly fate is the fact that Sebe, who
pretends to act as Esu’s intermediary and goads the Wing Commander
into fulfilling his fate as unconscious sacrificial scapegoat, has not the
slightest belief in the efficacy of the ritual sacrifice; Sebe acts purely and
solely to get the Wing Commander out of the way in order to be finally
secure in the success of his heist of the huge consignment of cocaine the
hapless military officer and his bosses wish to recover. In this respect,
Sebe’s unbelief in, or indifference to the metaphysics of sacrificial myths
and ritual practices is of one kind with the inverted, demythologizing
rites of the prison inmates in their enactments of the elaborate protocols
of militarist rule.
With all its dramaturgic scrappiness,From Zia with Loveis an engrossing
parable of both the seductions and the illusions of totalitarianism in the
weak state formations of the developing world. The play thus constitutes
part of any exploration of the issue of an appropriate scale of artistic re-
sponse to historical currents and political crises of great moment, an issue
that has always been at the base of Soyinka’s sense of the social ramifica-
tions of modern African literature. It has famously been expressed in his
critical writings, especially in such widely discussed essays as “The Writer