Wole Soyinka
“confession” of the psychological vulnerabilities and professional jeal-
ousies which prompted him to pluck his apprentice, Oremole, to his
death from his perch above his master at the crown of the Araba tree.
There are also passages of mature verse drama which gather genuine folk
and oracular wisdom into impeccably modern ideas about the perpetual
obstacles to social equality and environmental responsibility, obstacles of-
ten exacerbated by the march of “progress” itself. The testimony of the
phalanx of ants in the ritual masque scene is one of such instances of dra-
matic forcefulness and thematic depth fashioned out of the combination
of traditional Yoruba rhetoric associated with cultic, esoteric knowledge
and the symbolism of Western expressionist drama:
: If the hills are silent, who are these, if the sun is full and the
winds are still whose hand is this that reaches from the grave?
: We take our color from the loam and blindness hits them, and
they tread us underfoot.
: Are you my sons?
: We are the blazers of the trail; if you are Forest Father, we think
we are your sons.
: But who are you?
: We take our color from the fertile loam, our numbers from
the hair-roots of the earth and terror blinds them. They know we are the
children of earth. They break our skin upon the ground, fearful that we
guard the wisdom of earth, our mother.
: Have you a grievance?
: None Father, except great clods of earth pressed on our feet. The
world is old but the rust of a million years has left the chains unloosened.
: Are you not free?
: Freedom we have like the hunter on a precipice and the horns
of a rhinoceros nuzzling his buttocks.
: Do you not walk? Talk, bear and suckle children by the gross?
: Freedom indeed we have to choose our path to turn to the left
or the right like the spider in the sand-pit and the great ball of eggs pressing
on his back.
: But who are you?
(The leader retreats, and another takes his place.)
: I thought, staying this low, they would ignore me. I am the one that tried
to be forgotten.
: I am the victim of the careless stride.
: I know the path was thin, a trickle in the marsh. Yet we mowed the
roots, our bellies to the ground.
: Have you a Cause, or shall I preserve you like a riddle?
: We are the ones remembered when nations build...
: ...withtombstones.