Ritual, anti-ritual and the festival complex in
Soyinka’s dramatic parables
In the selection of pretenders, a new ‘king maker’ takes part, it is
ritual legitimation, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use
it, to allow oneself, as it were to be borne aloft by it... Because
of this dictatorship of theritual, however, power becomes clearly
anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual... (and)
it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity to the
light of power.
Vaclav Havel,The Power of the PowerlessThe plays discussed in this chapter are amongst Soyinka’s most ambi-
tious and most memorable dramas, but are also the most pessimistic in
his dramatic corpus:A Dance of the Forests,The Road,Madmen and Special-
ists,Death and the King’s HorsemanandThe Bacchae of Euripides. Moreover,
in terms of form and craft, and of language and ideas, Soyinka is at
his most resourceful and most vigorous in this group of dark, brooding
plays. Because each of these plays deals with, or derives directly from
a major historical event or crisis, the dramatist’s artistic resourcefulness
in the plays seems in turn to be linked to that element in his career
as a dramatist that we have identified in Chapterof this study as
the imperative of appropriate response. Within the logic of this imper-
ative, an historic event, a widespread socioeconomic trend, or world-
historical forces which engender massive individual and collective crises
of conscience find Soyinka responding through dramas which, in order
to match the instigating event or condition, contain startling or provoca-
tive formalistic and thematic expressions. How does this operate in each
of these plays?
A Dance of the Forestswas written and produced as part of the Nigerian
independence celebrations in; appropriate to the historic task of
forging a nation out of diverse peoples and communities that the cel-
ebrations symbolically entailed, the central action of the play revolves
around a “gathering of the tribes” at which the festivities intended to